Elon Musk is the tech visionary of our age. Known for Tesla (electric car), SpaceX (space exploration), the Boring Company (loop transportation), Musk made some headlines this month with updates on Neuralink, his neurotechnology company which aims to implant a microchip into human brains.
Ever since the media first reported on Neuralink’s existence two years ago, there has been a lot of speculation about what Musk and his team of brain-machine interface experts were trying to do. Talk was rife about implants designed to enhance the human brain but there was very little information.
That changed this month with the publication of a paper about Neuralink’s “integrated brain-machine interface platform with thousands of channels” and with Musk himself giving a talk via livestream.
In short, Musk wants to place a Bluetooth-enabled implant into your brain to enhance its capabilities. Among other things, he hopes this process can help repair motor functions in people with injuries (e.g. stroke victims and quadriplegics), facilitate the use of artificial intelligence to boost brain function and – not kidding – even enable telepathy.
Neuralink’s implant will consist of a small chip connected to thousands of wires just one-tenth the width of a strand of human hair. This is how the procedure works: A needle rapidly shoots thin-film polymer probes containing arrays of electrodes into the brain. The chip is then connected via Bluebooth to a small computerised gadget worn over the ear and connected to a smartphone, said Musk.
Actually machine-brain interfaces have been around for years already. In clinical studies with patients who were blind or paralysed, electrodes implanted into their brains allowed them to regain some of their vision or control robotic arms.
For example, in 2005, US researchers from neurotechnology company, Cyberkinetics succeeded in getting a paraplegic patient to move a robotic hand. During a nine-month trial, the patient was also able to operate a computer cursor, a television and a light switch.
It was a remarkable achievement but the set-up was very cumbersome. The electrode implants were very bulky and invasive and the patient had to be physically connected to a computer for the system to work.
HOW IT WORKS
Neuralink envisions a tiny implant that connects wirelessly with a small receiver placed behind the ear. Musk’s aim is to make the surgery “equivalent to a LASIK type of thing where you sit down, a machine does its thing, and you can walk away within a few hours.”
That’s a stark contrast to the ones done by other labs which required invasive brain surgery where the skull is cut open, chips installed, connectors are mounted, and then the head is stitched back up. Not everybody is prepared to go through all that unless they have no choice.
Another key difference between Neuralink’s system and those by other companies in this space is the sheer number of electrodes it plans to implant. While Neuralink hasn’t said exactly how many electrodes it would need for its brain-computer interface, its system is bound to have way more than existing ones.
In the past, prototypes tested in patients typically use hundreds of electrodes. Neuralink’s system, in contrast, would employ thousands of them. The more electrodes there are, the more neurons can be monitored. That in turn means more information gets fed into the software that analyses their meaning and translates it into an output such as moving a robotic arm and grabbing something.
During his presentation, Musk spoke about brain-computer links that could go in both directions, that is, recording neural activity and also stimulating it. Once perfected, Musk said, the host brain would “achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence (AI).”
Musk is famously wary of AI which he believes could run amok and destroy humanity if it’s not reigned in. That’s why he thinks it’s important that humans harness AI to enhance their brain’s capabilities. “Even in a benign AI scenario, we will be left behind,” he said, adding: “With a high-bandwidth brain-machine interface, we can actually go along for the ride. We can have the option of merging with AI.”
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN
Musk is a visionary and a dreamer and this was reflected in what he went on to say about the potential for Neuralink’s brain-machine interface. According to him, if two people both had Neuralinks, they’d “effectively have a really high-bandwidth telepathy… potentially a new kind of communication, a conceptual telepathy. It would also be consensual.”
He may be an idealist but he’s also a pragmatist. The first volunteers, Musk anticipates, will be quadriplegics who are willing to have four chips implanted, three in the motor cortex of the brain and one providing a closed-loop feedback to the somatosensory cortex.
So, when will this happen? Not so soon, Musk conceded, saying: “All this will occur I think quite slowly. It’s not as if Neuralink will suddenly have this incredible neural lace and take over people’s brains. It will take a long time.”
The other natural question is will people other than those who have debilitating conditions (e.g. quadriplegics) want to voluntarily have microchips implanted into their brains? Musk thinks so. In fact, he believes that everyone will want it because it’ll be what’s necessary to stay competitive in an AI era.
This technology isn’t science fiction, though it could very easily sound like it is. If Neuralink can deliver on its potential, it would at the very least dramatically improve the lives of those with disabilities. But at its best, it could radically upgrade the human brain and take it to another level beyond what normal, organic evolution could ever do. It’ll be nothing short of re-imagining what it means to be human.
Oon Yeoh is a consultant with experiences in print, online and mobile media. Reach him at oonyeoh@gmail.com.