Elon Musk Takes a Piggy to Market
(Photo: Neuralink)
Elon Musk put a chip in a pig’s brain to learn what a pig thinks about.
On August 28, 2020, Gertrude the pig was escorted into a mobile hog pen littered with straw. Musk’s company, Neuralink, has implanted a device the size of a quarter in the brain of Gertrude to allow her brain to interface with a computer.
Working on a farm, you learn quickly: pigs think about food. Pigs are smart and they look at you as if you should either have food or be food. So, rather than weigh in on US pork exports to China, Gertrude went right to the top of her hierarchy of thoughts — food, where is it, how to get it. As she snouted around the straw — oblivious to the world — her thoughts emerged as computer bleeps and bloots, sending a red line across blue spikes on a computer screen — like an EKG. No one understood the bloots and bleeps from the computer. But Musk assured that the bleeps were the sounds of Gertrude’s neurons firing as recorded by a chip in her skull.
Humans will become Musk’s guinea pigs by the end of 2020 — if he receives regulatory approval. Musk’s August YouTube demonstration was a sales pitch to future human customers.
Musk said that Neuralink’s first goal is to aid people with neurological disorders. For example, to restore control of the legs in a paraplegic. Or restore sight to the blind. All noble goals, from this saintly billionaire. But Musk quickly abandoned Florence Nightingale for the PT Barnum of the coming artificial intelligence symbiosis, the merger of mind and machine.
Neuralink employees spoon-fed questions to Musk: Will humans be able to save and replay memories? Yes. Can you store your memories as a backup? Can those memories be downloaded to a robot’s body? Yes and yes. And his employees dutifully applauded.
“So think of it like a FitBit in your skull,” Musk said, making a brain implant sound like another accessible digital toy. FitBit records your health data for marketing purposes, it’s such a valuable marketing tool that Google bought FitBit for $2.1 billion in September 2019.
Already some scientists are wondering who will own what’s in your mind, as if your mind is now cheap real estate ready for gold diggers. Think about that question for a moment: who will own your mind? We should never even have to ask that question. But Musk is betting that wealthy individuals will open their minds and wallets for the promise of superhuman cognition.
The implant would be “quite expensive” at first. Musk wants to lower the price saying, “I think it should be possible to get it similar to Lasik.” Lasik eye surgery currently costs between $1,000 to $3,000 per eye. So, the opportunity to attain what Musk calls “superhuman cognition” will cost anywhere from $2,000 to $6,000, thus making it available only to the wealthy.
If you’re ready to link your brain to the Brave New World, here’s what you would get for $6,000.
The chip is implanted through a hole drilled in your skull. A robot does the surgery and an hour later off you go to superhuman cognition. (Send no money now — this implant currently exists only in the brains of a few pigs.)
Musk’s idea is that the chip will enable us to control computers and robots merely by thinking. What does “merely by thinking” mean? I might think of a candy bar for a moment, but then change my mind. Which thought would the implant believe?
We have a whirlwind of thoughts flowing through the mind. How does the implant distinguish the consequential from the fleeting?
It cannot. To make the implant work, the patient must train her brain to use the neurons in proximity to the implants, like learning to meditate, play music, or juggle. Musk’s implant has 1,024 electrodes hanging out like jellyfish tentacles, tiny filaments thinner than human hair. The electrodes record the electrical charges moving inside nearby neurons. Gather enough neurons sending the same signal and the brain can control an external device like a robot or artificial limb. However, it is a two-way street. The implanted electrodes are always listening to the neurons, making your thoughts readable. (In 2011, Dr. Jack Gallant trained computers to convert MRI readings into moving images of brain activity. Gallant called it a “primitive proof of concept.”)
The brain rejects intruders. Its immune cells would swarm the electrodes covering them with what one scientist called “goop.” Another scientist questioned how long the electrode filaments could last in “the corrosive environment of the brain?” (Shades of Frank Zappa’s What's the Ugliest Part of Your Body?)
The placement of 1,024 electrodes in the human brain is a spit in the ocean of the brain’s 80 to 100 billion neurons with a trillion synapses. The electrodes can only glean information from nearby neurons. Neurons communicate through an internal electrical charge followed by chemical signals across the synaptic gap. But we don’t know what causes any specific neuron to fire or not fire. Some neurons fire instantly in response to a chemical signal, others have to receive multiple signals, and others ignore the signal. Furthermore, neural connections and synapses change through neural plasticity.
For example, Nathan Copeland was paralyzed from his upper chest down in a bicycle accident. Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh connected Copeland’s brain to a robotic arm allowing both control and the sensation of feeling his “right hand.” However, the normal neural plasticity required scientists to recalibrate the artificial intelligence for Copeland before every visit to the lab. As Copeland said, “The signals in your brain shift. They’re not exactly the same every day.”
Musk wants to begin human trials of his implant by the end of 2020. We should certainly welcome the technology that reverses profound disabilities — technologies that enable the blind to see or the paralyzed to walk. But, in his August demonstration, Musk skimmed over that part of his promise. By his own acknowledgment to Kara Swisher:
I created the company specifically to address the A.I. symbiosis problem, which I think is an existential threat.
Musk calls artificial intelligence symbiosis an existential threat, but he is hastening its arrival and preparing a market to sell superhuman cognition to the wealthy. We have profound economic and educational gaps. Now, Musk is driving another wedge into society: a cognition gap.
As the technology advances, a machine will be able to read your thoughts and implant new thoughts. Instead of only knowing everything you buy, Google will know everything you think.
Brain reading technology will destroy the fundamental primacy and privacy of the human mind. Cogito ergo sum becomes cogito ergo vendunt: I think therefore sell me, manipulate me, monitor me, destroy me.
The mind is the last sanctuary of individual humanity. Big Tech will turn your mind into a neural billboard and a gushing spring of marketing leads.
We will become like the poor pig Gertrude caught with our neural underpants pulled down. We will be the little piggies taken to the market.
Dan Hunter is an award-winning playwright, songwriter, teacher and founding partner of Hunter Higgs, LLC, an advocacy and communications firm. H-IQ, the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire, invented by Dan Hunter and developed by Hunter Higgs, LLC, received global recognition for innovation by Reimagine Education, the world’s largest awards program for innovative pedagogies. Out of a field of 1200 applicants from all over the world, H-IQ was one of 12 finalists in December 2022. H-IQ is being used in pilot programs in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, North Carolina and New York. He is co-author, with Dr. Rex Jung and Ranee Flores, of A New Measure of Imagination Ability: Anatomical Brain Imaging Correlates, published March 22, 2016 in The Frontiers of Psychology, an international peer-reviewed journal. He’s served as managing director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre at Boston University, published numerous plays with Baker’s Plays, and has performed his one-man show ABC, NPR, BBC and CNN. Formerly executive director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (MAASH) a statewide advocacy and education group, Hunter has 25 years’ experience in politics and arts advocacy. He served as Director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (a cabinet appointment requiring Senate confirmation). His most recent book, Atrophy, Apathy & Ambition,offers a layman’s investigation into artificial intelligence.