I read the Teen Vogue article on Elon Musk’s company Neuralink and their plans to have people be able to just upload and download their thoughts through a process called “neural lace”. All I could think about was the closing of The Circle and how frustrated she was at the end of the novel because she was unable to hear Annie’s thoughts while she was in a coma. How she felt it was selfish of Annie to be unable to access the thoughts she was having. This ideology seems eerily similar to this project, largely in part due to the implanting of electrodes onto the brain in order to upload and download thoughts. To Elon Musk, this is a great idea (although I’m not sure what you gain from a project from this asides from it being “cool” in the sci-fi sense. What does one stand to gain from merging biological and digital intelligence? There hasn’t been a clear stance on this by the writer so I decided to do some more digging. I came across waitbutwhy.com (article here) which discusses Musk’s project in depth and now I have feelings.
So the conceit is — we have an incredibly old way of accessing and interpreting language that originates in the brain. Essentially, out of everything we’ve accomplished thus far, we are still communicating with each other the way we did 50,000 years ago — by talking. Enter the BMI (not the reductive, go to the gym type) or brain machine interface to the uninitiated. The main preoccupation of the BMI is to communicate directly with the brain (really its neurons) and have the brain communicate with others in the outside world, directly. BMI’s already exist in the form of cochlear implants and deep brain interfaces (a technology that helps people with things like Parkinson’s tremors). Neuralink would essentially be able to read out information from the brain directly, something that definitely sounds straight out of a sequel of “The Circle”. But the author likens my trepidation to Lasik eye surgery – people were super nervous before they actually dove in and started doing it even though upon completing the article I still felt an overwhelming amount of fear. I still don’t understand the benefits of this type of communication, save for someone who is unable to do this due to disabilities (the current preoccupation of BMI’s). This “digital tertiary layer” would essentially allow you to communicate with the outside world and people with similar implants in a much more advanced way than you do now. But is that a good thing? Even though it seems good natured and futuristic, something about the idea feels wrong. It jeopardizes human connection and we begin to rely on tech in a way that we pretty much can’t come back from. If your brain is attached to the cloud – what stops you from living in a VR or AR space — almost like actually living in the Matrix. Idk, it freaks me out.
What about you guys?
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