Why no one will be rushing to get Elon Musk's neural knit

Tesla boss Elon Musk believes humans can be improved by implanting meshes of ultra-thin electrodes into their heads to speed the flow of data to and from the brain © Neuralink/YouTube

COMMENT:

Neural lace sounds like a dress material for androids. The term, as used by Elon Musk, reflects grander ambitions. The Tesla boss believes humans can be improved by implanting meshes of ultra-thin electrodes into their heads to speed the flow of data to and from the brain. People risk being left behind by artificial intelligence, he says.

The erratic tech entrepreneur is the last person most of us would want poking around under our hoods. Worries about AI eclipsing humans are overdone, moreover. Computers that could mimic human intelligence would be the size of aircraft hangars and use a million times more power than the brain, says Steve Furber, pioneer of one of the world's most widely-used chips.

Indeed, there is a lot the brain can teach its electronic counterpart. A huge supercomputer that mimics spikes of electrochemical energy from neurons has been developed at Manchester University. Intel and IBM are trying to emulate neural structures. Such "neuromorphic" computing promises "incredible leaps in performance and power efficiency", says Intel's boss Robert Swann.

Blurring the lines between tech and biology has big potential in medicine. More than 300,000 people have cochlear implants made by groups such as Sonova of Switzerland. Deep brain stimulation devices for diseases like Parkinson's have long been made by the likes of New York-listed Medtronic.

Further advances are coming. The Food and Drug Administration has announced rules to spur innovations like prosthetic limbs controlled by a patient's thoughts. CTRL-labs, a start-up backed by Google and Amazon, is developing an armband that reads the nervous signals travelling from the brain to the fingers. Facebook is working on technology that would let people type straight from their brain.

Mr Musk argues people are already cyborgs. They treat smartphones — with their vast memories — as extensions of themselves, he says. The utility of this argument is in giving an insight into how Mr Musk thinks: mechanistically.

Able-bodied people will not be queueing up for brain implants. Brain-computer interfaces worry them more than gene editing, surveys suggest. Ethical concerns have dogged brain implant studies for the past 50 years. Unless justified on medical grounds, the more invasive variants of neuro technology will remain in the realms of science fiction.

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