The Art of Language
What Neuralink’s brain-to-machine communication can’t express
“When language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, and absence of esteem, indifference or killed by fiat…all users and makers are accountable for its demise.”
— Toni Morrison, the Nobel Lecture in Literature (1993)
“Words are a very lossy compression of thought,” Elon Musk tweeted in July. A few years earlier, Musk gave an interview with “Wait But Why” that gives some context to his Tweet: “Words — either speaking or tapping things with fingers…That’s crazy slow communication. We should be able to improve that by many orders of magnitude with a direct neural interface.” Last week, Musk took the first step toward delivering on that promise when his company Neuralink introduced a prototype of its brain-to-machine interface, which Musk claims will eventually enable telepathy and render human language obsolete.
Neuralink’s mission is to develop and produce “ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces,” or neural implants that will “connect humans and computers.” The company is still developing the technology behind those interfaces. It demonstrated an early prototype implanted in pigs last Friday with mixed results. Effectiveness of the…
