Elon Musk’s Neuralink chip in a brain could be a boon for humankind — or a nightmare
Recently Elon Musk, the protean billionaire technological entrepreneur, demonstrated yet another technology with which he proposes to change the world. Cnet reports that Musk showed off a pig with a Neuralink chip attached to its brain. The chip transmitted brain activity to a computer for the edification of the audience.
The demonstration was rudimentary compared to some of the promises Musk is making about the technology. Future implants could help the paralyzed to walk again and the blind to see. Other implants could monitor human health in real time, detecting diseases far in advance of when symptoms could alert the patient and doctor to their existence. The technology could help stroke patients rehabilitate faster and more thoroughly.
Elon Musk, after all, is the man who dreams of starting a Mars colony, so he has expounded on some of the science fiction aspects of the Neuralink chip. Advanced versions of the chip will allow people to communicate mind to mind in a form of telepathy. The Neuralink chip will allow people to control machinery and access computer networks in a kind of direct Internet in which information can be downloaded and uploaded directly from the human brain. Indeed, people’s abilities will be enhanced through access to artificial intelligence systems, expanding their ability to think and process information. These applications would involve translating neural activity, our thoughts, memories, and even feelings into something computers can read and back again.
The potential of the Neuralink chip to be a boon for humankind is heady stuff. However, as with most new technology, a potential dark side exists.
Imagine how Chinese President Xi Jinping might regard Neuralink technology. Currently China is going beyond the usual coercive trappings of a police state to establish the social credit system. The social credit system contains a series of rewards and punishments to compel the Chinese people to behave in the way the Chinese Communist Party wants them to. Good behavior is awarded with extra privileges, such as better Internet connections, access to good schools and good jobs. Bad behavior can be punished with travel bans and denial of access to good schools and jobs.
The Neuralink technology could allow a tyrant like Xi Jinping, in theory, to access the innermost thoughts of Chinese citizens. The Chinese Communist Party could find out who is likely to make trouble before potential dissidents can act.
Take the technology one step forward, and a tyrant might be able to use it to change what he considers “bad behavior” directly. No more kludgy methods of behavior control like social credit incentives or good, old-fashioned torture. China’s Ministry of State Security would be able to just download some code into the brain of a potential dissident, and he will suddenly become like Winston Smith at the end of “1984.” He will love Big Brother, or rather the Chinese Communist Party, as the font of all things that are good.
Presuming that no one in the United States yields to the temptation of using the Neuralink technology for thought control, it will still represent a headache for cybersecurity experts. It is bad enough when a hacker breaks into a computer and either steals secrets or wreaks havoc. Imagine being able to do the same to a human brain.
Anyone who has watched “Star Trek” knows how this could end.
“We are the Borg. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”
The idea of stopping or forbidding Neuralink technology is likely unrealistic. The technology has too much potential to do good or ill for someone not to try to develop it. The task before us is to think about the implications of linking human brains to machines and what the upsides and the downsides are. Then we must figure out how to promote all the good things, especially healing of diseases, and prevent the nightmare of the human race being turned into the equivalent of the Borg hivemind depicted on “Star Trek.” Forging the right path is going to take a lot of wisdom and thought. Human civilization, for its own sake, had better be up to the task.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration entitled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond. He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times, and the Washington Post, among other venues.
