Merging the human brain with AI: We will pay the price with our lives for Elon Musk’s ‘crazy plan’.
Elon Musk wants to merge the human brain with AI to become smarter than AI itself. But the implant procedure requires drilling a hole into the skull and going through the brain.
How many people will have to pay the price for Elon Musk’s plan?
Of all Elon Musk’s accomplishments — Tesla cars, SpaceX rockets, Twitter acquisition, Mars landing plans — the billionaire’s secretive brain chip company, Neuralink, is arguably the most dangerous.
What is Neuralink used for? In the short term, brain chip implants could allow paralyzed people like Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old who demonstrated in a recent livestream that he could move a computer cursor with the power of his mind, after becoming the first patient to receive a Neuralink Implant. But that’s not all.
Launched in 2016, the company revealed in 2019 that it had created flexible “wires” that can be implanted in the brain, along with a sewing machine-like robot to perform the implantation. The idea is that these wires would read signals from a paralyzed patient’s brain and transmit that data to an iPhone or computer, allowing the patient to control it with just their thoughts — no tapping, typing or swiping required.
The company is currently recruiting paralyzed volunteers to get started on the project. If this technology works in humans, it could improve the quality of life for millions of people. There are an estimated 5.4 million people living with paralysis in the United States alone.
But helping paralyzed people isn’t Musk’s ultimate goal. It’s just one step on the path to achieving much larger long-term ambitions.
That ambition, in Musk’s words, is to “achieve symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” His goal is to develop technology that helps humans “merge with AI” so that we don’t get “left behind” as AI becomes more sophisticated.
This far-fetched vision is not something the FDA has given the green light for human testing. What’s more, the technology comes with enormous risks.
Former Neuralink employees and experts in the field accuse the company of promoting an unnecessarily invasive and potentially dangerous approach of implantable devices that could cause brain damage (which is reportedly done on animal test subjects) to advance Musk’s goal of merging with AI.
There are also ethical risks to society at large that extend beyond Neuralink. Several companies are developing human brain implant technology that could decode what’s going on in our minds, potentially eroding mental privacy and increasing authoritarian surveillance.
Why does Elon Musk want to merge the human brain with AI?
Neuralink is the answer to a big fear: AI will take over the world.
This is a growing fear among AI leaders, who worry that we could create machines that are smarter than humans and capable of outwitting and eventually taking over humanity.
In March, many of them, including Musk, signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on the development of AI systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4.
While Musk is not alone in warning about the dangers posed by AI systems, what sets him apart from others is his plan to avoid the risks. The plan is: “If you can’t beat them, join them.”
Musk envisions a world where AI systems capable of communicating at trillions of bits per second will look down on tiny humans — creatures that can only communicate at 39 bits per second. To AI systems, we seem useless — except that we become that way.
A key part of this, Musk believes, is the ability to think and communicate at the speed of AI. “It’s mostly about bandwidth — the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, especially the output,” he said in 2017.
Half a decade later, it’s clear that Musk remains obsessed with the concept of bandwidth — the speed at which computers can read information from the brain. Indeed, it’s this idea that drives Neuralink.
The Neuralink device is a brain implant, equipped with 1,024 electrodes, that can pick up signals from vast numbers of neurons. The more electrodes you have, the more neurons you can listen to and the more data you get. Plus, the closer you get to those neurons, the higher quality your data will be.
The Neuralink device gets very close to neurons. The company’s implant procedure requires drilling a hole in the skull and going through the brain. This poses great risks to trial participants.
Why are there better, noninvasive ways to solve this problem, but Neuralink chose the most extreme one? According to Hirobumi Watanabe, who led Neuralink’s endovascular research team in 2018, the main reason is the company’s obsession with maximizing bandwidth.
“Neuralink’s goal is to create more electrodes, more bandwidth, so that the combination can do more than other technologies can do,” Watanabe said.
What if Neuralink’s approach works too well?
If the high-bandwidth implants Musk is seeking really do open up unprecedented access to the human brain, the outlook is even bleaker.
Some neuroscientists argue that the potential for abuse is so great that we need to amend personal rights laws to protect ourselves before moving forward.
Our brains are the final frontier of privacy. They are the repository of a person’s personal identity and deepest thoughts.
Experts also fear that devices like the one Neuralink is building could be vulnerable to hacking. What if someone changed the signals going into your brain to make you lose your willpower or become more docile?
Neuroethicists call it “brain hacking.” “It’s still a hypothesis, but the possibility has been demonstrated in studies. A hack of this kind would not require much technological sophistication,” neuroscientist Marcello Ienca told VOX.
Finally, consider how psychology and self-awareness might be altered by the application of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).
In one study, an epileptic woman who received a BCI felt such a radical symbiosis that she said, “It became me.” The company that implanted the device in her subsequently went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw it. She cried and said, “I’m lost.”
To avoid the risk of a hypothetical omnipotent AI in the future, Musk wants to create a symbiosis between brain and machine. But this symbiosis creates its own very real risks, and we are now living with them.
