Elon Musk’s penchant for sending ripples of disruption in the technology and business market is not unknown to anyone. The owner of Tesla Inc., Twitter and PayPal among other companies has recently stupefied everyone with the launch of Neuralink – a company that he founded to help people realize the immense potential of brain computer interfaces (BCIs). However, technology experts, healthcare practitioners and ethicists are quite concerned with what lies ahead of Neuralink.

How is Neuralink supposed to work?

The Neuralink device is basically a brain implant which has 1,024 electrodes. These electrodes are meant for picking signals from brain. Just like a copper wire picks electricity when connected with another live wire, the Neuralink device’s electrodes with connect with the neurons inside the brain and picks the electrical signals as and when the user thinks of anything. The high number of electrodes ensures that it can connect with a large number of neurons and can accumulate greater volume of data.

However, you must be curious as to how the brain implant makes its way inside the brain in the first place. The answer lies in an invasive surgery that Neuralink team performs. A sewing machine-like robot drills into the user’s skill, places the electrodes of the brain chip and the thinner-than-hair electrodes latch on to the neurons. Voila! The electrical signals from the neurons are monitored and corresponding information is transmitted to an external device.

But why? Why, after all, is Elon Musk interested in what goes inside the brain?

Well, Musk says that he envisions a future where Artificial Intelligence (AI) will merge with human cognition and will make “symbiosis with AI” – as Musk has said – the new normal. So far, Neuralink says that its brain chip implant will read brain signals from a paralyzed patient’s mind and transmit that to a phone or a computer, for the person to control the devices using mere thoughts. Yes, goodbye to swipe and clicks. Moreover, Musk has said that Neuralink’s device can eventually help people with paralysis and spinal cord injuries to control devices without moving their limbs. He further wants humans and AI to merge so well that neither AI nor humans can remain behind each other. Such a symbiotic relationship between AI and humans can potentially empower humans with cognitive and physical capabilities unimagined before. Sounds exciting, right? Well, not to everyone though.

Ethicists have been concerned with the way Neuralink has conducted itself in the technology and business landscape.

Neuralink’s testing process raises ethical concerns about company’s motives

Information released by Neuralink’s employees state that several pigs and monkeys have gone through excruciating suffering as part of the animal trials that were conducted to assess the effectiveness of the brain chip. Rushed and botched surgeries were conducted in the hasty pursuit of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. And why not? Musk had repeatedly predicted that the company would soon commence human trials, and any delay could have been a displeasure. What is alarming is that in 2021, Neuralink had implanted 25 pigs with devices that were of the wrong size, which obviously led to the situation going out control, thereby leading the company to kill the affected pigs. In a statement given to Reuters, the staff admitted that if given more time for preparation, the fatal mistake could have been prevented. The misconduct did not end there; rather two monkeys also suffered horrific fates. During the trials, the device being implanted in a money broke off and caused the monkey to scratch and yank until the broken piece was dislodged. However, infections spread inside the monkey and the poor animal had to be euthanized. Another monkey was euthanized when an implant left parts of the brain torn.

Serious questions arise that if Neuralink could not do animal trials with precision, is it ready enough to conduct human trials? Not to forget that we still do not know how the parts of the implant removed from the monkeys’ brains were disposed. If not destroyed properly, the implants can expose people to dangerous pathogens, if they ever come in contact with the contaminated parts. Reuters reported that two monkeys and eighty-six pigs have been sacrificed so far as part of the animal trials. What’s more disturbing is that there are no standard operating procedures in defence of the poor animals, as animals are usually killed after trials for post-mortem research. Therefore, there is no way to implicate Neuralink for any misdeed.

Surgery may not be the best way forward

Though Neuralink has opted for an invasive surgery to place its brain chip implants, that’s perhaps not the best method. Companies like Synchron, Neurotech, Blackrock, Precision Nueroscience and Paradromics have tried dabbling with the concept of brain computer interfaces. Synchron has developed a BCI in the form of a stent, that is introduced into the blood vessel as a metal scaffold while a catheter is used to move it up the blood vessel before it reaches the motor cortex of the brain. On reaching the brain, it unfurls with its sensors picking up signals from neurons. This sounds much safer and has already helped several paralyzed patients be able to text and tweet by merely using their thoughts. What is surprising is the fact that Musk had himself said in Recode’s Code Conference 2016 that Neuralink devices could be transported to the brain through intravascular approach, like that of Synchron. However, by 2019, Neuralink – for reasons still unknown and untold – discarded the idea of intravascular approach in favour of a drill into the skull.

People are still wondering why Neuralink would choose the robotic surgery method of breaking through the brain-blood barrier, when it can lead to inflammation and scar tissue buildup.

Hirobumi Watanabe led Neuralink’s intravascular research team in 2018 and told Vox that the choice for robotic surgery method has to do with obsession for more electrodes and more bandwidth that can enable the brain-computer interface to do much more compared to other similar technologies.

The surgery process also led to concerns in animals that were part of the trials. Neuralink had acknowledged that it had to kill six monkeys during trials as a complication had arisen from the use of an FDA-approved glue. Moreover, Neuralink had not used surgery as a confirmatory method – i.e., used only as a last resort after all other methods have been tried – but as an exploratory method as reported by Reuters. This raises concerns about how empathetic Musk and Neuralink would be going forth with the humans they will be implanting the chips in.

Will it work with every brain?

When was the last time you heard that everyone’s brain is the same? If it were so, wouldn’t we all be alike? If neuroscientists are to be believed – and they must rightfully be, because they have been listening to brain cells in awake animals since 1950 – the brain of each individual walking on the Earth is unique. Today, most brain-machine interfaces use an approach called “biomimetic decoding”, in which scientists first record brain activity when the user imagines a variety of actions, such as movement of limbs. Once the different directions preferred by the brain cells are ascertained, scientists can decode subsequent body movements by tallying their action potentials (Andrew Jackson, The Conversation). Sounds amazing, right? But wait!

Biomimetic coding works only for simple movements, not for complex mental processes.

And this is where Neuralink’s efficacy comes under lens, yet again. To possibly comprehend a person’s brain, Neuralink will need to sample 100 billion brain cells, and yet that may be insufficient. Because, to calibrate the mind-reading device of Neuralink, the user will have to think of all the thoughts that she/he can possibly have. Can that ever be possible? We don’t think so, since new thoughts keep forming in our minds all the time. Moreover, the way one person thinks about a certain visual may be different from the way another person thinks about it. For example, if we ask you to imagine a dinosaur standing before you, the kind of dinosaur you would think of would certainly be different compared to the dinosaur your friend would think of in such a situation.

Thoughts have no grammar or rules, unlike language that AI has now begun comprehending.

While the anatomy of the brain is more or less similar across people, at the scale of individual brain cells, we are all unique. So, until the day comes when scientists discover a universal set of rules governing our thought processes, Neuralink may stay distant from understanding people’s thoughts accurately.

And if what if brains get hacked?

We know that making computers smarter has produced smarter hackers. No matter how much we invest in cybersecurity, the threat of hackers looms all the time. Currently, our machines do not have access to our brains, despite the machines’ ability to comprehend our buying preferences. However, BCIs eliminate this barrier and can pave a medium for machine algorithms to reach our brain. Having electronic chips implanted inside the brain can lead to a situation where a hacker may intrude into the mental faculties of one person – or worse, swarms of people – leading to a battalion of compromised sentient beings ready to obey the command of the hacker, as reported in Forbes. This act of getting unauthorized access to a person’s electronic brain implant is called “brainjacking” (Pugh et. al., PubMedv).

Such a massive threat to individual autonomy will certainly be alarming and can be an enormous law and order problem. It can also lead to situations where a malicious actor influences a high net worth individual to wire large sums of money to undercover money accounts which may constitute a crime in the individual’s country. Or a hacker intruding into a political leader’s brain to make him blurt anti-social statements, enough to spark social tensions in the country. An article in The Conversation said that stimulating visual regions of the brain can help blind people to perceive flashes of light. If such a use case develops further and gets refined over time to help people perceive scenes that would have never occurred in reality, it can eventually lead to a situation where malefic entities can make brain-jacked people visualize scenes that can incite them into riot and anti-social behaviour.

FDA clearance is not an assurance either

Neuralink has been banking upon the clearance it has received from FDA for its experiments on humans. However, it is to be noted that FDA had granted approval only for willing volunteers suffering from severe paralysis, such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or quadriplegia. However, when Musk announced the success of Neuralink’s procedure on an individual, the type and severity of the person’s condition was not revealed. No word was uttered on whether informed consent was taken from the patient, if doctors had given a green signal to the procedure or if the implant helped the patient despite successful surgery. BizNews reported that in 1999, researchers at University of Pennsylvania had secured a clearance from FDA to begin human trials for gene therapy, and yet had accidentally killed one of the volunteers, despite maintaining transparency over the process. Therefore, FDA’s clearance is not a verdict of 100 percent safety.

A rather unsettling observation is that in 2017, about a third of the new drugs that FDA had approved, were found to have safety problems, as reported by NPR. Therefore, we must not take FDA approval to Neuralink as a verdict of safety etched in stone.

Loss of privacy and control over civilization can be next

When a chip can decode what’s going in the brain and can transmit the information outside, obviously we need to be concerned about mental privacy. Our thoughts are the most guarded secrets, and no one ever gets to know the true side of us because our thoughts remain enclosed within the head, without anyone poring over it. If a company happens to track and store all our thoughts, then it may not come as a surprise that mental privacy will become a luxury for people. Moreover, that can catalyse authoritarian surveillance, especially if the mind-tracking companies enter into discreet agreements with the totalitarian governments to share what each individual citizen is thinking of.

Furthermore, ethicists are concerned that building a super-sentient artificial entity can pose a civilizational risk to humans that may outnumber, outpace and obliterate us in the long term. Though Musk has been saying that we must join AI if we can’t beat AI, yet people are rightfully concerned about the potential fallouts if AI stops considering humans as its ally.

Also, what people fear is brain fingerprinting.

This is a technology that analyses automatic responses that occur in our brain when it encounters familiar stimuli. Police in India has been using this technique since 2003 to interrogate a suspect’s brain to check if the suspect recognizes a face or phrase. Though it is scientifically questionable, not only Indian police, but Singapore police and Florida state police have been using it since 2013 and 2014 respectively (Vox). Chinese government has already begun mining data from the brains of workers to assess their emotional state using caps that scan brainwaves. The United States has been experimenting with neurotechnology to keep its soldiers fit for duty. Imagine how these use cases will evolve meteorically with the Neuralink’s device that can do such brain scanning at a much deeper level. People won’t have the Right to Not Self-Incriminate (which exists in the constitution of several countries) as law authorities will simply eavesdrop into people’s minds for surveillance, without any formal interrogation.

Is omniscience knocking at our door?

Visualize a world where all your thoughts are stored in cloud – or something even bigger and unfathomable – in real-time. Imagine all these data filling up an “Internet of Thoughts”. This will be the repository of all that a human can think of. If you do not know how to respond to a situation, your brain chip implant will simply download the thought that perhaps another person in some other corner of the world would have had years ago. Or if you want to know how the president of a country, or a successful entrepreneur or a psychopath thinks like, all you will need is to wait for its BCI to quickly download that thought. You will also be able to upload your own creative thoughts to this internet of thoughts. Basically, all information and all kinds of thoughts a person can have will be available on demand. This will be the onset of the Pan-Consciousness, that will merge all humans to a point of singularity and each brain in the multibillion population will be connected to a single source of omniscience.

Sounds like becoming a God, right?

What to expect next?

It is still too early to be sure of the implications of the Neuralink’s BCI. We can just speculate for now, and that’s the best anyone can do. We will certainly need revamped human rights laws to protect us from the negative consequences of the BCIs. Moreover, we will need more stringent guardrails that define how the BCI technology must be further developed. No wonder, BCIs will make businesses strong, particularly the ones owning the BCIs. People may have seldom control over what enters their brain and what gets deleted from; however, they may invest more in cybersecurity of their brains. Controlling of sentient machines by humans will grow easier… or should we say vice versa?

Brain is our final privacy frontier. We need to be cautious at taking any step to toy around with it. It is akin to playing with nature – something that we have been doing since hundreds of years, and the results are not that great so far. Therefore, the symbiosis that we are seeking with advanced machines needs further scrutiny.

The time to connect our brains to electronic circuits is yet to come… the time is not ripe yet.