Neuralink

Neuralink Corporation is a neurotechnology company founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The company specializes in developing implantable brain chips to create an interface between the brain and computers or machines.

Neuralink was founded by Tesla’s Elon Musk and eight others including Ben Rapport, Max Hodak, Dongjin Seo, Philip Saps, Tim Gardner, Tin Hanson, Paul Merolla, and Venesa Tolosa, all experts in different aspects of neurotechnology.

The company was founded to further develop technologies that could treat serious brain diseases in the near term. In the long term, Neuralink hopes to fuel human enhancement, also called transhumanism. The company has begun making moves towards that, as Musk recently announced that Neuralink has connected a brain chip with “tiny wires” into a monkey. Musk added that his inspiration for the next generation of AI partly came from the science fiction concept, “neural lace” in The Culture, a novel series by Lain M. Banks.

Musk, fascinated about the neural lace, defines it as a “digital layer above the cortex” that does not necessarily require surgical insertion to access, but through an implant in through the vein or artery. “With a direct neural interface, we can improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude,” Musk said. “I’d say probably the least 1,000, or maybe 10,000, or more.”

The brain cortex is an essential part of the brain that plays a key role in memory, perceptual awareness, thought, attention, consciousness, and language. Linking the Neuralink chip to the brain could allow humans to send information to each other using telepathy in a “saved state” which could be transferred into a robot or another human after they die, according to Musk, explaining the long-term plan of Neuralink.

The company has been “highly secretive about its work since its launch,” but has begun to gradually unveil some of its research work and developments. In 2019, Neuralink held a live presentation at the University of California, Davis to reveal to the public its prototype the company had been working on. In August 2020, the company had a live demo conducting a test on three pigs. The company hopes to release more videos in the coming month to show its progress.

Claims

Neuralink claims that its neurotechnology will help develop living experience, as humans will not only be able to control machines through telepathy but have their memories stored and transferred to a robot or another human after they die.

The ethics of Neuralink’s claims have been questioned and criticized by several neuroscientists and publications, including the MIT Technology Review. Some of the criticisms state that the claimed “tiny wires” that will be inserted into the brain mostly compose of polyamide, a biocompatible material that is coated in thin gold thread, known as probes.

Studies on the insertion of probes into the brain have shown that the body recognizes them as an unknown material due to their rigidity. Consequently, the body generates tissue to dispose of the probes, which, in long term, renders them useless.

In response to this, Neuralink said it has developed a robot that can insert flexible probes to allow rapid insertion of multiple probes to minimize the effect of trauma that can trigger a bounce reaction. The robot can insert up to 6 probes (192 electrons) per minute.