Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk is monkeying around with brains again. The billionaire showcased a monkey “telepathically” typing on a computer via brainchip at a Neuralink event Wednesday. Musk said he hopes to microchip a human within six months, according to Axios. Which raises a whole host of new ethical problems.
The livestreamed Wednesday event to recruit talent also included a display of “telepathic typing” from a monkey. “To be clear, he’s not actually using a keyboard,” Axios quoted Musk. “He’s moving the cursor with his mind to the highlighted key. Now technically, he can’t actually spell. So I don’t wanna oversell this thing, because that’s the next version.”
And the next version is coming out soon, Musk hopes. “We want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device into a human, but we’ve submitted, I think, most of our paperwork to the FDA and we think probably in about six months we should be able to have our first Neuralink in a human,” Musk enthused.
Neuralink showed a demo of Sake the monkey, which was shown on video manipulating an onscreen keyboard using his mind.https://t.co/tQh5bT94YJ pic.twitter.com/gMPrKZHgLb
— Ground News (@Ground_app) December 1, 2022
The brainchips are supposed to be designed primarily to help people with neurological disorders, as other chip manufacturers have described their products. “Even if we do not succeed with that problem, we are confident at this point that we will succeed at solving many brain injury issues–spine injury issues–along the way,” Musk said, according to Axios. He proposed it as a way for paralyzed people to connect to devices and thus be able to communicate more easily. And I think most people would be on board with helping those who have tragic conditions such as paralysis.
But two questions come to my (un-chipped) mind. First, is it ethical to implant chips in a person’s mind, in the same way that it is ethically questionable or even downright wrong to manipulate DNA or genetically “design” babies? Second, can Elon Musk — or any other chip manufacturer (he’s not the only one) — be trusted not to allow brainchips to become instruments of control?
The first question does not yet have solid answers, simply because this is a relatively new technology. The main question is whether brainchips can be instruments of control, and that’s not as conspiracist as you might think. After all, speaking merely of a microchip in a consumable pill (which is not on the level of a brain implant), Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla explicitly said, “Imagine … the compliance.” So the idea that microchips in humans can bring about “compliance” isn’t sequestered to institutional skeptics like me.
And Elon Musk has specifically pushed for increased Chinese investment in his Neuralink project in a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) state publication. Considering that the CCP is famous for using technology to exercise tyrannical control over its people, Musk has to be aware that a brainchip could work both ways — it could allow the chipped person to communicate, but it could also allow another person with the technology to manipulate his microchip. Is it really such a stretch to imagine the CCP, or other governments, attaining the capability to send unwanted messages to a person’s brain chip or even shut down or otherwise manipulate the chip for some reason?
I’m not saying Musk necessarily intends to use the brainchip for any purpose other than his stated one. But he has shown that he is willing to sell out stated values, such as the value of free speech over tyranny, by pandering to the Chinese Communists. He has yet to comment on the freedom protests against COVID-19 lockdowns rocking China, even though his Tesla workers were previously reported as suffering harsh conditions under the CCP’s draconian COVID-19 lockdowns. He also said that the CCP should own the sovereign nation of Taiwan. And even if his Neuralink does nothing wrong with the brainchips, how can we guarantee that they are unhackable or uncontrollable by other entities?
Ultimately, brain microchips, as marvelous an advance as they may seem, are all-too-likely to lead to monkey business.
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