Elon Musk wants to merge humans with AI.
Of all Elon Musk’s exploits — the Tesla cars, the SpaceX rockets, the Twitter takeover, the plans to colonize Mars — his secretive brain chip company Neuralink may be the most dangerous.
What is Neuralink for? In the short term, it’s for helping people with paralysis. But that’s not the whole answer.
Launched in 2016, the company revealed in 2019 that it had created flexible “threads” that can be implanted into a brain, along with a sewing-machine-like robot to do the implanting. The idea is that these threads will read signals from a paralyzed patient’s brain and transmit that data to an iPhone or computer, enabling the patient to control it with just their thoughts — no need to tap or type or swipe.
So far, Neuralink has only done testing on animals. But in May, the company announced it had won FDA approval to run its first clinical trial in humans. Now, it’s recruiting paralyzed volunteers to study whether the implant enables them to control external devices. If the technology works in humans, it could improve quality of life for millions of people. Approximately 5.4 million people are living with paralysis in the US alone.
But helping paralyzed people is not Musk’s end goal. That’s just a step on the way to achieving a much wilder long-term ambition.
That ambition, in Musk’s own words, is “to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” His goal is to develop a technology that helps humans “merg[e] with AI” so that we won’t be “left behind” as AI becomes more sophisticated.
This fantastical vision is not the sort of thing for which the FDA greenlights human trials. But work on helping people with paralysis? That can get a warmer reception. And so it has.
But it’s important to understand that this technology comes with staggering risks. Former Neuralink employees as well as experts in the field alleged that the company pushed for an unnecessarily invasive, potentially dangerous approach to the implants that can damage the brain (and apparently has done so in animal test subjects) to advance Musk’s goal of merging with AI.
Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment.
There are also ethical risks for society at large that go beyond just Neuralink. A number of companies are developing tech that plugs into human brains, which can decode what’s going on in our minds and has the potential to erode mental privacy and supercharge authoritarian surveillance. We have to prepare ourselves for what’s coming.
Why Elon Musk wants to merge human brains with AI
Neuralink is a response to one big fear: that AI will take over the world.
This is a fear that’s increasingly widespread among AI leaders, who worry that we may create machines that are smarter than humans and that have the ability to deceive us and ultimately seize control from us.
In March, many of them, including Musk, signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on developing AI systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4. The letter warned that “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity” and went on to ask: “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”
Although Musk is not alone in warning about “civilizational risk” posed by AI systems, where he differs from others is in his plan for warding off the risk. The plan is basically: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
Musk foresees a world where AI systems that can communicate information at a trillion bits per second will look down their metaphorical noses at humans, who can only communicate at 39 bits per second. To the AI systems, we’d seem useless. Unless, perhaps, we became just like them.
A big part of that, in Musk’s view, is being able to think and communicate at the speed of AI. “It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output,” he said in 2017. “Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem.”
Fast forward a half-dozen years, and you can see that Musk is still obsessed with this notion of bandwidth — the rate at which computers can read out information from your brain. It is, in fact, the idea that drives Neuralink.
The Neuralink device is a brain implant, outfitted with 1,024 electrodes, that can pick up signals from a whole lot of neurons. The more electrodes you’ve got, the more neurons you can listen in on, and the more data you’ll get. Plus, the closer you can get to those neurons, the higher quality your data will be.
And the Neuralink device gets very close to the neurons. The company’s procedure for implanting it requires drilling a hole in the skull and penetrating the brain.
But there are less extreme ways to go about this. Other companies are proving it. Let’s break down what they’re doing — and why Musk feels the need to do something different.
There are other ways to make a brain-computer interface. Why is Neuralink choosing the most extreme one?
Neuralink isn’t the only company exploring brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) for restoring people’s physical capabilities. Other companies like Synchron, Blackrock Neurotech, Paradromics, and Precision Neuroscience are also working in this space. So is the US military.
In recent years, a lot of the research that’s made headlines has focused on brain implants that would translate paralyzed people’s thoughts into speech. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, for example, is working on BCIs that could pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words in real time. (In the long term, the company says it aims to give everyone the ability to control keyboards, augmented reality glasses, and more, using just their thoughts.)
Earlier success in the BCI field focused not on speech, but on movement. In 2006, Matthew Nagle, a man with spinal cord paralysis, received a brain implant that allowed him to control a computer cursor. Soon Nagle was playing Pong using only his mind.
Nagle’s brain implant, developed by the research consortium BrainGate, contained a “Utah” array, a cluster of 100 spiky electrodes that is surgically embedded into the brain. That’s only around one-tenth of the electrodes in Neuralink’s device. But it still enabled a paralyzed person to move a cursor, check email, adjust the volume or channel on a TV, and control a robotic limb. Since then, others with paralysis have achieved similar feats with BCI technology.
While early technologies like the Utah array protruded awkwardly from the skull, newer BCIs are invisible to the outside observer once they’re implanted, and some are much less invasive.
Synchron’s BCI, for example, builds on stent technology that’s been around since the 1980s. A stent is a metal scaffold that you can introduce into a blood vessel; it can be safely left there for decades (and has been in many cardiac patients, keeping their arteries open). Synchron uses a catheter to send a stent up into a blood vessel in the motor cortex of the brain. Once there, the stent unfurls like a flower, and sensors on it pick up signals from neurons. This has already enabled several paralyzed people to tweet and text with their thoughts.
Synchron’s BCI, for example, builds on stent technology that’s been around since the 1980s. A stent is a metal scaffold that you can introduce into a blood vessel; it can be safely left there for decades (and has been in many cardiac patients, keeping their arteries open). Synchron uses a catheter to send a stent up into a blood vessel in the motor cortex of the brain. Once there, the stent unfurls like a flower, and sensors on it pick up signals from neurons. This has already enabled several paralyzed people to tweet and text with their thoughts.
No open brain surgery necessary. No drilling holes in the skull.
Musk himself has said that BCIs wouldn’t necessarily require open brain surgery, in a telling five-minute video at Recode’s Code Conference in 2016. “You could go through the veins and arteries, because that provides a complete roadway to all of your neurons,” he said. “You could insert something basically into the jugular and…”
After the audience laughed nervously, he added, “It doesn’t involve chopping your skull off or anything like that.”