Elon Musk has his irons in plenty of fires right now. If he’s not ramping up to bring Tesla Cybertrucks to the masses, he’s blasting SpaceX rockets into orbit or digging tunnels with his Boring company or promising the future of high-speed travel with his Hyperloop.
And then there’s Neuralink, which always seemed a bit murky compared to his other projects, a sort of pie-in-the-sky, vaguely Johnny Mnemonic futuristic premise of letting people hook their brains up to…stuff? For reasons?
Well, Musk recently gave the world an update on Neuralink, and while it’s clearly not exactly a flight of fancy anymore, it also doesn’t have the experts entirely thrilled.
What the heck is Neuralink even supposed to do?
Well, Musk’s vision of the future of humanity involves brain implants that will let people link up with the world in all kinds of ways. Much of it sounds like it’s straight out of science fiction: using this link-up to store memories or alter brain functions to do things like remove a fear, or cure seizures, blindness, or deafness. They’re big promises, but until Musk trotted out Gertrude and Dorothy, a pair of pigs that had actually received the brain implants, it all sounded like a lot of fanciful fluff that will remain fiction.
However, it’s worth noting that Neuralink does build off of existing technology. There are brain probes that, for example, allow people with paralysis to manipulate robotic limbs.
Can Neuralink do any of that just yet?
No, not yet. “It’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires,” Musk said during the demo. While the tech remains at a rudimentary point, Musk’s promises of a brain-machine interface were indeed enough to excite some of the neuroscientists in the audience.
Ralph Adolphs, Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology at California Institute of Technology, told Inverse that Neuralink is “a good example of technology outstripping our current ability to know how to use it.
“The primary initial application will be for people who are ill and for clinical reasons it is justified to implant such a chip into their brain. It would be unethical to do so right now in a healthy person.”
“But who knows what the future holds?”
However, many of his colleagues were left unimpressed by Musk’s demonstration.
MIT’s Technology Review, for example, called it “neuroscience theater,” noting that “Despite the long list of medical applications Musk presented, Neuralink didn’t show it’s ready to commit to any one of them.”
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Others pointed out that neuroscientists have been able to do what Neuralink did in the demo for decades now. “We’ve been connecting forms of computers to brains for 20 or 30 years already,” Nolan Williams, the director of Stanford’s Brain Stimulation Lab, told Recode .
The Neuralink demonstration also created more questions than answers for some.
John Krakauer, chief medical and scientific officer at MindMaze and professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University, was filled with concerns, he told Inverse.
“The device we saw was placed over a single sensorimotor area,” Krakauer noted. “If we want to read thoughts rather than movements (assuming we knew their neural basis) where do we put it? How many will we need? How does one avoid having one’s scalp studded with them? No mention of any of this of course.”
One important factor that the demonstration did cover was that the Neuralink isn’t permanent.
Gertrude the pig was the star of the demonstration as she had the link in her brain, but Dorothy’s presence was just as important because she had had her implant removed.
“If you have a Neuralink and then you decide you don’t want it, or you want to get an upgrade, and the Neuralink is removed,” Musk said, according to Venture Beat. “it is removed in such a way that you’re still healthy and happy afterwards. And what Dorothy illustrates is that you can put in the Neuralink, remove it, and be healthy, happy, and indistinguishable from a normal pig.”
So, at least there’s that.
h/t: Inverse , MIT Technology Review , Recode