Elon Musk is now planning to create chips that can link a smartphone to your brain. 

Technological advancement is moving at a rapid pace. We have seemingly surpassed all other innovative opportunities, so the next possible room for advancement is what I call the ‘robot’ phase. We’ve seen them in movies, but brushing the idea aside we thought: ‘This will never actually happen’. Then came Sophia the robot. However, instead of trying to make machines human-like, it seems like the more plausible thing is to make humans more machine-like. This may not be Elon Musk’s intention, but I am worried that this might be the case. 

It was on July 16 that the reveal was made by Musk. Neuralink, the name of his new startup that seeks to link brain and machine is set to start testing on humans next year in hopes of coming up with means of treating brain injuries. Neuralink has been one of Musk’s secret plans announced in 2017 and its advancement had seemingly halted until he made the reveal recently. 

This is what Musk had to say: “Ultimately, we can do a full brain-machine interface…This is going to be important at a civilization-level scale. Even in a benign AI scenario, we will be left behind. With a high-bandwidth brain-machine interface, we can go along for the ride and have the option of merging with AI.”

Yup. The future is here guys. Many scientists hold the opinion that this is the next stage in the evolution of technology, where man’s intellect will ultimately lead him to try and create, or at least merge with his own makings. What’s strange for me is that while this project is said to be helpful to the medical industry, it was also clearly stated that a long term goal could also be to possibly merge humans with Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is therefore not far fetched that the aforementioned belief held by scientists is coming into fruition. But, what does this mean for mankind?

Will natural human interactions be a thing of the past? Will we become a society, half-man, half-machine where feelings are replaced by strings of binary? Will it even be safe to link the brain to a machine? Could the machine short circuit and you know… ‘boom!’? I have so many questions. The main one is, however, if this advancement is truly beneficial to mankind, or is it simply trying to remove mankind out of the picture. What is the ultimate goal of a project like this? Is every advancement equal or necessary to the plight of man? Couldn’t our energies be placed in solving some of the several other issues that lie, like fixing our environment instead of blasting off to Mars after ruining this planet? Only this time we may be blasting off to Mars as machine-minded sociopaths. Musk who owns SpaceX is also planning to terraform Mars so we can live there by the way. This isn’t just speculation anymore.

I am not against the advancement of society and technology, but I believe that at the heart of every advancement there should be a clear, safe goal ahead. 

— Fabrizio Darby