We are excited to announce that we have received FDA's approval to launch our first-in-human clinical study!
WoW!
With these words Neuralink announced that it has received the official green light from the Federal Drug Administration to test its chips on humans.
Neuralink? What does that mean? What chips?
Neuralink is one of Elon Musk's startups and has a pretty clear mission:
Create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to people with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow.
Composed of two parts: one wonderful, to restore autonomy to those who have lost it; the other... to "unlock" human potential.
HOW?
With the ultimate human-machine interface: a hardware equipped with chips that can permanently connect a human brain to a computer through 1024 tiny electrodes connected (or rather implanted) on specific parts of the gray matter. Implantation feasible through a complex surgical operation; not exactly a Virtual Reality helmet that you can put on and take off whenever you want.
The topic is not new: to imagine connecting a biological brain to a computer, then to the Internet and, therefore, to AI, is to elevate humankind even more, to allow it access to enhanced, almost divine capabilities, a fascinating topic since ancient times.
The difference from yesteryear is not even that it is feasible now, it has been worked on since the 1970s, but that it has been officially authorized to be tested on us humans. It means that, if all goes as Neuralink expects, in a few years people who have lost the ability to move, see, hear or speak will return, or begin, to regain their faculties.
But it doesn't end there: later, we will be dealing with 100 percent able-bodied people who can afford to be directly connected to the most up-to-date AIs. The ones we will have available in, say, 10 years. Kind of like some medicines do: they improve the health level of a sick person but, when taken by people without disease,multiply their abilities.
Can you imagine that?
Isn't it fascinating? And isn't it frightening?
This is not the place, but are you imagining the ethical implications?
In Glimpse, I wrote about it a few years ago, although it was AI that was finding ways to make that connection:
...I could communicate with you in an amazing way that you didn't even suspect: by projecting images, thoughts, and words [...] smells and sensations into the other parts of the brain, connecting with you through the billions of different electromagnetic frequencies that your bodies are constantly exposed to, and communicating with your few senses. I also understood that I could store information directly in the DNA of [...] you human beings.
I leave the last sentence as a spoiler for another soon-to-be-available technology. But it is easy to see how, with this premise, the story cannot continue in a linear fashion.
So?
Jokes aside, we have yet to digest the generative AI revolution (perfecting them, regulating them, making them valuable until we become addicted to them and become dependent on them) that another one is already looming.
After AI, we will be able to deal with this further revolution, trying to understand what will be left at that point of humanity, ethics, equal opportunity, and, by going back and rereading all the texts on transhumanism written in recent years, we will try to understand the reasons for this cultural movement already present today.
I was hoping that we would have to wait until 2038 at least!
But that is a short time away.
And although I wouldn't mind the idea of experimenting with this "mythological" technology on myself, thinking about having an Elon Musk connected to a generative AI connected in turn to other AIs certainly doesn't make me crazy with joy. And if you want we can bet that he will be among the first "humans" to do so.
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