By Sigal Samuel
October 16, 2023
Source: VOX
Photo Source: Unsplash,
The brain implant company Neuralink is pushing a needlessly risky approach, former employees say.
Finding the best ways to do good.
Of all Elon Musk’s exploits — the Tesla cars, the SpaceX rockets, the Twitter takeover, the plans to colonize Mars — his secretive brain chip company Neuralink may be the most dangerous.
What is Neuralink for? In the short term, it’s for helping people with paralysis. But that’s not the whole answer.
Launched in 2016, the company revealed in 2019 that it had created flexible “threads” that can be implanted into a brain, along with a sewing-machine-like robot to do the implanting. The idea is that these threads will read signals from a paralyzed patient’s brain and transmit that data to an iPhone or computer, enabling the patient to control it with just their thoughts — no need to tap or type or swipe.
So far, Neuralink has only done testing on animals. But in May, the company announced it had won FDA approval to run its first clinical trial in humans. Now, it’s recruiting paralyzed volunteers to study whether the implant enables them to control external devices. If the technology works in humans, it could improve quality of life for millions of people.
Approximately 5.4 million people are living with paralysis in the US alone.
But helping paralyzed people is not Musk’s end goal. That’s just a step on the way to achieving a much wilder long-term ambition.
That ambition, in Musk’s own words, is “to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” His goal is to develop a technology that helps humans “merg[e] with AI” so that we won’t be “left behind” as AI becomes more sophisticated.
This fantastical vision is not the sort of thing for which the FDA greenlights human trials. But work on helping people with paralysis? That can get a warmer reception. And so it has.
But it’s important to understand that this technology comes with staggering risks. Former Neuralink employees as well as experts in the field alleged that the company pushed for an unnecessarily invasive, potentially dangerous approach to the implants that can damage the brain (and apparently has done so in animal test subjects) to advance Musk’s goal of merging with AI.
Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment.
There are also ethical risks for society at large that go beyond just Neuralink. A number of companies are developing tech that plugs into human brains, which can decode what’s going on in our minds and has the potential to erode mental privacy and supercharge authoritarian surveillance. We have to prepare ourselves for what’s coming.
Why Elon Musk wants to merge human brains with AI
Neuralink is a response to one big fear: that AI will take over the world.
This is a fear that’s increasingly widespread among AI leaders, who worry that we may create machines that are smarter than humans and that have the ability to deceive us and ultimately seize control from us.
In March, many of them, including Musk, signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on developing AI systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4. The letter warned that “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity” and went on to ask: “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”
Although Musk is not alone in warning about “civilizational risk” posed by AI systems, where he differs from others is in his plan for warding off the risk. The plan is basically: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
Musk foresees a world where AI systems that can communicate information at a trillion bits per second will look down their metaphorical noses at humans, who can only communicate at 39 bits per second. To the AI systems, we’d seem useless. Unless, perhaps, we became just like them.
A big part of that, in Musk’s view, is being able to think and communicate at the speed of AI. “It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output,” he said in 2017. “Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem.”
Fast forward a half-dozen years, and you can see that Musk is still obsessed with this notion of bandwidth — the rate at which computers can read out information from your brain. It is, in fact, the idea that drives Neuralink.
How can such practices impact your health? How? Why?
Share the wealth of health with your family and friends by sharing this article with 3 people today.
If this article was helpful to you, donate to the Shidonna Raven Garden and Cook E-Magazine Today. Thank you in advance.