From the first moment in which (1) Elon Musk announced the new achievement of "Neuralink", his latest company, until the Arab social media has turned into something like a demonstration that stands with and against the man's statements at the same time. Human nature is moving it to the world of "transhumanism", while the other accuses him of crossing all moral barriers and planning for a world governed by the rules of the film group "Terminator" or "Robo-Cup"! We have not yet been exposed to the conspiracy theory group.
In fact, the advertisement was interesting. Musk began it with great interest by clarifying a key point, which is that the new chip, which is slightly larger than the size of a coin, is completely safe, and he brought his audience 4 "happy and healthy" pigs, as he put it, three of them underwent a slide implantation operation. First, his skull contains one slide, the second contains two slices in his skull, and the third was subjected to an implantation and removal of the slide, and Musk took care to explain that the slide can be removed safely "as if nothing had happened", then he showed the brain waves of a pig while he was dealing normally.
Musk, like a brilliant businessman, increased his attempts to reassure the audience when he showed a machine to implant that chip in the brain, and said that it is a fully automated process that does not make mistakes, and the idea is that it is not just about the chip but about a huge number of electrodes (1024) emerging from it and it is assumed It was distributed around the chip in the brain, then Musk began to clarify the expected future potential behind this technology, and here appears the point that everyone cared about.
Musk talked about the promising potential of this type of technology, starting with helping people with paralysis, through its ability to measure temperature, pressure and movement, data that could warn you of a heart attack or stroke, but he went beyond that to processes such as intellectual telepathy and control across the brain , Storing memories, and treating a very wide range of mental and neurological illnesses, then Musk jumped to another very exciting idea that he believes that docking with a machine is the best weapon to counter the dominance of artificial intelligence in the future.
While talking to some journalists, Musk said, "I know that this looks increasingly like an episode of the" Black Mirror "series, which opened the door for many Arab bloggers to talk about a dangerous future or an unprecedented technological revolution linking the brain. And the machine, but the first mistake everyone made is their thinking that what Elon Musk is talking about is something completely new that the mere presence of a chip in a pig's brain is exceptional, but - in fact - it is not.
Let's go back in time to the 1980s. Have you ever heard of Cochlear implant procedures (2)? The mechanism of this process is for an external microphone to take sounds from outside the brain and then process them and transmit them as electrical signals to the auditory nerve behind the ear, which translates those signals into sounds, thus enabling the deaf to hear again.
There are many similar surgical techniques currently promising. For example, researchers from companies such as "Second Sight" have been able to re-look at people with a specific type of blindness through a camera that records a video outside and is then converted into electrical signals that are sent directly to stimulate the responsible brain neural network. To see, so the person can see.
In addition to that, researchers from the University of Washington were able (4), in 2014, to brain connect two people at a distance of about a kilometer, and one of them was able to push the other, through brain signals only, to press a button in a specific color, this very primitive type of Telepathy was done using devices, such as those of Neuralink, that record brain waves.
And in 2008 another research team was able to use brain waves to push an experimental monkey to move (5) a robotic prosthesis, the experiment that was conducted on humans (6) in 2012, and volunteers were really able, only by focusing on moving a robotic prosthesis, to move it. Indeed, the reason all of these experiments succeed is because brain waves, despite their complexity, create patterns that can be understood, and researchers are already using them in promising attempts to treat patients with paralysis in particular and nervous system injuries in general.
Thus, what Elon Musk presented was not new, but rather a step in the way of technological development that began since the seventies of the last century trying to connect between the brain and the machine, whether in one or two directions, which is called the brain-computer interface (7) (Brain-Computer Interface) , And it has two types, the first - like the case of the University of Washington - is done without surgical intervention, only data is collected from the brain through external sensors, and the second - like the case of the Elon Musk slide - requires surgery to communicate with the brain, but did Elon Musk introduce something new?
In fact, Musk’s announcement was so short that it was not clear, and some specialists in this field believe that what he presented is not new (8,9). His company started one year ago and was able to publish one research paper (10), in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, "described the development of the device that can perform surgery, which is an important milestone in this technology. In addition, the paper talked about the company's first achievement, which is the success of experiments on mice, where the company's researchers were able to insert 3000 electrodes into the brains of one of them and receive signals Brain, communication used to be wired, now Neuralink is wireless.
On the other hand, the news from the company does not bode well. A week or more ago, (11) five employees of the company submitted to resign, describing what is happening within it as a “chaotic internal culture,” and that the environment is characterized by severe pressure and inappropriately accelerated timetables for research developments. At this point, the pressure that led to the failure of a large number of animal experiments, because the company incorrectly jumped from experiments with rodents to experiments with primates.
That may be true, it is known that Elon Musk is a solid entrepreneur, who pushes hard on his employees to complete the work as quickly as possible, and does not accept any compromise on his exceptional standards in the work environment, and this applies to the highest engineer and the youngest worker, you will see on social media platforms Famous marketing rules say that Elon Musk does not believe in meetings, and that he is interested in production at the expense of the number of working hours so you feel happy, but you will hear in the news - from time to time (12) - about workers who completed more than 100 hours of work per week without holidays, which caused their illness. Musk himself often talks about 80 hours of work a week as being a normal thing.
Despite this, Elon Musk in his advertisement confidently talked about wonderful future dreams in this field, which are nothing more than dreams in reality, but to understand why Musk was so interested in talking about these dreams, let's go back to 2001, when Elon Musk announced about His participation in the "Mars Oasis" project (13). He intends here that Earth space agencies send plants to Mars in a closed room as a start to the Mars Reconstruction Project.
This project - as you can see - is closer to the creative imagination than to a business plan, but for Mask it was not only that, but a way to attract people's attention to the world of space again, after the Cold War, the public interest in this field began to decline little by little until we reached a point As there is no longer any public interest in the matter, here appears the intelligent entrepreneur Musk who knows very well that public interest is half the deal. Every time Elon Musk comes up with a new idea, he focuses on raising the public's attention to what he is doing, knowing full well that creating a "trend" has a very high price.
Musk’s talk about the future of mankind with this kind of technology is similar to his talk about the oasis of Mars 20 years ago, dreams that have not yet come true, and we have not even started on the road to achieving them, but let us clarify an important idea that many misunderstand, as they deal with Elon Musk as a scientist However, he is fundamentally - despite his interest in science - an entrepreneur, much like Henry Ford, where the latter's job was not to create new car technology from scratch, but rather to work on re-examining what already exists.
Ford's question was not: How do we create new technology? It was: How can we modify this technology that already exists so that it is smaller, cheaper and more practical? How can we make those tools that are mainly used in the field of medicine to a degree of luxury that children in their teens demand from their parents? This simple philosophy (Make it cheaper) is the reason for the success of the Elon Musk companies so far, but will he be able to move forward with this success?
Maybe it does happen. Elon Musk has already succeeded in other important projects like Tesla and SpaceX, but let's bear in mind that the scope of research in brain science is not the same as that of rocket engineering, cars or smartphones, because it is a very challenging field in privacy. There is an important experience in this specialization which is the attempts of Elizabeth Holmes, the girl who left, in 2003, to study chemical engineering at Stanford University to establish her company in Silicon Valley, and relied on a pattern of work similar to technology companies such as "Apple", but the scope of medical science did not allow this The pattern accelerated achievement, little scientific publication, and lost quickly, with a resounding scandal. (See a previous report by the author entitled "The Belle of Silicon Valley: How did she bring the business tycoons under control?") (14).
Researchers in this domain trying to connect between the brain and the machine know that there are indeed great challenges in their path, but despite this, their recent achievements point to a future that looks promising in the medical field, and like Elon Musk, some neuroscientists, including David Eagleman, the American neuroscientist, believe in Stanford University (15), for example, that a day will come when we will be able to add extraordinary capabilities to our bodies, such as visual acuity, and perhaps also be able to detect areas of the electromagnetic spectrum that our sensory tools cannot perceive.
But we don't know when that might happen, and none of the researchers in this domain - including those of Elon Musk - have any tools to start with a clear itinerary, meaning that they are nothing more than speculations about a truly possible future.
While we are talking, the main advantage of the Elon Musk chip is that it is so small that anyone will put it in their skull and you will not know it while talking to you, it is also easy to charge and exchange data with the external piece smoothly and quickly. However, this is nothing more than a review of a possible product, meaning that it is not yet suitable for use, and does not have any of the technologies that Musk promised, it is nothing more than a machine for measuring brain waves such as electroencephalogram (EEG) devices that we know, time alone is a guarantee The future of Musk's remaining dreams will be revealed, but with his schedule so tight, we will no doubt know soon.
_____________________________________________________________