Neuralink: Elon Musk’s Disaster in Making

Humans have long been fascinated by the ability to manipulate around them, by essentially making use of their thoughts. This concept has widely been popularised globally through numerous sci-fi movies and several thousands of fictional novels. As a civilization, we already have reached a stage wherein individuals can voluntarily get these implants in order to experience life from an entirely new perspective. After all, how many people would turn down the offer to at least possess the partial powers of the legendary Professor X?

Neuralink, a tech “business” corporation majorly funded by entrepreneur Elon Musk, has come a very long way since first proposing an idea of linking the conscious human brain and a computer via Bluetooth or the internet in 2016 to actually teasing a partly functional, working prototype in 2020 amidst the ravaging pandemic. This effectively means that in the near future computers will be equipped to record each and every thought which crosses our mind, beam it back to one of the numerous data centres and store it for profitable corporate uses.

The neuralink’s design has undergone a groundbreaking transformation from a behind-the-ear device (resembling a hearing aid) to a fully hidden, coin-sized standalone disc, just in under three years. This chip will be implanted by a high precision surgical robot by drilling a hole through the skull(also developed by their in-house R&D teams).

A few weeks ago the company live-streamed videos of three pigs who were successfully implanted with the latest neuralink chipset. The team concluded that the chipset was successfully tracking the brain waves as intended and had no adverse impact on the animal’s cognitive skills. This feat was glorified by all major media houses across the globe and was termed as a game-changing technological advancement of the 21st century, in many ways it certainly is.

A subtle pause from our otherwise busy lives and a few minutes of responsible thinking will reveal the enormity of how disastrous this technology of, connecting human brains to the internet would be.

Perhaps threatening the very foundation of what makes life on this planet so special and unique.

Neuralink’s so-called benefits:

The company maintains that the chipset is largely being developed for helping the differently-abled and people who suffer from a broad range of diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, paralysis, and other neurological infirmities to live a normal and respectful life. If this is true, then without a second thought, the technology must be further refined and made available to commoners as soon as possible.

But, wait here’s a statement made by Elon Musk;

“Yes, with a Neuralink implant, anybody would be able to summon their Tesla telepathically, just by thinking about it.”

This statement largely speaks for itself and clearly exposes the future intentions of the company, which is to eventually target and sell these chipsets to every tesla owner.

Communication At The Speed Of Thoughts:

The neuralink chipset boasts unimaginable speeds of data transfer to and from other neuralink embedded users.

This astonishing speeds of data transfer is indeed a reason to rejoice but hold on, it comes with a cost, the cost of losing a sole entity which you rightfully call yours, without a debate: Your Thoughts.

Right now, as I type in, the pace of expressing my thoughts is limited to the pace at which my fingers can skillfully navigate the keyboard in a reasonable interval of time. On the contrary, our thoughts are instantaneous. With the neuralink implant, we will be able to read and transmit our thoughts to recipients who also have an implant embedded in their head at near the speeds of firing neurons which is way faster than the speed of light itself.

After a certain point, the flow of information across the network of these chip embedded brains will become seamless to an extent wherein individuals will become ignorant of the fact that there’s a chip implanted in them. It would feel exactly the same as you do right now except that their thoughts are actually being tracked, analyzed, and stored in huge data centres for corporate uses.

At the end of the day, it is the consumers like you and me who have to make the call; whether to allow these large business corporations to earn huge profits, by granting them access to our mind and thoughts or rather otherwise.

Google & Friends In Absolute Damage Control Mode:

All the major tech conglomerates will start facing the heat of this new technology. They will desperately try to innovate their own technologies in the field of the mind-machine interface, if not perish in the everchanging-volatile market.

The neuralink corporation definitely has the potential to strip Apple, Google, and many others off their existing means of bread and butter; by influencing the younger generations to switch to a future-ready mind-machine interface instead of relying on the monotonous physical touchscreen devices.

Now think of a scenario wherein we directly binge-watch movies on Netflix in our heads or even listen to our favourite music albums from Spotify without the hassle of using wired or wireless headphones. These mind-bending scenarios will unquestionably entice and fascinate a large portion of the generations yet to come, thereby becoming the first wave of humans to choose to experience life as cyborgs.

There’s a solid chance that these rival companies will race forward to ink profitable deals with the neuralink corporation and in the blink of an eye, these companies will switch all their apps, software & services to the new mind-machine platform and will be absolutely fine with the shift as long as they can mint money off innocuous users.

Government-funded Spying

Neuralink will enable government agencies and hackers to spy on citizens and individuals with a whole new level of efficiency and ease. The People’s Republic Of China and the Russian government will definitely be excited about the enormous possibilities of using this technology to implement stricter surveillance machinery and flaunt their privacy-invasive governance like never before. Citizens might forcibly be implanted with these chips, which in turn, will help the regime catch hold of citizens, not when they question or act against the government but, as early as, when an anti-regime thought crosses their minds.

Since it is evident from Elon Musk’s statements that neuralink is certainly going to mass-produce their chipsets in the near future, it will be welcomed if they publically declare that they will not sell or aid government agencies to develop their own versions of the mind-machine interface.

The Ultimate Winners : Advertising Agencies

With neuralink, targeting advertisements to a potential customer will become an absolute cakewalk. Companies like Facebook and Google will no longer stay put at tracking user location, smartphones, search engine behaviour, or other IoT based home devices. These advertising agencies invariably will foray into the neural-machine interface business(Facebook has already acquired a promising neural-machine interface startup in 2019) and based on their past exploits it is easy to predict that they’ll eventually buy out their competitors, given the humungous financial wealth which they sit on.

These agencies might remotely induce the urge of eating a burger at Mc Donalds or sipping a coffee at Starbucks, Who knows? And they certainly will replicate this new wave of advertising technology to any brand which is ready to splurge a little more than their allocated advertisement budget to effectively capture a significant chunk of the market share.

Today the dark web is full of stolen information consisting of user data like email ids, phone numbers, passwords, and sometimes even our addresses which we are deemed to provide to various service providers for “security reasons”.

Now think about it, in the near future the dark web will be flooded, not with these petty email ids or passwords but instead our feelings (however special they may be to us), our unique thought patterns, and a lot more personally acquired intellectual knowledge from our life experiences, all waiting for a price to be paid before being exploited.

Final Thoughts:

Many scientists believe that the neuralink chipset will effectively churn out the next wave of human evolution if it successfully marries human consciousness to artificial intelligence.

Only time can tell us the veracity of the latter statement. All we do now is hope for a better future, while we wait and watch as the future unfolds before us.