埃隆-马斯克希望将人类与人工智能融合在一起，会有多少大脑会因此受损？

来源：科技世代千高原

作者：Sigal Samuel

前员工称，大脑植入公司 Neuralink 正在推行一种不必要的冒险方法。

2023 年 10 月 16 日上午 7:00

在埃隆-马斯克的所有探索中--特斯拉汽车、SpaceX火箭、Twitter收购、火星殖民计划--他的秘密脑芯片公司Neuralink可能是最危险的。

Neuralink 有什么用？从短期来看，它是用来帮助瘫痪病人的。但这并不是答案的全部。

该公司于 2016 年推出，2019 年透露，它已创造出可植入大脑的柔性 "线程"，以及一个类似缝纫机的机器人来完成植入。我们的想法是，这些 "线 "将读取瘫痪病人大脑的信号，并将数据传输到 iPhone 或电脑上，使病人只需意念就能控制它，而无需点击、打字或刷卡。

到目前为止，Neuralink 公司只在动物身上做过测试。但今年 5 月，该公司宣布已获得美国食品及药物管理局的批准，可以进行首次人体临床试验。现在，该公司正在招募瘫痪志愿者，研究植入物是否能让他们控制外部设备。如果这项技术能在人体中发挥作用，就能改善数百万人的生活质量。仅在美国就有约 540 万瘫痪患者。

但帮助瘫痪病人并不是马斯克的最终目标。这只是实现更远大的长远目标的一个步骤。

用马斯克自己的话说，这个野心就是 "实现与人工智能的共生"。他的目标是开发一种技术，帮助人类 "与人工智能融合"，这样，当人工智能变得越来越复杂时，我们就不会被 "抛在后面"。

这种天马行空的设想并不符合美国食品及药物管理局（FDA）对人体试验的要求。但帮助瘫痪病人的工作呢？这可能会受到更热烈的欢迎。事实也是如此。

但重要的是要明白，这项技术伴随着惊人的风险。Neuralink 的前员工以及该领域的专家声称，该公司为了推进马斯克与人工智能融合的目标，推动了一种不必要的、侵入性的、具有潜在危险的植入方法，这种方法可能会损害大脑（显然在动物试验对象身上已经造成了损害）。

Neuralink 没有回应置评请求。

对整个社会来说，除了 Neuralink 之外，还有其他伦理风险。许多公司都在开发能侵入人脑的技术，这种技术能解码我们的大脑，有可能侵蚀精神隐私，加剧专制监控。我们必须为即将发生的事情做好准备。

为什么埃隆-马斯克想把人脑与人工智能融合在一起？

Neuralink 是对一种巨大恐惧的回应：人工智能将接管世界。

这种恐惧在人工智能领导者中越来越普遍，他们担心我们可能会创造出比人类更聪明的机器，这些机器有能力欺骗我们，并最终夺取我们的控制权。

今年 3 月，包括马斯克在内的许多人签署了一封公开信，呼吁暂停开发比 OpenAI 的 GPT-4 更强大的人工智能系统六个月。信中警告说，"具有人类竞争智能的人工智能系统会给社会和人类带来深远的风险"，并继续问道："我们是否应该开发那些最终可能在数量上超过、超越、淘汰和取代我们的非人类思维？我们是否应该冒着文明失控的风险？

尽管并非只有马斯克一个人对人工智能系统带来的 "文明风险 "发出警告，但他与其他人的不同之处在于他提出了抵御风险的计划。他的计划基本上是 如果你不能打败它们，那就加入它们。

马斯克预见到，在这个世界上，能以每秒万亿比特的速度交流信息的人工智能系统，将以隐喻的方式俯视只能以每秒 39 比特的速度交流信息的人类。对人工智能系统来说，我们似乎毫无用处。除非，也许我们变得和它们一样。

马斯克认为，这其中很重要的一点就是能够以人工智能的速度进行思考和交流。"这主要是关于带宽，你的大脑和数字版自己之间的连接速度，尤其是输出，"他在 2017 年说。"一些与大脑连接的高带宽接口将是有助于实现人类与机器智能共生的东西，或许能解决控制问题和实用性问题。"

快进半多年后，你可以看到马斯克仍然痴迷于这个带宽概念--计算机从你的大脑读取信息的速度。事实上，正是这一理念推动了 Neuralink 的发展。

Neuralink 设备是一种大脑植入物，装有 1,024 个电极，可以接收大量神经元的信号。电极越多，可以监听的神经元就越多，获得的数据也就越多。此外，离神经元越近，数据质量就越高。

Neuralink 设备可以非常接近神经元。该公司的植入程序需要在头骨上钻一个洞并穿透大脑。

但也有不那么极端的方法。其他公司正在证明这一点。让我们来分析一下他们在做什么--以及为什么马斯克觉得有必要做一些与众不同的事情。

制造脑机接口还有各种方法，为何Neuralink 选择了最极端的一种？

Neuralink 并不是唯一一家探索脑机接口（BCI）以恢复人们身体机能的公司。其他公司如 Synchron、Blackrock Neurotech、Paradromics 和 Precision Neuroscience 也在这一领域开展工作。美国军方也是如此。

近年来，许多成为头条新闻的研究都集中在将瘫痪者的思想转化为语言的大脑植入上。例如，马克-扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）的 Meta 公司正在研发 BCIs，它可以直接从你的神经元中获取思想，并实时将其转化为文字。(该公司表示，从长远来看，它的目标是让每个人都能用自己的想法控制键盘、增强现实眼镜等）。

生物识别（BCI）领域早期的成功并不是集中在语音上，而是运动上。2006 年，患有脊髓瘫痪的马修-纳格尔（Matthew Nagle）接受了大脑植入手术，使他能够控制电脑光标。很快，纳格尔就能只用意念玩乒乓球了。

纳格尔的大脑植入物由研究联盟 "脑门"（BrainGate）开发，包含一个 "犹他 "阵列，由 100 个尖刺状电极组成，通过手术植入大脑。这只是 Neuralink 设备中电极数量的十分之一。但它仍能让瘫痪者移动光标、查看电子邮件、调节电视音量或频道，以及控制机械肢体。此后，其他瘫痪患者也利用 BCI 技术取得了类似的成就。

犹他阵列等早期技术会从头骨中突兀地伸出来，而较新的 BCI 一旦植入，外部观察者就看不到了，而且有些技术的侵入性要小得多。

例如，Synchron公司的BCI以20世纪80年代就已出现的支架技术为基础。支架是一种可以植入血管的金属支架，可以安全地放置数十年（许多心脏病患者一直使用这种支架保持动脉通畅）。Synchron 利用导管将支架送入大脑运动皮层的血管中。一旦到达那里，支架就会像花朵一样展开，支架上的传感器会接收来自神经元的信号。这已经让几位瘫痪病人能够用他们的想法发推特和短信。

无需开颅手术。无需在头骨上钻孔。

马斯克本人曾在 2016 年 Recode 代码大会上一段长达五分钟的视频中表示，BCI 不一定需要开颅手术。"他说："你可以穿过静脉和动脉，因为这为你的所有神经元提供了完整的通道。"你可以把东西插入颈静脉，然后......"

在观众紧张地大笑之后，他补充道："这不需要砍掉你的头骨或类似的东西。

四名 Neuralink 的前员工告诉我，在 Neuralink 成立之初，在公司确定目前的方法（确实需要钻入头骨）之前，据称公司的一个研究团队曾研究过较为温和的血管内方法。该团队探索了通过动脉向大脑输送设备的方案，并证明这是可行的。

但到了 2019 年，Neuralink 拒绝了这一方案，转而选择了创伤性更大的手术机器人，将线直接植入大脑。

为什么要这样做？如果血管内方法可以恢复瘫痪病人的关键功能，还能避免穿越血脑屏障带来的一些安全风险，如脑部炎症和疤痕组织堆积，那为什么还要选择更具侵入性的方法呢？

该公司没有说。但据 2018 年领导 Neuralink 血管内研究团队的渡边博文（Hirobumi Watanabe）称，主要原因是公司对带宽最大化的执着。

"Neuralink的目标是追求更多的电极、更大的带宽，"渡边说，"这样这个接口就能比其他技术做得更多。"

毕竟，马斯克曾表示，与机器的无缝融合可以让我们做任何事，从增强记忆到上传大脑和长生不老--这些都是硅谷超人类幻想的主要内容。这或许有助于理解该公司的双重使命："创建一个通用的大脑接口，让那些目前有医疗需求但尚未得到满足的人恢复自主能力，并在未来释放人类的潜能。

"慕尼黑神经伦理学家马尔切洛-伊恩卡（Marcello Ienca）告诉我："Neuralink的目标很明确，就是生产通用的神经接口。"据我所知，他们是目前唯一一家计划进行植入式医用神经接口临床试验的公司，同时还公开声明未来将神经植入用于认知增强的非医疗应用。要想创造一种通用技术，就必须在人类和计算机之间建立一个无缝接口，从而增强认知和感知能力。要实现这一愿景，可能确实需要采用更具侵入性的方法来实现更高的带宽和精度"。

Watanabe 认为，Neuralink 优先考虑最大化带宽，因为这符合马斯克的目标，即创建一种通用的 BCI，让我们与人工智能融合，开发各种新能力。"他说："这就是埃隆-马斯克所说的，所以这也是公司必须做的。

血管内方法似乎无法提供与侵入式方法一样多的带宽。留在血管内可能更安全，但缺点是你无法接触到更多的神经元。"这是他们没有采用这种方法的最大原因，"Watanabe 说。"这是相当可悲的。他补充说，他认为Neuralink放弃微创方法太快了。"我们本可以推进这个项目的。

对于 Synchron 首席执行官汤姆-奥克斯利（Tom Oxley）来说，这提出了一个大问题。"问题是，以患者为导向的临床健康结果这一短期目标与人工智能共生这一长期目标之间是否会出现冲突？"他告诉我。"我认为答案很可能是肯定的。"

"奥克斯利补充说："这取决于你的设计目的，以及你是否考虑到了病人的问题。从理论上讲，Synchron 可以通过技术微型化和深入血管分支来增加带宽；研究表明这是可行的。"但是，"他说，"我们选择了一个点，在这个点上，我们认为我们有足够的信号为病人解决问题。

本-拉波波特（Ben Rapoport）是一名神经外科医生，他离开 Neuralink 后创办了 Precision Neuroscience 公司。如果你的目标是帮助瘫痪病人，这就没有必要。

"拉波波特告诉我："我认为，要想让中风和脊髓损伤患者恢复语言和运动功能，就不需要对神经假体的功能进行这种权衡。"我们的指导思想之一是，可以在不损伤大脑的情况下建立高保真脑机接口系统。

为了证明不需要穆斯基式的侵入性也能实现高带宽，Precision 公司设计了一种薄膜，在大脑表面涂上 1,024 个电极--与 Neuralink 植入物中的电极数量相同--这些电极能传递与 Neuralink 类似的信号。这种薄膜必须通过颅骨上的一个缝隙插入，但其优点是它位于大脑表面而不会穿透大脑。拉波波特称这是 "金发姑娘解决方案"，它已经被植入少数病人体内，以高分辨率记录他们的大脑活动。

"拉波波特说："关键是要做一个非常非常安全的手术，不会损伤大脑，而且是微创手术。"此外，随着我们扩大系统的带宽，病人面临的风险应该不会增加。

如果你最珍视的抱负是在不冒不必要风险的情况下尽可能帮助病人改善生活，那么这是有道理的。但我们知道，马斯克还有其他野心。

"Neuralink似乎不太感兴趣的是，虽然更具侵入性的方法可能会在带宽方面带来优势，但它会引发更大的道德和安全问题，"Ienca告诉我。Ienca 告诉我："至少，我还没有听到他们在任何公开声明中表示打算如何解决他们的方法所带来的更大的隐私、安全和精神完整性风险。这很奇怪，因为根据国际研究伦理准则，如果使用侵入性较小的方法也能达到同样的效果，那么使用侵入性更大的技术就不符合伦理。

正如 Neuralink 在动物身上进行的实验所表明的那样，侵入性较强的方法本质上会对大脑造成真正的伤害。

Neuralink的伦理问题，从其动物实验可见一斑

Neuralink 的一些员工站出来为公司实验中使用的猪和猴子说话，他们说，由于公司仓促行事和手术失败，这些动物遭受的痛苦和死亡率高于必要的水平。他们称，马斯克在多次预测公司将很快开始人体试验后，一直在催促员工尽快获得 FDA 批准。

一个惨痛错误的例子是 2021 年，Neuralink 为 60 头猪中的 25 头植入了尺寸错误的设备。之后，该公司杀死了所有受影响的猪。工作人员告诉路透社记者，如果他们有更多的时间做准备，这次错误本可以避免。

兽医报告显示，Neuralink 的猴子也遭受了可怕的命运。其中一只猴子的装置在植入大脑的过程中 "断裂"。猴子又抓又拽，直到部分装置脱落，感染随之而来。另一只猴子脑部出血，植入物导致部分大脑皮层 "破损"。两只动物都被安乐死。

去年 12 月，美国农业部监察长办公室对 Neuralink 公司可能违反动物福利的行为展开了调查。该公司还面临着来自交通部的调查，因为人们担心从猴子大脑中取出的植入物可能被不安全地包装和移动，从而可能使人接触到病原体。

反对动物实验的非营利组织 "负责任医学医生委员会"（Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine）在 5 月份的一份声明中说："（Neuralink 公司）过去的动物实验暴露出了严重的安全隐患，这些隐患源于产品的侵入性和公司员工仓促、马虎的行为。"因此，公众应该继续对 Neuralink 生产的任何设备的安全性和功能性持怀疑态度。

尽管如此，美国食品和药物管理局已批准该公司开始人体试验。

FDA 在给 Vox 的一份声明中说："该公司已经提供了足够的信息来支持其 IDE（研究性设备豁免）申请的批准，以便根据 IDE 批准的标准和要求开始人体试验。"FDA 还补充说："该机构决定批准 IDE 的重点是评估潜在受试者的安全状况，确保风险被适当地最小化并传达给受试者，以及确保潜在的收益（包括所获得知识的价值）大于风险。"

如果 Neuralink 的方法效果太好咋整？

除了手术对被招募参加 Neuralink 试验的个人意味着什么之外，BCI 技术对整个社会意味着什么也是一个伦理问题。如果马斯克正在研究的这种高带宽植入技术真的能让人们以前所未有的方式了解大脑中发生的事情，那就更有可能出现乌托邦式的可能性。一些神经伦理学家认为，滥用的可能性如此之大，以至于我们在前进之前需要修订人权法来保护我们。

首先，我们的大脑是最终的隐私边界。它们代表着我们的个人身份和最私密的想法。如果我们头盖骨里那宝贵的三磅重的黏液都不是我们可以控制的，那什么才是呢？

在有的地方，已经开始挖掘一些工人大脑中的数据，让他们戴上扫描脑电波的帽子，以了解他们的情绪状态。

世界各地的一些警察部门也在探索 "大脑指纹 "技术，这种技术可以分析我们大脑在遇到我们所识别的刺激时产生的自动反应。(我们的想法是，这可以让警察对嫌疑人的大脑进行审讯；他们的大脑对不认识的面孔或短语的反应会比对认识的面孔或短语的反应更消极）。大脑指纹识别技术在科学上是有疑问的，但印度警方自2003年起就开始使用这种技术，新加坡警方于2013年购买了这种技术，佛罗里达州警方于2014年签署了使用合同。

美国宪法规定的 "不自证其罪 "的权利在这个世界上可能变得毫无意义，因为在这个世界上，当局有权在未经您同意的情况下窃听您的精神状态。

如果你正在使用这些设备，而恶意行为者拦截了蓝牙连接，改变了传输到你大脑的信号，比如说让你更抑郁或更顺从，会发生什么？

神经伦理学家将这种情况称为 "劫脑"。"伊恩卡在 2019 年告诉我："这仍然是假设，但概念验证研究已经证明了这种可能性。"这样的黑客不需要那么复杂的技术。"

最后，考虑一下你的心理连续性或基本的自我意识会如何被 BCI 强加或移除所破坏。在一项研究中，一名被植入 BCI 的癫痫妇女与 BCI 产生了强烈的共鸣，她说："BCI 变成了我"。她哭着说："我失去了自我。"

为了抵御未来假想的全能人工智能的风险，马斯克希望在你的大脑和机器之间建立一种共生关系。但这种共生关系本身也会产生非常现实的风险--而这些风险现在就在我们身边。

Elon Musk wants to merge humans with AI. How many brains will be damaged along the way?

The brain implant company Neuralink is pushing a needlessly risky approach, former employees say.

By Sigal Samuel  Oct 16, 2023, 7:00am EDT

Of all Elon Musk’s exploits — the Tesla cars, the SpaceX rockets, the Twitter takeover, the plans to colonize Mars — his secretive brain chip company Neuralink may be the most dangerous.

What is Neuralink for? In the short term, it’s for helping people with paralysis. But that’s not the whole answer.

Launched in 2016, the company revealed in 2019 that it had created flexible “threads” that can be implanted into a brain, along with a sewing-machine-like robot to do the implanting. The idea is that these threads will read signals from a paralyzed patient’s brain and transmit that data to an iPhone or computer, enabling the patient to control it with just their thoughts — no need to tap or type or swipe.

So far, Neuralink has only done testing on animals. But in May, the company announced it had won FDA approval to run its first clinical trial in humans. Now, it’s recruiting paralyzed volunteers to study whether the implant enables them to control external devices. If the technology works in humans, it could improve quality of life for millions of people. Approximately 5.4 million people are living with paralysis in the US alone.

But helping paralyzed people is not Musk’s end goal. That’s just a step on the way to achieving a much wilder long-term ambition.

That ambition, in Musk’s own words, is “to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” His goal is to develop a technology that helps humans “merg[e] with AI” so that we won’t be “left behind” as AI becomes more sophisticated.

This fantastical vision is not the sort of thing for which the FDA greenlights human trials. But work on helping people with paralysis? That can get a warmer reception. And so it has.

But it’s important to understand that this technology comes with staggering risks. Former Neuralink employees as well as experts in the field alleged that the company pushed for an unnecessarily invasive, potentially dangerous approach to the implants that can damage the brain (and apparently has done so in animal test subjects) to advance Musk’s goal of merging with AI.

Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment.

There are also ethical risks for society at large that go beyond just Neuralink. A number of companies are developing tech that plugs into human brains, which can decode what’s going on in our minds and has the potential to erode mental privacy and supercharge authoritarian surveillance. We have to prepare ourselves for what’s coming.

Why Elon Musk wants to merge human brains with AI

Neuralink is a response to one big fear: that AI will take over the world.

This is a fear that’s increasingly widespread among AI leaders, who worry that we may create machines that are smarter than humans and that have the ability to deceive us and ultimately seize control from us.

In March, many of them, including Musk, signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on developing AI systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4. The letter warned that “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity” and went on to ask: “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”

Although Musk is not alone in warning about “civilizational risk” posed by AI systems, where he differs from others is in his plan for warding off the risk. The plan is basically: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

Musk foresees a world where AI systems that can communicate information at a trillion bits per second will look down their metaphorical noses at humans, who can only communicate at 39 bits per second. To the AI systems, we’d seem useless. Unless, perhaps, we became just like them.

A big part of that, in Musk’s view, is being able to think and communicate at the speed of AI. “It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output,” he said in 2017. “Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem.”

Fast forward a half-dozen years, and you can see that Musk is still obsessed with this notion of bandwidth — the rate at which computers can read out information from your brain. It is, in fact, the idea that drives Neuralink.

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The Neuralink device is a brain implant, outfitted with 1,024 electrodes, that can pick up signals from a whole lot of neurons. The more electrodes you’ve got, the more neurons you can listen in on, and the more data you’ll get. Plus, the closer you can get to those neurons, the higher quality your data will be.

And the Neuralink device gets very close to the neurons. The company’s procedure for implanting it requires drilling a hole in the skull and penetrating the brain.

But there are less extreme ways to go about this. Other companies are proving it. Let’s break down what they’re doing — and why Musk feels the need to do something different.

There are other ways to make a brain-computer interface. Why is Neuralink choosing the most extreme one?

Neuralink isn’t the only company exploring brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) for restoring people’s physical capabilities. Other companies like Synchron, Blackrock Neurotech, Paradromics, and Precision Neuroscience are also working in this space. So is the US military.

In recent years, a lot of the research that’s made headlines has focused on brain implants that would translate paralyzed people’s thoughts into speech. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, for example, is working on BCIs that could pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words in real time. (In the long term, the company says it aims to give everyone the ability to control keyboards, augmented reality glasses, and more, using just their thoughts.)

Earlier success in the BCI field focused not on speech, but on movement. In 2006, Matthew Nagle, a man with spinal cord paralysis, received a brain implant that allowed him to control a computer cursor. Soon Nagle was playing Pong using only his mind.

Nagle’s brain implant, developed by the research consortium BrainGate, contained a “Utah” array, a cluster of 100 spiky electrodes that is surgically embedded into the brain. That’s only around one-tenth of the electrodes in Neuralink’s device. But it still enabled a paralyzed person to move a cursor, check email, adjust the volume or channel on a TV, and control a robotic limb. Since then, others with paralysis have achieved similar feats with BCI technology.

While early technologies like the Utah array protruded awkwardly from the skull, newer BCIs are invisible to the outside observer once they’re implanted, and some are much less invasive.

Synchron’s BCI, for example, builds on stent technology that’s been around since the 1980s. A stent is a metal scaffold that you can introduce into a blood vessel; it can be safely left there for decades (and has been in many cardiac patients, keeping their arteries open). Synchron uses a catheter to send a stent up into a blood vessel in the motor cortex of the brain. Once there, the stent unfurls like a flower, and sensors on it pick up signals from neurons. This has already enabled several paralyzed people to tweet and text with their thoughts.

No open brain surgery necessary. No drilling holes in the skull.

Musk himself has said that BCIs wouldn’t necessarily require open brain surgery, in a telling five-minute video at Recode’s Code Conference in 2016. “You could go through the veins and arteries, because that provides a complete roadway to all of your neurons,” he said. “You could insert something basically into the jugular and...”

After the audience laughed nervously, he added, “It doesn’t involve chopping your skull off or anything like that.”

In Neuralink’s early years, before the company had settled on its current approach — which does involve drilling into the skull — one of its research teams allegedly looked into the tamer intravascular approach, four former Neuralink employees told me. This team explored the option of delivering a device to the brain through an artery and demonstrated that it was feasible.

But by 2019, Neuralink had rejected this option, choosing instead to go with the more invasive surgical robot that implants threads directly into the brain.

Why? If the intravascular approach can restore key functioning to paralyzed patients, and also avoids some of the safety risks that come with crossing the blood-brain barrier, such as inflammation and scar tissue buildup in the brain, why opt for something more invasive than necessary?

The company isn’t saying. But according to Hirobumi Watanabe, who led Neuralink’s intravascular research team in 2018, the main reason was the company’s obsession with maximizing bandwidth.

“The goal of Neuralink is to go for more electrodes, more bandwidth,” Watanabe said, “so that this interface can do way more than what other technologies can do.”

After all, Musk has suggested that a seamless merge with machines could enable us to do everything from enhancing our memory to uploading our minds and living forever — staples of Silicon Valley’s transhumanist fantasies. Which perhaps helps make sense of the company’s dual mission: to “create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow.”

“Neuralink is explicitly aiming at producing general-purpose neural interfaces,” the Munich-based neuroethicist Marcello Ienca told me. “To my knowledge, they are the only company that is currently planning clinical trials for implantable medical neural interfaces while making public statements about future nonmedical applications of neural implants for cognitive enhancement. To create a general-purpose technology, you need to create a seamless interface between humans and computers, enabling enhanced cognitive and sensory abilities. Achieving this vision may indeed require more invasive methods to achieve higher bandwidth and precision.”

Watanabe believes Neuralink prioritized maximizing bandwidth because that serves Musk’s goal of creating a generalized BCI that lets us merge with AI and develop all sorts of new capacities. “That’s what Elon Musk is saying, so that’s what the company has to do,” he said.

The intravascular approach didn’t seem like it could deliver as much bandwidth as the invasive approach. Staying in the blood vessels may be safer, but the downside is that you don’t have access to as many neurons. “That’s the biggest reason they did not go for this approach,” Watanabe said. “It’s rather sad.” He added that he believed Neuralink was too quick to abandon the minimally invasive approach. “We could have pushed this project forward.”

For Tom Oxley, the CEO of Synchron, this raises a big question. “The question is, does a clash emerge between the short-term goal of patient-oriented clinical health outcomes and the long-term goal of AI symbiosis?” he told me. “I think the answer is probably yes.”

“It matters what you’re designing for and if you have a patient problem in mind,” Oxley added. Synchron could theoretically build toward increasing bandwidth by miniaturizing its tech and going into deeper branches of the blood vessels; research shows this is viable. “But,” he said, “we chose a point at which we think we have enough signal to solve a problem for a patient.”

Ben Rapoport, a neurosurgeon who left Neuralink to found Precision Neuroscience, emphasized that any time you’ve got electrodes penetrating the brain, you’re doing some damage to brain tissue. And that’s unnecessary if your goal is helping paralyzed patients.

“I don’t think that tradeoff is required for the kind of neuroprosthetic function that we need to restore speech and motor function to patients with stroke and spinal cord injury,” Rapoport told me. “One of our guiding philosophies is that building a high-fidelity brain-computer interface system can be accomplished without damaging the brain.”

To prove that you don’t need Muskian invasiveness to achieve high bandwidth, Precision has designed a thin film that coats the surface of the brain with 1,024 electrodes — the same number of electrodes in Neuralink’s implant — that deliver signals similar to Neuralink’s. The film has to be inserted through a slit in the skull, but the advantage is that it sits on the brain’s surface without penetrating it. Rapoport calls this the “Goldilocks solution,” and it’s already been implanted in a handful of patients, recording their brain activity at high resolution.

“It’s key to do a very, very safe procedure that doesn’t damage the brain and that is minimally invasive in nature,” Rapoport said. “And furthermore, that as we scale up the bandwidth of the system, the risk to the patient should not increase.”

This makes sense if your most cherished ambition is to help patients improve their lives as much as possible without courting undue risk. But Musk, we know, has other ambitions.

“What Neuralink doesn’t seem to be very interested in is that while a more invasive approach might offer advantages in terms of bandwidth, it raises greater ethical and safety concerns,” Ienca told me. “At least, I haven’t heard any public statement in which they indicate how they intend to address the greater privacy, safety, and mental integrity risks generated by their approach. This is strange because according to international research ethics guidelines it wouldn’t be ethical to use a more invasive technology if the same performance can be achieved using less invasive methods.”

More invasive methods, by their nature, can do real damage to the brain — as Neuralink’s experiments on animals have shown.

Ethical concerns about Neuralink, as illustrated by its animals

Some Neuralink employees have come forward to speak on behalf of the pigs and monkeys used in the company’s experiments, saying they suffered and died at higher rates than necessary because the company was rushing and botching surgeries. Musk, they alleged, was pushing the staff to get FDA approval quickly after he’d repeatedly predicted the company would soon start human trials.

One example of a grisly error: In 2021, Neuralink implanted 25 out of 60 pigs with devices that were the wrong size. Afterward, the company killed all the affected pigs. Staff told Reuters that the mistake could have been averted if they’d had more time to prepare.

Veterinary reports indicate that Neuralink’s monkeys also suffered gruesome fates. In one monkey, a bit of the device “broke off” during implantation in the brain. The monkey scratched and yanked until part of the device was dislodged, and infections took hold. Another monkey developed bleeding in her brain, with the implant leaving parts of her cortex “tattered.” Both animals were euthanized.

Last December, the US Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General launched an investigation into possible animal welfare violations at Neuralink. The company is also facing a probe from the Department of Transportation over worries that implants removed from monkeys’ brains may have been packaged and moved unsafely, potentially exposing people to pathogens.

“Past animal experiments [at Neuralink] revealed serious safety concerns stemming from the product’s invasiveness and rushed, sloppy actions by company employees,” said the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit that opposes animal testing, in a May statement. “As such, the public should continue to be skeptical of the safety and functionality of any device produced by Neuralink.”

Nevertheless, the FDA has cleared the company to begin human trials.

“The company has provided sufficient information to support the approval of its IDE [investigational device exemption] application to begin human trials under the criteria and requirements of the IDE approval,” the FDA said in a statement to Vox, adding, “The agency’s focus for determining approval of an IDE is based on assessing the safety profile for potential subjects, ensuring risks are appropriately minimized and communicated to subjects, and ensuring the potential for benefit, including the value of the knowledge to be gained, outweighs the risk.”

What if Neuralink’s approach works too well?

Beyond what the surgeries will mean for the individuals who get recruited for Neuralink’s trials, there are ethical concerns about what BCI technology means for society more broadly. If high-bandwidth implants of the type Musk is pursuing really do allow unprecedented access to what’s happening in people’s brains, that could make dystopian possibilities more likely. Some neuroethicists argue that the potential for misuse is so great that we need revamped human rights laws to protect us before we move forward.

For one thing, our brains are the final privacy frontier. They’re the seat of our personal identity and our most intimate thoughts. If those precious three pounds of goo in our craniums aren’t ours to control, what is?

In somewhere, the authourity is already mining data from some workers’ brains by having them wear caps that scan their brainwaves for emotional states. In the US, the military is looking into neurotechnologies to make soldiers more fit for duty — more alert, for instance.

And some police departments around the world have been exploring “brain fingerprinting” technology, which analyzes automatic responses that occur in our brains when we encounter stimuli we recognize. (The idea is that this could enable police to interrogate a suspect’s brain; their brain responses would be more negative for faces or phrases they don’t recognize than for faces or phrases they do recognize.) Brain fingerprinting tech is scientifically questionable, yet India’s police have used it since 2003, Singapore’s police bought it in 2013, and the Florida state police signed a contract to use it in 2014.

Imagine a scenario where your government uses BCIs for surveillance or interrogations. The right to not self-incriminate — enshrined in the US Constitution — could become meaningless in a world where the authorities are empowered to eavesdrop on your mental state without your consent.

Experts also worry that devices like those being built by Neuralink may be vulnerable to hacking. What happens if you’re using one of them and a malicious actor intercepts the Bluetooth connection, changing the signals that go to your brain to make you more depressed, say, or more compliant?

Neuroethicists refer to that as brainjacking. “This is still hypothetical, but the possibility has been demonstrated in proof-of-concept studies,” Ienca told me in 2019. “A hack like this wouldn’t require that much technological sophistication.”

Finally, consider how your psychological continuity or fundamental sense of self could be disrupted by the imposition of a BCI — or by its removal. In one study, an epileptic woman who’d been given a BCI came to feel such a radical symbiosis with it that, she said, “It became me.” Then the company that implanted the device in her brain went bankrupt and she was forced to have it removed. She cried, saying, “I lost myself.”

To ward off the risk of a hypothetical all-powerful AI in the future, Musk wants to create a symbiosis between your brain and machines. But the symbiosis generates its own very real risks — and they are upon us now.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23899981/elon-musk-ai-neuralink-brain-computer-interface

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