NEURALINK AND HUMANITY

 NEURALINK
                                            -BENJOSE

               

                             

WHAT'S NEURALINK?

NEURALINK is a company set up by Elon Musk in 2016 that is exploring the human brain and how it can be connected to a computer interface. Operating at a much smaller scale than Tesla or SpaceX, this conceptual startup aims to use this brain-machine interface to integrate humans with artificial intelligence by surgically implanting processors into our brains with a procedure that is said to be no more invasive than something like LASEK surgery.

FUTURE OF HUMANITY

Without even getting up, using just your thoughts, you can tell your smart coffee machine to make you a cup of coffee. Perhaps you decide to put some music on in the background and turn off the TV while you work. No remote needed. All you need to do is use your mind. 

Neuralink could bring us this future. However, it goes much deeper than just controlling your smart appliances and streaming service. Brain-machine interfaces could help those who suffer from mobility disabilities gain better control of their lives, allowing them to communicate with loved ones in more dynamic ways or complete daily tasks that are otherwise almost impossible. Paralyzed humans would be able to control smart devices and computers. 

When you first hear it, Neuralink’s pursuit sounds like it comes straight out of a mad genius’s diary; certainly, with Elon Musk at the head of the company, that image might not be a far stretch. But if you look beyond what seems to be a Sci-Fi horror movie, you can get a glimpse of quite a different future for humanity — one that has a new, sixth sense.

These things are really, really small. You really can’t manipulate them with your hand. The threads are peeled off one at a time by the robot to place into the brain… So we had to build a surgical robot… The surgery is not possible without the robot.

- Max Hodak, President of Neuralink

HAVE THEY STARTED THEIR TEST?

The Neuralink team has already started experimenting with various versions of the devices on both rats and monkeys. The results have been impressive. During the presentation in San Francisco, Musk and his team described one instance of a monkey being able to control a computer with simply its brain. Unfortunately, (or fortunately) there have not been any tests on humans. Yet, the team hopes to obtain FDA approval and begin human trials as early as this year. 

RISKS

During his presentation Elon Musk reiterated the idea that Neuralink will be an important part of our future, eventually allowing us to reach symbiosis with artificial intelligence. “With a high bandwidth brain-machine interface, we can go along for the ride and effectively have the option of merging with AI”, said Musk.  And as for the risks to reach this end goal? Musk reassured his audience that the device will be safe.

Even more so, BMIs technology is not completely new and is currently used to help those with mobility disabilities. However, this technology is still in its infinite stages, is very invasive, and is not so scalable. That is what makes Neuralink so special. The N1 Bandwith system holds the promise of being non-invasive, safer, and potentially easier to integrate into our lives.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of technical and ethical challenges ahead for Neuralink if they want to make this possible. Could someone hack these devices in the future? What do we do with all the collected patient N1 data? Krittika D'Silva, an AI researcher at the Frontier Development Lab and attendee of the event summed it up perfectly for BBC news when she stated, “The technology described by NeuraLink is exciting because it is significantly less invasive than prior work in this field.”

This robot has the ability to make the precise movements necessary to install the threads into your brain. It sounds like a simple task, but at the small scale that the threads are, it becomes a task that’s about as complicated as landing a space rocket safely back on Earth — something Musk is all too familiar with.

The Part That’s Outside the Brain

Having a bionic superbrain chip robotically implanted in your head is something that most of us would consider a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Musk and his team want to keep it that way. Software updates are already inconvenient, and always happen whenever we don’t want them to. The idea of having to make a trip to the local neurosurgeon every time the software wants to run an update takes away a glimpse of the appeal that having a superbrain might bring. So a large piece of Neuralink resides outside of the skull, as a wearable behind your ear.

What Neuralink Wants To Be

It wants to be a computer inside everyone’s brain — one that we don’t have to carry around in our hands, and that’s undetectable in use. While Elon Musk probably likes the idea of helping out paraplegics, nothing seems to tickle him more than giving our future AI overlords a good kick below the belt. And he believes Neuralink will deliver that blow.

In the [unmeasurable] future, he sees Neuralink’s brain-chip as elective surgery. That means it won’t be covered by insurance in the United States. Sorry, that last sentence was an irrelevant, sarcastic jab at the joke that is American healthcare. In all seriousness, what it means is that people will want it, not need it. It may become more common around the world than plastic surgery (maybe with the exception of Beverly Hills).

[Neuralink] is not a mandatory thing. This is a thing you can choose to have if you want. This is something I think will be really important at a civilization-level scale.

- Elon Musk