Elon Musk’s Neuralink, is it ethical to control brain?
Elon Musk wants everyone to get brain surgery. Specifically, he wants everyone to get a brain implant, the brain-machine interface created by his company, Neuralink, ethical to control brain. He says it will be able to solve any number of medical conditions including paralysis, anxiety and addiction. Neuralink isn’t the first to believe that brain implants could extend or restore human capabilities (ethical to control brain). Researchers began placing probes in the brains of paralyzed people in the late 1990s in order to show that signals could let them move robot arms or computer cursors. And mice with visual implants really can perceive infrared rays.
Building on that work, Neuralink says it hopes to further develop such brain-computer interfaces (or BCIs) to the point where one can be installed in a doctor’s office in under an hour. “This actually does work,” Musk said of people who have controlled computers with brain signals. “It’s just not something the average person can use effectively.” Neuralink is a hugely ambitious plan to link the human brain to a computer. It might eventually allow people with conditions such as Parkinson's disease to control their physical movements or manipulate machines via the power of thought.
In July 2019, Musk said that a monkey had already been able to control a computer with its brain and the Neuralink implant. Since then, we’ve seen demonstrations of the Neuralink technology in pigs. In the case of humans, he explained, a person might decide they either no longer want the chip in their head, or that they want an upgrade, so it's vital to demonstrate reversibility is possible. In testing out the pigs' Neuralinks, the team put the pigs onto treadmills to observe their walking.
There are plenty of scientists already at work in this field. But Musk has far greater ambitions than most, talking of developing "superhuman cognition" - enhancing the human brain in part to combat the threat he sees from artificial intelligence.
For now, those goals are very much out of reach. Scientists need to learn far more about the brain and how it works for any of those ideas to become reality. The brain is still mysterious, and the neurological causes of things like anxiety and addiction are still unclear.
