Neuralink, what could possibly go wrong

Lets go on a thought experiment for a bit shall we? Imagine you were instantly teleported two hundred years back into the past with nothing but the clothes on your back and your smart phone. After gasping at how exposed your ankles are, the people of the eighteen hundreds turn their attention to the peculiar little box in your hand. Confused as to why you are being judged so harshly for a little ankle, you start taking pictures thinking this moment will be immaculate for the memes later. The crowd stirs into a frenzy and are about to hang you for witch craft, but then, you show them a video of a trombone player serenading some cows (highly suggest watching). They are taken a back, as you use the power of the internet to show them even more things, they become utterly befuddled as to how you are able to go through an infinite amount of information in an instantaneous amount of time. You also avoid getting murdered!

What would really amaze the people in this thought experiment, is how you are able to interface with data. In the 1800s the interface was going to a library, searching through bookshelves, finding a book, and searching through pages to finally find the bit of knowledge you needed. In comparison a simple query into your phone seems almost omniscient. This massive discrepancy between interfaces is about to manifest itself again with Neuralink. Neuralink’s brain implant, the Link, is being advertised as a seamless interface between technology and humans. The company was founded by the famous entrepreneur Elon Musk who has also founded SpaceX and Tesla. In line with his other companies, Neuralink has the lofty goal of changing humanity for the better. The main difference between it and previous BMIs are that it can also gather data from the brain instead of simply stimulating it. As of now the technology is still in its infancy and it is mainly being marketed as a clinical device that will give autonomy back to the physically disabled. Human trials have not been started but the device has been successfully tested in monkeys, with demonstrations displaying the monkeys controlling video games with just their minds. The company has received skepticism, with scholars such as Andrew Jackson, a professor at Newcastle University stating that the Link is “good engineering but mediocre neuroscience”. However, the company hopes to expand to the general public and have the Link enhance the lives of everyone in the future. Instead of having to manually search through your phone or laptop, mere thoughts can find the exact piece of knowledge you want. So what could go wrong? A similar question must have been pondered when social media was first introduced. The first sites seemed like a harmless new way for people to connect with friends and interact with people. Now, less than two decades after their introduction, issues of data privacy and disinformation have plagued social media and there are still no viable solutions on the horizon.

With Neuralink, these issues will spiral out of control, and the way we view ourselves and our ethics will become radically changed.

One of the most challenging issues surrounding social media is data privacy. The thing that makes data privacy so challenging is that it is inherently tied to the profits of social media companies. Dr. Joan Donovan, a research director at Harvard, testified in front of the US senate on the issue stating, “Advertising revenue continues to grow across all of these products, where Google ($146 billion) and Facebook ($84 billion) dominate”. In order to effectively target these ads to their users and thus make it worth while for companies to give these platforms their ads, mining the data of their users is a must. Will Neuralink be a new, morally just company that does not care about its profits? Obviously not. Instead, their devices have an unprecedented power to collect data and invade a user’s privacy. This power was noticed by Rafael Yuste and Sara Goering, who are spearheading a group of STEM professionals in calling for ethical guidelines to be put in place to regulate human enhancing products such as the one produced by Neuralink. In their 2017 paper, they warn that neural information will prove to be invaluable in the ad targeting market and that it could even provide information on individuals that don't have the implants. The paper described how algorithms have been used to analyze neural data and that they could be used to diagnosis diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. This unfortunately wouldn't be the first time bio-information was stolen from patients by biomedical devices. Hugo Campus lives with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator that helps keep his arrhythmia in check. However, as explained in his 2015 article, the device had been transmitting information about his heart back to the manufacturer and he was actually legally withheld from accessing the data. Hugo also described how limiting his access to the data greatly affected his ability to self care, which would also be an essential component of patient’s living with diseases such as Parkinson's, where the symptoms are constant. If Neuralink has the potential to record information about the literal thoughts of its customers and there is already a precedent of data privacy breaches in biomedical devices, data privacy will struggle to exist.

We live in a time where information has never been more accessible. Unfortunately, this also means disinformation has never been given a larger platform. Its effects can be seen today in politics on both sides of the aisle. Disinformation has divided this country beyond recognition. A large part of this has to do with just how much time we spend consuming information. Whether we do it purposefully or not we are always interacting with the internet, the hub of information. With Neuralink the interaction will be constant and if the interface is not fine tuned enough, even fleeting thoughts could trigger a flow of information. Dr Allan McCay, a Sydney University Law School professor, discussed how there has to be a fine line between making the Neuralink interface sensitive to thoughts but not overly excitable in an article by InnovationAus. Even if this fine balance is sorted out, the ease of accessing information means the issue of disinformation will become exacerbated. Dr. Joan’s research has already revealed this issue in social media in a phenomenon he describes as, going down the rabbit hole. Essentially he describes how social media contains properties of repetition, redundancy, responsiveness, and reinforcement that together, pull individuals into sub cultures on the internet. These properties allow otherwise reasonable people to be sucked into fringe ideologies that would be dismissed if they were present on other media. Since Neuralink and other BMIs are just an extension of the internet infrastructure, they will not only retain these properties of social media but exacerbate them. Not only will Neuralink make the information more accessible as I described before but its effects will be even greater on the people who rely on it the most. Neuralink has been advertised as a way to improve the quality of life for the physically disabled, allowing them to interact with the physical and virtual world like they could not before. However, this increased reliance means that these patients will not have the luxury of disconnecting from this world created by Neuralink and thus will be more likely to fall victim to disinformation.

The final issue is a new ethical dilemma that society has never dealt with or has barely even thought about before, autonomy. As of now Neuralink is poised to be sold on the market as a bidirectional device. It takes information from the brain, but it can also send information to the brain and modulate its activity. Of course we have to acknowledge that we are no where near the technology that will be needed to make specific changes to human behavior. However, if Neuralink proves to be a success, the allure of the new brain machine interface market will lead to a “BMI boom” similar to the dot com boom of 2002. This spur of interest being driven by the morally pure goal of getting rich as f*ck, will lead to rapid innovation, innovation that will likely leave careful regulation in its wake. It is here that we will likely see high reward high risk BMIs. These devices will promise a multitude of features, possibly even solve issues of behavior or mental illness, however, a lack of regulation will mean critical design flaws will arise that could potentially alter a person’s behavior or mental state. This is where the issue of autonomy arises. If Neuralink and future BMIs have the potential to alter behavior, the question of whether a person was responsible for their actions becomes very complex. An article by the University of Sydney raises questions on the implications of BMIs on autonomy, specifically, on how it would affect criminal law. These questions include: If people start committing crimes by way of brain-computer interface, what is the criminal act? What if there was a brain implant that could detect the neural patterns associated with impulsive aggression, then issue a warning to the person that they may be on the cusp of a violent outburst, or even automatically act on their brain to calm them down? The second question had been pondered by Dr Allan McCay, a Sydney University Law School professor. In a InnovationAus article, he talks about how many people may get BMI’s such as Neuralink’s to handle temper and impulsivity, and thus their actions may be so manipulated by these machines that it may not be reasonable to hold them liable to any of their actions. Experts in law are already gearing up to handle the moral and ethical dilemmas that Neuralink has the potential to bring about. Yet even with this diligence, when it comes to a subject as complex as the brain and ethics, predicting how these devices will impact society is next to impossible. This is why the necessary regulations have to be put in place now before BMIs such as Neuralink begin their exponential growth in the consumer marketplace.

In all, BMIs have changed from a niche technology that never left the laboratories of academia, to a sensationalized trend that promises to redefine what it means to be a human. With any promising technology, there has to be a fine balance between the pros and cons which manifests itself as a balance between innovation and regulation. Not only does this technology have the potential to change the lives of currently disabled patients, but the research it spurs will undoubtedly make large leaps in the field of neuroscience that will also lead to clinical advancements. However, the issues of data privacy, disinformation, and autonomy must be kept in check. We have already seen how social media has made society almost unrecognizable in less than two decades. It would make us fools to repeat the same mistakes with BMIs. We also have to be active in identifying and preventing novel issues that will certainly arise with BMIs. Regulations have to be put in place to minimize any ill intentions that could take advantage of them and research has to be conducted to best predict how BMIs will alter our society. If done correctly, Neuralink and future BMIs will improve the lives of many.