Elon Musk has left even his most ardent fans terrified after he revealed his tech start-up, Neuralink, has become the first to successfully implant a microchip into a human brain.
According to the richest man in the world, the procedure was performed on Sunday, and “initial results show promising neuron spike detection.”
The device called ‘Telepathy’ will ‘enable control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking’, he said.
However, a large portion of his 170 million Twitter followers on X accused him of “playing God,” “mind control,” and even producing “cyborgs.”
‘The negative potential of this makes me very uneasy,’ one person wrote in reply to his announcement.
‘I’m terrified by the thought of it,’ added another.
Musk expressed his hope that it will enable people with impairments to “communicate faster than an auctioneer,” much like Stephen Hawking.
Those who are limb-loss victims will be the first users. What if Stephen Hawking was able to speak more quickly than an auctioneer or speed typist? That’s the aim.
The company’s goal is to implant microchips into paralysed individuals’ brains so they can move their bodies with their thoughts.
‘I think the real issue here is that even your thoughts won’t be safe,’ tweeted *TemplerTV.
‘If they can decode your thoughts for this, how long until the FBI gets a search warrant for your thought crime?’
‘What if someone else starts controlling you, and you can easily understand whom I am referring to?’ added Sagar Pandey. ‘Scary.’
‘Any technological advance has to be based on bioethical principles; otherwise, playing God always ends badly,’ wrote P. Juan Manuel Gongora.
Some, though, were more optimistic.
‘Well done, Neuralink and Elon!! This might very well turn out to be an important moment in history,’ wrote one user.
‘This is awesome news; we’re expanding on the two final frontiers. Space and the mind—I can’t wait for the next company talk. So excited!’ wrote another.
In September, Neuralink declared that it would shortly start a human study to assess the implant’s safety.
The FDA gave Neuralink permission to operate on humans less than a year ago, which was a significant milestone for the firm.
Details of the patient were not given, but Ashlee Vance, who wrote a 2015 biography, ‘Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future’, wrote in a Bloomberg report that the ideal candidate for Neuralink’s first human trial was ‘an adult under age 40 whose four limbs are paralysed’.
It’s not enough to collect data from your computer; next, they will collect it directly from your brain.
There’s no way this can be safe. Scientists formerly said that pesticides like DDT were harmless, even though they were killing the ecosystem and the entire food chain.
We already know that utilising search engines on the internet reduces memory because our brains consider the internet to be an external storage device, negating the requirement for memory.
Retaining knowledge becomes more difficult the less effort you put into it. When things are taken too far, you wind up with a scenario where governments can falsify documents and facts, and everyone assumes this is because they can accept everything they read on the internet as true and forget about anything that didn’t originate there.
It could reach a point where what you see, hear, and touch is all imaginary.
Eventually, humans will wipe themselves out. I mean, what could go wrong? Governments don’t have to use climate change as an excuse; just call it Elon Musk change.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 