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The Art of Language

Liz Rios Hall
Curious
Published in
15 min readSep 4, 2020

What Neuralink’s brain-to-machine communication can’t express

Selection from: Sexton, Anne. “The Gold Key.” Transformations, Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Cited under CMSI’s “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry.”

“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…

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Curious
Curious

Published in Curious

A community of people who are curious to find out what others have already figured out // Curious is a new personal growth publication by The Startup (https://medium.com/swlh).

Liz Rios Hall
Liz Rios Hall

Written by Liz Rios Hall

Close reader. Long-form lover. Proud word nerd. I’m a librarian-in-training who writes about language, literature and digital life.

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