Elon's Concerning Innovation

On November 30, Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk did a showcase on his far more interesting recent endeavor, Neuralink. Lately, he’s been under a lot of heat for his purchase of Twitter. Musk has allowed Trump back onto Twitter, the use of racial slurs has skyrocketed on the platform, and he’s continually shown overt support for right-wing politicians. This controversy has heavily distracted from Neuralink, a fascinating but potentially concerning innovation in tech.

Neuralink Inc. is Elon Musk’s startup devoted to designing a brain chip that Musk claims could potentially cure paralysis and blindness. The WSJ reported that the showcase showed a monkey typing on a digital keyboard purely with the chip in his brain.

“Mr. Musk showed a video of “telepathic typing” from a monkey that has a Neuralink brain implant. The animal was not typing into a keyboard but was able to move a cursor to images of letters.

“He’s moving the cursor with his mind,” he said. “He can’t actually spell. I don’t want to oversell this thing,” he said.

Neuralink devices are so compact that it is difficult to tell that a monkey in a demo had an implant, Mr. Musk said.

“I could have a Neuralink device implanted right now and you wouldn’t even know, hypothetically,” he said.”

As fascinating as this innovation is, the intention of this post isn’t just to sing Neuralink’s praises. Neuralink’s stated intention is undeniably admirable. It would be incredible if an implant could be used to cure paralysis and blindness. However, the chip is also touted to assist in unspoken communication. It can translate thoughts into typed letters (as shown by the monkey).

The capability for unexpressed communication could be concerning for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there seems to be something inhuman about unspoken communication becoming the norm. We’re already seeing negative effects from in-person communication being replaced by texting and social media. Neuralink could serve to remove communication even further from real-life interaction. My second concern may sound a bit like a conspiracy theory. However, I’d be very wary of trusting any corporation to design a chip implanted in my brain. If it can cure disabilities and translate thoughts into digital communication, what other parts of my brain could it control? I’m not necessarily claiming that Musk has malevolent intentions, but I’d struggle to trust any corporation enough to implant such a powerful chip into my brain without knowing everything it’s capable of.

Some of the more radical members of the anti-vax movement have claimed that Bill Gates wants to put microchips into people through vaccines. This is obviously an absurd theory. However, it’s curious to me that Elon Musk, who is openly attempting to implant microchips in human brains, isn’t getting the same treatment. Being distrustful of a corporation implanting tech into your brain is totally reasonable. Trusting one billionaire’s microchips over another billionaire’s vaccines, on the other hand, is unreasonable to say the least.