Elon Musk under fire from scientific community amidst Neuralink trial success
Elon Musk has announced that Neuralink’s first human patient “seems to have made a full recovery” and can control a mouse cursor around a screen “just by thinking”.
This is a development in a brain-computer interface (BCI) device that is described by Neuralink as “fully implantable, cosmetically invisible, and designed to let you control a computer or mobile device anywhere you go”. The neurotechnology company, launched by Musk in 2016, got approval for human trial recruitment last September.
This is not unchartered territory. British scientist Kevin Warwick's 1998 experiments on Radio Frequency Identification implants paved the way for computer-nervous system interfaces. Indeed, Neuralink’s competitor Synchron has been developing BCI’s for years, and with the backing of Bezos and Gates, were the first to create a fully implantable brain chip.
Still, the publicity around Neuralink has brought renewed attention – full of optimism and skepticism alike – to the technology.
Last week’s successful insertion into a human patient sees Neurolink get ever closer to fulfilling Musk’s lofty ambitions; to “solve” conditions ranging from autism and schizophrenia. This has been deemed ableist: autism is a development disorder; schizophrenia is a “severe mental disorder”. Neither are diseases that can be “solved”.
Musk also sees Neuralink as a treatment for physical paralysis. “Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal”, Musk reiterated on X.
Despite the trial’s reported success, Musk has received backlash from the scientific community. Neuralink has clarified neither whether it has set up an internal ethics board, nor if it has established an ethical code.
With Neuralink’s progress being published on platforms like X, rather than via peer-reviewed publications, it further sidesteps evaluation and accountability procedures. This sidestepping of scrutiny from the scientific community has been deemed irresponsible and dangerous to participants, and the future of neurotechnology at large.
If something goes wrong, therefore, it is highly likely that public perceptions of neurotechnology will tank, and neurotechnologists will lose funding and public support. Given Neuralink has killed 25 pigs, having implanted them with the wrong size device, and needed to euthanize monkeys, an error occurring in the trial stage is not implausible.
There are further concerns about the risks of putting BCI on the mass-market which pre-date Musk’s incursion into the field. They can be categorized as the following:
Socioeconomic: who will have access to BCIs? What if they are only available to the 0.1%?
Health: what are the long term medical complications of the chips? Do they pose an electronic hazard?
Privacy: who has access to the information stored on a BCI chip? Could surveillance authorities make a case for viewing the contents?
Security: could they be hijacked?
If these questions sound straight out of a William Gibson novel, it is because the histories of BCI technology and science-fiction writing are so interlinked (see Nick Halper’s genealogy). Neuralink’s bullish approach suggests that Musk never quite made it to the final chapter…