Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk is monkeying around with brains again. The billionaire showcased a monkey “telepathically” typing on a computer via brainchip at a Neuralink event Wednesday. Musk said he hopes to microchip a human within six months, according to Axios. Which raises a whole host of new ethical problems.
The livestreamed Wednesday event to recruit talent also included a display of “telepathic typing” from a monkey. “To be clear, he’s not actually using a keyboard,” Axios quoted Musk. “He’s moving the cursor with his mind to the highlighted key. Now technically, he can’t actually spell. So I don’t wanna oversell this thing, because that’s the next version.”
The brainchips are supposed to be designed primarily to help people with neurological disorders, as other chip manufacturers have described their products.
But two questions come to my (un-chipped) mind. First, is it ethical to implant chips in a person’s mind, in the same way that it is ethically questionable or even downright wrong to manipulate DNA or genetically “design” babies? Second, can Elon Musk — or any other chip manufacturer (he’s not the only one) — be trusted not to allow brainchips to become instruments of control?
The first question does not yet have solid answers, simply because this is a relatively new technology. The main question is whether brainchips can be instruments of control, and that’s not as conspiracist as you might think. After all, speaking merely of a microchip in a consumable pill (which is not on the level of a brain implant), Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla explicitly said, “Imagine … the compliance.” So the idea that microchips in humans can bring about “compliance” isn’t sequestered to institutional skeptics like me.
And Elon Musk has specifically pushed for increased Chinese investment in his Neuralink project in a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) state publication. Considering that the CCP is famous for using technology to exercise tyrannical control over its people, Musk has to be aware that a brainchip could work both ways — it could allow the chipped person to communicate, but it could also allow another person with the technology to manipulate his microchip.
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