Elon Musk and his company Neuralink have been under the spotlight recently for implanting the first chip in a human brain. They have an ambitious idea of using ‘sewing machine like’ robots to implant extremely fine electrodes, capable of reading information 15 times faster than current systems embedded in our body and treating several medical conditions.
These devices have a variety of uses, from allowing simple tasks to be carried out such as searching for information or performing complex calculations with computers, albeit requiring less physical movement. They could theoretically introduce technological telepathy, restore sight to blind people and enable paralysed people to control prostheses, regaining their movement. Humans would hence be allowed to form “a sort of symbiosis” with AI.
Elon Musk’s announcement turned heads in the community of scientists who have spent decades working to treat certain disabilities and conditions. “Getting a device into a person is no small feat”, says Robert Gaunt, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh applauding Neuralink’s announcement in an NBC article, while also noticing that these trials are at a quite an early stage and not a lot of information has been revealed. He says this new milestone is jumpstarting an industry that has already undergone rapid advancement in the last 15 years.
However, Neuralink’s technology could have some serious long term effects on the human brain and body. The lack of research means that it's impossible to know what the full extent of these side effects might be. The company has the possibility of invading one’s privacy by reading their thoughts and recording their memories. If you have a chip implanted into your brain, anyone with access to it will be able to read and track your daily activities.
On the contrary, this technology will allow humans to communicate freely with machines without having to rely on any external devices such as keyboards or touch screens, instead controlling them through their minds, while giving us the ability to upload our memories into an artificial intelligence system stored on a cloud server, meaning they are never lost.
The first brain computer interface was implanted into a human in the late 1990s led by Phil Kennedy whose idea was to allow the device to tap into the human brain circuitry that remains intact after surgery to perform basic movements and functions. “For instance, when a person thinks about moving their hand, or watch someone else move their hand, a lot of the same neurons in the brain are active as if they performed the movement themselves” according to Jennifer Collinger.
Musk’s start-up, along with other similar ventures such as Synchron and Precision Neuroscience, are essentially trying to make brain computer interfaces more practical.
There have been bumps along the way. Neuralink was mired in controversy by some activist groups, however there is no doubt that the company has improved the recording capacity of these devices by leaps and bounds through the use of innovative robotic surgery instead of a specialised neurosurgeon to implant this device.