A lucky individual has become the first human to receive a brain implant from Elon Musk’s start-up Neuralink Corp, marking a step toward being able to steer computers with our minds.
The device, called Telepathy, is about the size of a NT$5 coin and was inserted with hundreds of wires and electrodes just under the skull. Its aim is to take “control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking,” Musk said. (1)
Sounds great, so long as the device does not plug people’s brains into the time-sucking matrix of distraction that we call the Internet. Far from enhancing our lives, that could prove a step too far in being “connected.”
Illustration: Tania Chou
Neuralink seems to be far ahead of its peers in terms of technological prowess. (2)
While rival devices have roughly 16 electrodes for gathering brain data, Neuralink’s implant has more than 1,000 and it does not need wiring to a bulky battery that is implanted into a person’s chest, according to a deep dive on the company by Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance.
Musk, who wants Neuralink to perform surgeries on more than 22,000 people by 2030, is likely to be the first to go mainstream, even if his “maniacal sense of urgency” means it might not be the most reliable product.
Musk has a history of exaggerating milestones on his products, but he has still managed to sell vehicles that partly drive themselves. There is every reason to think that in the next five years or so, many more people would have his coin-sized computer in their brains. That would have profound implications for how we define human identity and connection, especially if these gadgets plug our minds directly into the Web.
The Internet has transformed over the past decade from a place filled with curated forums and niche Web sites, to a noisy mess of algorithms enticing you to click hundreds of other links, while social media have sucked people down rabbit holes of distraction.
Imagine how much harder it would be to resist the lure of algorithms if you do not even have to click a mouse to open up a post.
Now imagine doing that on the Internet in five or 10 years’ time when it is teeming with more artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content than ever before, along with hyper-personalized algorithms that pull you in as many directions as possible.
Today’s keyboard and mouse act as healthy layers of friction between thinking we want to do something on the Internet and doing it, and even then, people often find themselves jumping into behaviors that they would not do in the real world, like posting inept comments on Musk’s public town square, X.
When I reported on the exploits of hacktivists Anonymous years ago, some of the online vigilantes told me that the barrier between what they thought and what they did in online forums was dauntingly thin as they fell deeper into groupthink and egged each other on to hack Web sites — before ultimately getting arrested. When there is virtually no barrier between thinking and acting on the Internet, people often proceed in ways they should not.
History is filled with visionaries whose grand plans for technology did not pan out exactly as dreamed. Mark Zuckerberg wanted to connect the world with Facebook, but ended up dividing people into political silos. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said he wants to bring “trillions” of dollars of economic abundance to humanity, but so far he has mostly helped enrich his own company and Microsoft with his generative AI products.
Musk’s goal for Neuralink is to prevent a future AI apocalypse by making our brains bionic. His reasoning is that a digital superintelligence would eventually become so powerful that it would outthink us, so we would need to add some digital smarts to our limbic system and neocortex to address that existential risk.
“If you can’t beat them, join ‘em,” the billionaire says.
Another potential benefit of the device would be helping those with paralysis. That would follow a long history of gadgets — from the computer mouse to text-to-speech — that first sought to assist people with disabilities before going mainstream, but there is an obvious paradox in that putting powerful AI into our skulls also brings its risks closer to home. Giving our brains a direct connection to the Web could make us far more vulnerable to its addictive pull, too.
Neuralink might bring awe-inspiring freedom to the disabled, but as we marvel at Musk’s technological progress, we might find ourselves sleepwalking into an era where we wish we were not quite so plugged in.
(1) Musk on Monday said that the first human had received an implant and was recovering well.
“Initial results show promising neuron spike detection,” he said, referring to the tiny computer’s ability to detect and record the electrical activity of neurons. Neurons talk to each other through electrical impulses sometimes known as “spikes,” and these are crucial for functions such as thought, sensation and motor control. If the device can detect those spikes, that means it can potentially decode neural activity.
(2) Until now, monkeys implanted with Musk’s device have used it to stare at laptop screens and play simple games with just their brains.
That process is not so novel. There are several companies working on computer-brain interfaces, and about five years ago I tried one of them. After sticking about a dozen electrodes to my head with some gloop, I was able to play a racing game by — weirdly enough — thinking about bending my left arm to move an object on the screen to the left, and vice versa.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is the author of We Are Anonymous. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS