Among the intentions of Musk’s Neuralink company there is also that of giving paralyzed people the opportunity to walk again.
Neuralink is a neurotechnology company founded in United States of America in 2016 by Elon Musk, Max Hodak and Paul Merolla, but it only became public knowledge a year later. The headquarters are located in California, precisely in the Piooner Building of San Francisco.
In 2017, one of the founders, Elon Musk, best known for being the CEO of Tesla, claimed that the idea for this company originally came from the science fiction concept of "neural snare", from the universe of the short story series “The Culture”, by Ian M. Banks.
The short-term goal was to study and possibly prevent diseases of the brain, while, in the long term, Musk and his team want to work on integration between man and artificial intelligence.
The main idea on which the project is based is to create a chip that can be implanted directly inside the brain of a man, so as to allow him to communicate with the computer and vice-versa.
This translates into many opportunities, some of which are only imaginable. It would be possible, for example, to return the use of legs to people who have lost them, putting the latter in communication with the brain, bypassing the spine. The company dubbed this technology Brain-Machine Interface.
This technology is by no means new, it is many years that large technology companies have been working to make the fusion between man and machine possible. What is surprising about this project is the size of the object that makes communication between the subject and the computer possible: it is in fact a small coin with 1.024 very thin threads inside.
The tests done by Neuralink
Neuralink has chosen University of California-Davis as its partner to carry out the experiments on animals. In order to have it available, the company opened in 2020 a nursery where animals can be grown that can be used for experimentation.
These experiments, although they have generated much controversy, have brought great and important results.
One of the most acclaimed achievements can be seen in the video of the pig called Gertrude, which was implanted with two chips made by the company.
The video shows the pig walking on a treadmill, while his brain activity is monitored and reported on a screen.
The video represented a very important moment for Elon Musk & co., as it showed the progress made by the company; in 2019, in fact, the device was a much more cumbersome and visible implant to be installed behind the ear.
Subsequently, another video was released in April 2021 showing the progress made by the company. In the video, this time, you can see a monkey named Pager who had two chips implanted, one for each hemisphere of the brain, playing the famous video game Pong. To succeed in this feat, the primate did not have to use any limbs, but only the impulses produced by his brain.
At the end of August this year, Elon Musk announced that at Halloween 2022 it will be holding a demonstration of what Neuralink can do.
The current situation and the ethical question
The world is currently waiting to find out what and how many steps forward Neuralink will have made, which on October 31 will return with a new demonstration.
There is a very good chance that the main announcement in this context relates to the initiation of clinical trials on humans, as the company said animals texts have been confirmed positive.
However, there are problems, some people who follow the project have asked themselves numerous questions related to the ethical question related to Musk’s project.
The company was accused, for example, of animal violence; Neuralink denied this, however, stating that animals are not mistreated.
Despite this, some monkeys were reported to be dead over the course of experiments due to some operational complications, which only made the situation worse.
The company says the choice to do animal testing is necessary, as it considers ethically wrong to test its findings directly on humans.
Another piece that needs to be considered in the ethics question is the question of monkey learning.
Indeed, it is crucial to ask whether or not it is right to use these cutting-edge technologies to ensure that animals gain more awareness, as this presents risks. In particular, what could these monkeys do if trained too well?
Another ethical question that should not be underestimated is that of the fusion between man and machine: in a historical moment in which we are increasingly connected, this fusion raises several questions: one of these is certainly whether mankind, proceeding in this direction, does not risk losing his human component, becoming more and more a kind of Frankenstein’s monster and not a person.
