Elon Musk’s budding Neuralink project promises to be his most experimental yet, even in a career rife with eccentric investments. The premise: a small electrical conductor that is drilled through the skull and lodged into the brain’s folds, one that can interpret brain data and stimulate cerebral areas. A brain chip.
“I mean, with a brain chip, you could do a lot.” Musk begins in a 2020 interview for Kara Swisher’s New York Times podcast, “Sway.” “You can make people walk again. You could solve extreme depression, or anxiety, or schizophrenia or seizures. You could give a mother back her memory so she could remember who her kids are, you know?”
Though it sounds ideal coming from his mouth, Musk’s argument is profoundly bankrupt. He makes points that are more overtly ridiculous, that AI’s advancement necessitates human-computer integration, and intentionally misleading, with his assurance that “You don’t have to get it” forgetting how technological leaps are inescapable in the United States’s mass culture, but none that are as damaging. I am attacking the deceit in this presented narrative, the great flaw in his strongest selling point.
Curing paraplegics is one thing – a wholly noble thing, admittedly – but curing all neurological disorders is another. While both seem equally valid humanitarian causes, entertaining the idea even for a moment reveals a disturbing question. That is, if all mental illness can be cured with Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs), then doesn’t that mean that the human condition itself can be cured? Could we not iron out every nagging flaw in us with the push of a button? Better yet, should we?
To all of my questions, my better judgment tells me no. To put as volatile a thing as human nature into the hands of anything beyond our own grasp, a BCI in this case, is to play with something beyond our collective understanding. There is some small but vehement part of me that longs to be something more than I am, to be perfect. A BCI would be an exceedingly simple way to achieve that, but at a cost. To work through these emotions, through therapy or art, whatever means I choose, is to move beyond and redefine that definition of a perfect self, instead of trying hopelessly to alter brain chemistry when it is self-hatred that lies at its very core. But at my most vulnerable moment, I might flee to the comfort of a BCI: and that is precisely why I shouldn’t be able to.
Serious mental illness cannot always be treated solely through therapy, and that is because those illnesses are long term and debilitating. And it is for that brand of mental illness that Neuralink could be considered.
If Musk’s mad science experiment becomes just half what he has reported it will (which is a likely outcome considering Musk’s inconsistency and overconfidence), then his plan to make the technology fully commercial should be, must be, swiped down by the FDA. The FDA doesn’t allow just anyone to walk into a store and walk out with Prozac, so the same should follow for Neuralink, at the very least. Perhaps Neuralink could work as a last ditch option for stagnating patients, but not something allowed for general consumption, as Musk is marketing it.
In the previously mentioned New York Times interview with Swisher, Musk described the Neuralink as “a FitBit in your skull.” Is there a different setting in the Neuralink that one can access to activate all of the personality changing aspects? Because there is clearly a difference between a FitBit and a happy robot lobotomy. It might seem ridiculous that anyone would actually use this technology to drastically change their mind, but it didn’t take long for us to all adopt smartphones, and we still don’t know how much they’ve shaped us.
The final result of Musk’s vision is a population that has entirely too much control on their mental state while also having precisely none. The Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) method that Neuralink is using for their commercial BCIs has already been used since the 1980s, and it produced unpredictable results when tested for patients with Parkinson’s and epilepsy. On paper, DBS should produce uniform results. After all, the areas that the machine is stimulating directly correspond to the outcome or behavior that is desired. But scientists cannot definitively explain why some patients feel as though they aren’t themselves, or that they have “become the machine.” Clearly, any drastic treatment such as this is embarking into territory that we don’t, and maybe never will, understand.
And this shows the deep fault of the BCI. If its users reach a state of contentment through it, barring the likelihood that it just makes them numb and vacant, then who is really content? At what point do people stop being themselves and become nothing more than the gross product of faceless machinery? If their personality is altered through no work of their own, is just the product of a machine, then they have essentially relinquished their agency as a human. We will become wholly dependent on technology if we cannot, on a most basic level, function without it.