Neuralink’s controversial implantable brain-computer interface is commencing its clinical trials
At ten years old, the news of Google Glass evoked a fear in me that has lingered ever since. I felt powerless against the gaining speed of technological advancement. I thought human connection would be irrevocably altered, and I could do nothing to impede this change.
Hindsight has revealed the insignificance of Google Glass to the general public. This fear resurfaced when I learned about Neuralink, a neurotechnology company founded in 2016 by Elon Musk. Since its inception, Neuralink has been developing an implantable brain-computer interface (BCI). This implant is intended to allow paralysis patients to utilise computers through neurotransmission. The implantable BCI processes neural signals and then translates these neural signals into intended actions within an application on a computer interface.
While Neuralink has been developing its BCI for nearly a decade, news of its commencing clinical trials has sprung the company and BCIs into the public’s attention. Despite what the newfound popularity of the technology may suggest, BCIs are not new, nor are they unique to Neuralink’s project. Brain-computer interfaces have been in development for decades, and some projects have successfully enabled paralysis patients to regain a sense of autonomy.
What differentiates Neuralink’s project from its peers is the level of invasiveness Neuralink’s BCI demands. Companies, such as Synchron have successfully introduced stents into motor cortex blood vessels to sense neural signals. This method of BCI implantation method forgoes brain surgery while still allowing paralysis patients to operate computer interfaces with their thoughts. Conversely, Neuralink’s BCI must be implanted within the brain to expand the neurological connection. Musk is utilising the maturation of BCIs to bring forth an unprecedented level of invasiveness for the technology, which brings forth accompanying technical issues. This increased invasiveness is in preparation for the project’s final conceptual goal: to merge AI and human consciousness on a neurological level.
Public attention has been focused on the technology’s sensationalised, purely conceptual capabilities. The Neuralink clinical trials, pertaining strictly to the technology’s capacity to serve paralysis patients, are set to take six years. By the end of the decade, the company hopes to release its product on the market for the aforementioned population. It will be quite a few years before Neuralink’s conceptual end goal of AI and human unification is actualised, if ever.
Despite the dubious potentiality of Neuralink’s BCI becoming a technology for the general public, Musk’s sensationalism of the project has raised concerns regarding data collection, hyper-surveillance, and neuroethics. The aspirations of Neuralink are representative of technocracy’s culmination—the insertion of a foreign object in the human mind, operated by a technological conglomerate, which would biologically merge users and data collection. The potentiality for abuse is astronomical, yet still very much hypothetical.
Companies, such as the Toronto-based Muse have already released EEG-based BCIs marketed towards “corporate wellness,” which monitors focus levels. These are not implanted into the brain and can measure the electrical activity in the brain. A crucial limitation of Muse’s technology is its inability to determine exactly what users are focused on, unlike implantable BCIs, which work beyond this limitation. The capacity of Neuralink’s BCI utilised in the corporate sphere, is a single, hypothetical example of the technology’s potentiality for abuse.
Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscience professor at Duke University, expresses that there is no place in the public market for cosmetic BCIs or the invasive surgery technology demands. As one would expect, engaging in competition with AI by means of cosmetic brain surgery and an unprecedented breach of personal security is not an attractive proposition for the general public. Less attractive are their encroachments upon the corporate sphere.
One must hope that Neuralink’s invasive brain-computer interface has a trajectory similar to Google Glass—confined to domains that appreciate its strengths and are rejected by the public on the basis of its frivolity.
