by The sci-fi thrillers and movies we used to see are about to come true. And unfortunately, these are not conspiracy theories. It is a nightmarish reality that Elon Musk is about to implement through his brain implant company “Neuralink”, which has also received a relevant license from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The next stage of the experiment in preparation will be that of the volunteers! In other words, let’s become laboratory animals since Neuralink is designing an interface that will be implanted in the human brain to allow communication with computers through thought. Of course, no one answers about the feasibility of such a development. Why put implants in the human brain and synchronize them with computers? What would such a thing offer beyond the complete control of human thought, intelligence and will by machines? In other words, the transformation of the human race into a “bionic humanoid”.
And the even more important question is who pursues such a thing? The big multinationals that control global commerce are investing in this sense of so-called artificial intelligence, despite the fact that we are rushing towards the destruction of the human species. And Ian Hogarth, Plural Platform and co-creator of the annual State of AI report, wrote, among other things, in the Financial Times that “artificial intelligence could be a force beyond out of our control or understanding, even something that could bring discredit or destruction to the human race’!
Why is no one reacting?
Despite this, politically and socially, no one talks about the issue. No reaction from any organization, neither national nor supranational. The European Union is ignored, the United States, the West as a whole, the World Health Organization, the UN are in complete silence on this whole plan that is in full swing.
“The FDA’s decision represents an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people,” Neuralink said in a Twitter post, quick to clarify that the “recruitment” of volunteers for the “clinical trials” he is conducting “have not yet begun”.
How exactly will brain control by machines help the human species?
It is expected – say those who plan the above non-scientific ethical actions – above all to help people who are paralyzed or suffering from neurological diseases. In other words, they will abolish medicine and pharmaceutical science and deposit human life in software. Will they lead to coercion, to the limitation of individual and collective freedoms, to the control and access of artificial intelligence to people’s thoughts? These are crucial questions that demand answers.
The start-up, as we read in the relevant reports, then wants to make the devices safe and reliable enough to be implanted in people willing to spend thousands of dollars to make their brains more powerful.
For Mr. Musk, who founded Neuralink in 2016, the chip to be implanted in humans could allow humanity to achieve “coexistence with artificial intelligence”, as he said in 2020 during a corporate event. Even the billionaire himself fears that artificial intelligence (AI) will overtake humans, will one day take over, but nevertheless he is moving forward and relentlessly investing in this direction.
Bionic humanoids
According to Musk, the man is already a “cyborg”, that is to say a bionic humanoid and has “a digital layer” thanks to phones, computers and applications. “With a direct neural connection, we can improve the range between the cortex and the digital layer by many commands,” he said, adding “I would say at least 1,000, or maybe 10,000 or more. ” The cortex is part of the brain that plays a key role in memory, attention, perception, thought, language and consciousness.
In March, Mr. Musk founded X.AI, another startup specializing in artificial intelligence, possibly to compete with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, a software capable of interacting with people and producing all kinds of text. when they ask him. “We are now confident that Neuralink’s device is ready for humans, so the timeline depends on the FDA approval process,” the US drug agency said via Twitter in late November, a month after buying the device. social networking site. The FDA did not immediately respond when AFP sought comment.
The chronology to stop the evolution of the human species
The boss of Tesla (electric cars) and SpaceX (space) is used to making ambitious and risky predictions, eg. on the range of Tesla cars. In July 2019, he assured that Neuralink would begin the first human clinical trials in 2020.
From time to time, Mr. Musk has made headlines with his claims about technology of this nature, for example that it could cure everything from obesity to autism and schizophrenia, or that it would surf the web telepathically. Last year, he said he was so sure of the security of his company’s device that he would implant it in his children.
The whole nightmarish enterprise that is not a dark secret continued with relevant animal experiments.
To date, prototype implants, which are the size of a small coin, have been installed in animal skulls. Monkeys could thus “play” video games, or “type” words on screens, simply by moving the cursor on the screen with their eyes. The Silicon Valley company has already successfully implanted microchips in two animals, a monkey, “Pager”, and a pig, “Gertrude”.
At the end of November, the start-up mentioned advances in the design of a robotic surgeon and the development of other implants, which would be placed in the spinal cord or the eyes to restore movement or vision.
In 2022, Mr. Musk urged Neuralink workers to move at a much faster speed. “We’ll all be dead before anything useful happens,” he told them at a meeting last year, according to the Bloomberg news agency.
In the past, the FDA has highlighted several areas it will need to get convincing answers on before approving human trials – the implant’s lithium battery, the possibility of wires coming out of the implant and damaging the brain, the ability to safely remove the device without damaging brain tissue, etc.
The multinational war
And other companies are working on controlling computers by thought, such as Synchron, which announced in July 2022 that it had implanted the first brain-machine interface in the United States.
Elon Musk revealed in a 2021 interview that a monkey was wired to play video games with his mind in the company he founded called Neuralink. Neuralink put a chip in the monkey’s skull and used “tiny wires” to connect it to its brain, Musk said.
“He’s not an unhappy monkey,” Musk said during a speech at Clubhouse, a new social networking app that’s gaining traction and allowing people to chat and others to just listen.
The billionaire said Neuralink was trying to figure out if it could use its chip to get the monkeys to play “mind pong” with each other.
“That would be really cool,” said Musk, CEO of Neuralink. At the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, the Neuralink team of around 100 people is trying to develop a connection between the computer and the brain. Musk describes it as a small device that penetrates the skull with tiny wires that enter the brain.
He also said Neuralink’s goal is to increase the speed at which information can flow from the human brain to a machine.
To illustrate the pace of progress in artificial intelligence, Musk – who believes technical intelligence will eventually overtake human intelligence – pointed to breakthroughs in research labs such as OpenAI, which also founded DeepMind, a London artificial intelligence laboratory acquired by Google in 2014. .
