Elon Musk will end up picking a fight with the scientific community: with the billionaire announcing his intention to implant chips in the human brain (through its startup Neuralink) in 2022, experts couldn’t help but be alarmed by the idea.
Speaking to the Daily Beast, several neuroscience experts expressed concerns about the unrealistically rapid advance of technology being developed. for the company of Musk, which began to be implanted in pigs and already has monkeys playing video games. According to them, however, perhaps humanity is not ready for this leap and the matter should be better researched and discussed before any practical action is taken.
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“I don’t think there is enough public discourse regarding the major implications that this technology has. [pode trazer]” Dr. Karola Kreitmair, assistant professor of bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the paper. “I worry that there could be an ‘uneasy marriage’ between a profit-focused company and these medical interventions that I hope are here to help people.”
Musk recently confirmed that Neuralink has hired a director of clinical trials to help with this transition from animals for humans. The aim of the five-year-old company is to first implant the chip (slightly larger than a coin) in the brains of people with motor difficulties, such as quadriplegics. The idea is not to make a person who can’t walk walk again – it’s more like “someone unable to move to control their computer with their mind”.
However, Elon Musk himself has praised greater desires, mentioning things like “preventing humanity from falling into oblivion” through “downloading and uploading consciousness” on machines.
“By all means, these are very niche products — if we’re just talking about developing them for paralyzed individuals, then the market is small, but the devices are going to be very expensive,” said Dr. L. Syd Johnson, professor Associate at the Center for Bioethics and Humanity at SUNY University of Medicine, New York. “Now, if the goal is to use the acquired brain data for other activities — drive a Tesla, for example — so there is a much, much larger market. But then all these individuals used in research, who are people with genuine special needs, are being exploited in a risky study, for the commercial gain of someone else.”
Other scientists who spoke to the paper said that while they are hopeful that Neuralink will use human trials to bring a new form of therapy to these patients, there are still a number of ethical concerns that Elon Musk has yet to address.
For example, let’s say a patient within the trial gives up on it midway through the trial or develops some undesirable side effect? When the subject is a new one medicine, the patient can simply choose to stop taking it. But what about when it comes to literally a chip in his brain?
“What I’ve seen is that we are very good at deploy a device. But if something goes wrong, we don’t have the technology to explant them [removê-los] without causing any kind of tissue damage,” said Dr. Laura Cabrera, a neuroethics researcher at Penn State University.
Other concerns put the business side of the project in jeopardy: if Neuralink goes bankrupt for whatever reason, who will control the data collected by the already implanted chips? Who gets the information relevant to brain activities if the company is bought by some foreign entity? How long will these chips last and will Neuralink cover upgrade costs – even for test patients?
One scientist – Dr. James Giordano of Georgetown University – said that using the Neuralink chip outside of human trials (ie, already on a commercial basis) could create what he called a “medical tourism market”. The population will compete for global access to technology, which will not only introduce, but also amplify, the risk of poor oversight and quality control.
This, considering that everything goes well with the tests and the technology reaches the market without problems. But there is still the issue of “bad technological actors”. Scientists who spoke to the Daily Beast raised the most obvious concerns – hackers literally invading brains, computer viruses infecting a human via the chip or, in less apocalyptic but equally dangerous notes, “pirated” versions of the chip seducing those who cannot afford the original.
“Our brain is the last bastion of our freedom, the most primordial point of our privacy,” said Dr. Nita Farahany, an emerging technologies researcher at Duke University School of Law. “There is a risk of misuse by corporations, by governments, by bad actors. When you have a company like Neuralink promising to get into human testing, I think it should put the world on a high alert, that the time for us to develop more robust concepts of cognitive freedom is now.”
It is natural that Elon Musk’s company takes the center of all discussions, given the market projection that its CEO has. In addition to Neuralink, he also leads the Tesla (from luxury electric cars), Boring Company (which works in several partnerships with municipal and state governments to improve public transport) and the SpaceX, which develops all sorts of technologies for space and plans to popularize “tourism out of Earth”.
Does Musk have competition? Yes: Companies like Neurable and Synchron are also making advances in research, but scientists note that Neuralink has the biggest flaws when it comes to the ethical conversation of the project.
“With these companies and company leaders…they’re kind of ‘hosts on a show,’” Dr. Cabrera said. “They make all these exaggerated, hyperbolic claims, and I think that’s very dangerous. Because a lot of people will believe them blindly. Musk’s controversies, specifically, make us worry about his other claims. I’m always wary of the things he says.”
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