By Vassilios Della Cioppa | Published Mar 10, 2022
(Microsoft Word Stock Image)
What is Neuralink? How does its tech work?
Current and Future Applications.
Societal Impact.
Intro:
X-ray vision, telepathy, perfect memory recall, and eternal life are all abilities most of us dream of having. Many wish to cure their neurological conditions like Alzheimer's, epilepsy, anxiety, OCD, and depression. Some just want to restore their vision, hearing, and basic motor skills that we generally take for granted. I know this all sounds too good to be true, but believe it or not, in 5 to 10 years with Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink, all this and more may be a fast-approaching reality.
What is Neuralink?
Neuralink, founded in 2016, is one of Elon Musk’s newer and lesser-known companies due to the massive success of Tesla and SpaceX, but no less impressive and maybe one of the most transformational technologies ever introduced. Their ultimate end goal is to achieve AI Symbiosis: complementing interactions between humans and AI that can make both parties smarter over time. Neuralink plans to accomplish this marriage between man and machine, starting with their first neural implant that they call the “Link.”
The Neuralink team created Link V0.9/1.0: a small coin-sized brain-computer interface (BCI) system, 23 mm x 8 mm, that is surgically installed by their fully automated robot into the skull and connected to different brain regions via thin neural wires. Don’t worry; if you ever want to upgrade to the newest model or have it removed, it is just as easy to have it taken out, with no known negative consequences.
The Link's first iterations will focus to “Solve important brain & spine problems.” These challenges include restoring limb function, eyesight, and hearing. Once installed, the Link device training, downloads, and updates are done through a smartphone application.
Implanted Link, Neural Threads, and Charger (Source: https://neuralink.com/approach/)
How does the Neuralink Link work?
The Link functions first, by their fully automated Neuralink robot surgically implanting 1024 individual threads (electrodes) a few millimeters deep into the desired brain regains with perfect accuracy: completed in about an hour with no anesthesia. These electrodes are incredibly tiny: only 5 microns in diameter, about 1/5 a human hair, so small no damage is done to the blood vessels when inserted; a surgical task that only a robot could perform.
Then the implanted Link communicates with the brain through the electrodes via electrical pulses of varying levels, causing neighboring brain neurons to fire. When the neurons trigger in specific temporal sequences, the user can control electronics, experience physical touch, conjure a visual image, or eliminate neurological disorders like epilepsy.
Once the Link is implanted, learning how to operate the device can easily be done right away through the 2.4 GHz Bluetooth connection on Neuralink’s app from any smart device.
The battery life is stated to last a full day, but when the Link device does get low on battery, it is simply charged wirelessly from outside the skull.
Pager, Playing MindPong (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsCul1sp4hQ)
Proven Applications:
Neuralink is not the first company to try to create a brain-computer interface; thousands of people already have some type of BCI implanted. In the 1970s, UCLA began to experiment on animals and lay the groundwork that Neuralink and other BCI companies build upon today, but as with all of Elon’s companies, Neuralink is pushing the limits past what most think or thought was impossible.
Like their predecessors, Neuralink uses animals for precurse test subjects to humans: pigs and Macaque Monkeys have been displayed to the public. The pigs were used to show that the Link could be installed and removed safely with the automated robot and that there are no known adverse side effects from having the Link removed. The monkeys show promising results that a brain similar to humans could learn to use the Neuralink Link with not a strenuous amount of effort.
Neuralink’s next step is human trials, slated to start sometime this year but have not yet released any further information.
Current and Future Applications:
The results that Neuralink expects their project to produce are remarkable. The areas they are focusing on within the first models of the Link are restoring function to the user’s hearing, vision, and limbs. Then they will move towards eliminating neurological disorders like Parkinson’s and dementia.
Neuralink isn’t just stopping at repairing the brain and body, though, but also improving them. Later models will allow you to tune your optics to see in other wavelengths like X-ray vision, seeing far more than the sliver of the spectrum that we naturally see. Users could have a permanent memory: recording their entire sensory experience and be able to play it back; seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and feeling physical and emotional sensations.
Even eliminating death as we perceive it could be possible with this technology. Theoretically, a user could upload all their data and be redownloaded into a donor, clone, or robot. This technology's inspiring potential has breed many theories on its possible future development, applications, and how it will impact humanity.
Societal Impact:
What Elon and the team have proposed thus far is incredible. Still, if the speed of technology advancement keeps up, the future versions of the Link will give users abilities beyond our wildest dreams, but will it alter how our society functions?
People who choose to have a future version of the Neuralink Link installed will have a cognitive advantage over those who don’t. How people learn, work, interact, and process death will be very different not long after being “Linked.”
The pace at what Link users will learn will be overwhelming and unbelievable to unaugmented people. Learning new languages or getting a college degree in Art, Business, Astronautical Engineering, Neuroscience, anything will be as simple as a download: years worth of knowledge instantly known.
Having the ability to learn anything in seconds will make Link users more hireable. Users will be as reliable as computers for timing, memory, and accuracy but still be real people. It will be difficult to compete in the workplace against someone with a Link implant.
Communication should be significantly improved when two or more Link users are connecting: fixing the misunderstandings that have plagued human communication for as long as we have been sentient for one reason or another; language barriers, neurological disorders, deaf, blindness, the list goes on. All these issues should be solved for users because they will have the complete picture of what other users are trying to convey: the words, emotions, and intentions behind them, producing a more precise interpretation of a concept.
Like Amazon’s show Upload, people with Link implants will either die naturally or be uploaded to a metaverse type program for individuals who want to continue their lives in a digital afterlife: potentially living forever.
UPLOAD | Amazon Prime (https://www.amazon.com/Upload-Season-1/dp/B08BYYHCLN)
Conclusion:
Many questions come with this marvelous new technology; will it change how we meditate, perceive consciousness and ourselves, or maybe even talk to animals and aliens? Only time will tell, but luckily, physics is on our side.
All we are at our basic level, movements, thoughts, and everything in between are electrical impulses sent and received from our brains. If we can read and write the proper neural patterns using the Neuralink Link, people’s lives will significantly improve and maybe advance past what they thought was possible.
Many people champion Elon’s and Neuralink’s endeavors, and some are against it, but either way, what they are doing will change the way we interact, discover, heal, philosophize, and shape our future.
This is fantastic! I believe this will provide hope to so many. Great article!