My biggest question about Elon Musk’s Neuralink

What if there’s a better option?

So Elon Musk has another revolutionary venture, and Wait But Why has another exceptionally readable explainer about the thinking behind it. And unsurprisingly, there are plenty of dissenting voices saying Musk’s vision is impossible (MIT Technology Review, for instance).

But let’s just assume for a minute that it is possible, that Neuralink will usher in the “Wizard Era” that Tim Urban described. If that’s the case, I don’t think the questions of feasibility or timeline or even invasiveness should be our top concerns. Here’s why.

Charles Duhigg and Tim Urban walk into a bar…

As luck would have it, I discovered Tim Urban’s explanation of Neuralink on Wait But Why the day I finished reading Charles Duhigg’s excellent Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity. Since Neuralink is all about making the human brain smarter, faster, and better, you might think Charles’s book and Tim’s post would complement each other nicely. But you’d be wrong.

In fact, current research on human productivity pushes us in the opposite direction of where Neuralink is trying to take us.

Specifically, there are three concepts in Tim’s post that really stood out to me as things that don’t jibe with the research in Charles’s book.

#1: Being cyborgs

Tim’s post isn’t the first time I’ve heard Elon say we’re already cyborgs. I believe he said the same thing in an AI panel discussion earlier this year. There’s part of this line of thinking I agree with and part of it I don’t.

Here’s the part that I agree with:

The thing that people, I think, don’t appreciate right now is that they are already a cyborg. You’re already a different creature than you would have been twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. You’re already a different creature. You can see this when they do surveys of like, “how long do you want to be away from your phone?” and — particularly if you’re a teenager or in your 20s — even a day hurts. If you leave your phone behind, it’s like missing limb syndrome. I think people — they’re already kind of merged with their phone and their laptop and their applications and everything.

Fair enough. I’m with him so far. Here’s where he loses me:

You’re already digitally superhuman. The thing that would change is the interface — having a high-bandwidth interface to your digital enhancements. The thing is that today, the interface all necks down to this tiny straw, which is, particularly in terms of output, it’s like poking things with your meat sticks, or using words — either speaking or tapping things with fingers. And in fact, output has gone backwards. It used to be, in your most frequent form, output would be ten-finger typing. Now, it’s like, two-thumb typing. That’s crazy slow communication. We should be able to improve that by many orders of magnitude with a direct neural interface.

Hold up there a minute. This assumes that we made a good choice in becoming cyborgs, and that is far from a closed debate.

Now, before you toss me in the bucket of people Tim says would like to “get rid of the internet,” just hear me out for a minute:

The internet, I think, was an excellent innovation. It was a huge leap forward in communication and collaboration, and it’s given us a way to access more information more easily than ever before. I’m not debating that.

What I’m not sure was such a good idea was moving the internet from our desks to our pockets. Honestly, I think that’s been 100% productivity loss.

I mean, Elon points out in the previous quote that we dropped from typing with 10 fingers to typing with two thumbs, and that’s a definite loss. But think about it more generally: when was the last time you used your smartphone to do something productive?

I’ll bet that the vast majority of the research Tim did on his post was done at a computer. That’s how I do my research when I’m serious about it. I might do some searches on my phone when I have an idea while I’m out and about, but when it’s time to get to work, I sit down at a computer, where there’s more screen space and fewer distractions. That isn’t a bandwidth issue, per se. It’s a focus issue. There are fewer distractions when I’m sitting at my computer than when I’m out and about in the world.

Here’s what Charles says about this:

These advances in communications and technology are supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, they often seem to fill our days with more work and stress.

In part, that’s because we’ve been paying attention to the wrong innovations. We’ve been staring at the tools of productivity — the gadgets and apps and complicated filing systems for keeping track of various to-do lists — rather than the lessons those technologies are trying to teach us.

Think about — does having a smartphone really make you more productive, or does it just make you busier? Sure, it might help you keep your inbox tidy (maybe), but is that really getting you any closer to accomplishing your goals? When was the last time you used your smartphone to produce something? For me, the answer is, um, pretty much never.

And it isn’t just me. Pew Research has found that that’s true of most smartphone owners. Look at the list of things people are using their phones for. I’m hesitant to put it here because of copyright reasons, but it shouldn’t surprise you that there aren’t any activities I’d call high-impact or creative. Lots of entertainment stuff. Lots of transactional things like banking. And lots of counterproductive things like avoiding conversations with people who are physically present.

So why do we think moving the device inside our brain will make things any better?

#2: We need a less “lossy” medium

Tim’s post mentions several times how “lossy” spoken language is. The idea is that, no matter how carefully I choose my words, I’m never going to be able to take an idea that’s inside my head and perfectly reproduce it in someone else’s.

Let’s take a look at one of Tim’s examples:

[I]magine how much easier it would be to describe a dream you had or a piece of music stuck in your head or a memory you’re thinking about if you could just beam the thing into someone’s head, like showing them on your computer screen. Or as Elon said, “I could think of a bouquet of flowers and have a very clear picture in my head of what that is. It would take a lot of words for you to even have an approximation of what that bouquet of flowers looks like.”

How much faster could a team of engineers or architects or designers plan out a new bridge or a new building or a new dress if they could beam the vision in their head onto a screen and others could adjust it with their minds, versus sketching things out — which not only takes far longer, but probably is inevitably lossy?

How many symphonies could Mozart have written if he had been able to think the music in his head onto the page? How many Mozarts are out there right now who never learned how to play instruments well enough to get their talent out?

Okay, I get it. Anytime I try to describe some awesome view I saw while hiking, my description never quite captures the grandeur of it.

Fine. But I doubt Elon is especially invested in being able to share bouquet ideas. Tim’s example of engineers, architects, and designers is more to the point, but that’s also where the line of reasoning falls apart.

I often find that I think I have pages and pages worth of thoughts, then I sit and type and peter out after a few sentences or paragraphs. I’ve done similar things when whiteboarding ideas for colleagues — after a minute or two I say, “Well, I guess that’s all I’ve got. Sorry for booking the full hour with you.”

Tim shared a similar experience later in the post:

[O]ne night while working on the post, I was rereading some of Elon’s quotes about this, and it suddenly clicked. […] Fully. I got it.

Then I lost it. The next day, I tried to explain the epiphany to a friend and I left us both confused.

I don’t think this is an issue with lossiness. I think the effort required to be able to cement an idea in clear prose or intelligible conversation or any other “lossy” medium is vital to the creative process. It forces the creator to fully understand the concept.

I’m sure — I’m just absolutely certain — that if I could just effortlessly (and losslessly) send my haze of half-baked ideas to another person, it wouldn’t be a productive exchange. The other person would see a mess of assumptions and contradictions and wouldn’t be able to parse out what I was trying to say. Even if I could losslessly send them my emotions of “Isn’t this great?” they wouldn’t be able to get anything out of it until I imposed some sort of structure on it. And that’s good! This is how ideas go from being vague notions to actionable plans. The work of communicating through lossy media is crucial to the creative process.

And this isn’t just me romanticizing the current state of things. Charles talks a lot about an idea called disfluence, which is all about the advantages of working with lossy, low-bandwidth media. Here’s a taste:

“The important step seems to be performing some kind of operation,” said Adam Alter, a professor at NYU who has studied disfluency. “If you make people use a new word in a sentence, they’ll remember it longer. If you make them write down a sentence with the word, they’ll start using it in conversations.” When Alter conducts experiments, he sometimes gives people instructions in a hard-to-read font because, as they struggle to make out the words, they read the text more carefully. “The initial difficulty in processing the text leads you to think more deeply about what you’re reading, so you spend more time and energy making sense of it,” he said.

So going back to Tim’s thoughts about Mozart — it’s possible that Mozart’s music wouldn’t have been so good if he’d been able to beam the notes straight out from his head. Perhaps being forced to write each symphony a note at a time acted as a sort of quality control, and without that limitation he wouldn’t have given us anything remarkable. At the very least, it’s conceivable that an increase in output would have meant a decrease in quality.

And, come to think of it, this thinking matches well with Wait But Why’s practice of producing new content “every sometimes.” Tim keeps his output low so he can keep his quality high. I don’t think that’s an issue with the lossiness of the written word — it’s just the nature of getting ideas into a state where they can resonate with someone else’s brain.

And this doesn’t just apply to producing content — it’s relevant for consuming content, too. Content consumption is something the Neuralink team also expects to accelerate. Tim talks about various levels we might reach with BMI technology:

Level 1: I want to know a fact. I call on the cloud for that info — like googling something with my brain — and the answer, in text, appears in my mind’s eye. Basically what I do now except it all happens in my head.

Level 2: I want to know a fact. I call on the cloud for that info, and then a second later I just know it. No reading was involved — it was more like the way I’d recall something from memory.

Level 3: I just know the fact I want to know the second I want it. I don’t even know if it came from the cloud or if it was stored in my brain. I can essentially treat the whole cloud like my brain. I don’t know all the info — my brain could never fit it all — but any time I want to know something it downloads into my consciousness so seamlessly and quickly that it’s as if it were there all along.

Level 4: Beyond just knowing facts, I can deeply understand anything I want to, in a complex way. We discussed the example of Moby Dick. Could I download Moby Dick from the cloud into my memory and then suddenly have it be the same as if I had read the whole book? Where I’d have thoughts and opinions and I could cite passages and have discussions about the themes?

Here again, I don’t think this is a road we want to go down. In its current state, the internet has already changed our brains in ways that aren’t all positive. We’re much better at skimming, yes, but that comes as a tradeoff with our ability to remember the things we read and engage with the ideas we encounter.

And looking at those levels that Tim laid out, one phrase in Level 3 is particularly worrisome: “I don’t know all the info — my brain could never fit it all….” This bothers me because of something Charles said:

“A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.”

Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers. In one study published in 2004, a sociologist named Ronald Burt studied 673 managers at a large electronics company and found that ideas that were most consistently ranked as “creative” came from people who were particularly talented at taking concepts from one division of the company and explaining them to employees in other departments. “People connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving,” Burt wrote. “The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable.” They were more credible when they made suggestions, Burt said, because they could say which ideas had already succeeded somewhere else.

“This is not creativity born of genius,” Burt wrote. “It is creativity as an import-export business.”

At first, this might actually seem to be an argument in favor of Neuralink — if we have the entire cloud at our immediate disposal, think of how much brokering we can do! But again that doesn’t add up because, as Tim says, our brains could never fit all that information inside of them!

We can’t make connections between knowledge that isn’t in our heads, and creative breakthroughs tend to come serendipitously — two unrelated pieces of information that are floating around in someone’s head happen to collide. If the ideas aren’t inside your head, if you have to go online and download them, these insights can’t come. And we can’t just go download the necessary information because we don’t know what bits of information will make an insight until they collide, which can only happen after the download. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem.

Furthermore, even in writing this post, I’ve found that turning to the internet to find ideas quickly devolves into watching irrelevant YouTube videos and checking my email. My brain can’t quite handle all the degrees of freedom the internet offers.

So why do we think moving the device inside our brain will make things any better?

#3: Language is transactional

Tim has a few nice graphics about how language stands in the way of true communication. If we didn’t have to encode our thoughts into words, if instead we could just have direct brain-to-brain communication, the world would be so much better.

This is an idea that people are deeply bought into. We would much rather send of text messages and emails and juggle multiple online conversation simultaneously than go through the horribly inefficient process of having a real-time, in-person conversation with another person. It’s just more efficient.

Right — but what if that isn’t actually the point of communication?

Here’s another place where I’m not convinced smartphones — or even mobile phones in general — were a step in the right direction.

Here’s a story from Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by MIT’s Sherry Turkle:

I needed to find a new nanny. When I interview nannies, I like to go to where they live, so that I can see them in their environment, not just in mine. So, I made an appointment to interview Ronnie, who had applied for the job. I show up at her apartment and her housemate answers the door. She is a young woman, around twenty-one, texting on her BlackBerry. Her thumbs are bandaged. I look at them, pained at the tiny thumb splints, and I try to be sympathetic. “That must hurt.” But she just shrugs. She explains that she is still able to text. I tell her I am here to speak with Ronnie; this is her job interview. Could she please knock on Ronnie’s bedroom door? The girl with the bandaged thumbs looks surprised. “Oh no,” she says, “I would never do that. That would be intrusive. I’ll text her.” And so she sent a text message to Ronnie, no more than fifteen feet away.

That was back in 2010 (ergo “texting on her BlackBerry”). As we get more connected to technology, we seem to be getting more disconnected from each other.

Roughly a decade ago, I read a book called Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott, and one idea has stuck with me ever since:

(Crap. Amazon won’t let me search inside the book, so I can’t get the exact quote. Alright, I’ll do my best to paraphrase….)

Lots of newlyweds go through a phase of frustration, where one person wants to talk about the relationship and the other person doesn’t.

“Everything’s going great,” Person #2 thinks. “What’s to talk about?”

And then Susan says a very fine thing: The conversation isn’t about the relationship, the conversation is the relationship.

It took a minute for me to wrap my head it, but once I did, it changed the way I thought about relationships.

If you can sit down with somebody and just chat with them — not with the intent of transferring data between brains but simply to shoot the breeze — then you have a relationship with that person. If you can only talk to somebody when you have business to transact, there is no relationship.

It’s like that scene in The Last Crusade, when Indiana Jones laments that he and his father never talked. His father then asks him, “Well, what do you want to talk about?” and it’s a horribly unfair question. All of us sitting in the audience writhe in the injustice of it, and we can’t blame Indy for giving a frustrated laugh and saying, “Not a thing.” Fathers and sons, husbands and wives, friends, people don’t talk about stuff — we talk because that’s what people do.

Tim seems to think of human language as this thing that prehistoric man invented as a way to ask for things (a rock, in the example Tim sketches out). Language does give us that ability, and that’s hugely important for the collection of human intelligence that Tim calls the Human Colossus. But for us as individual people, the social aspect of language is far more important.

If we want to talk about language solely in terms of Darwinian value, I think the access it gives us to humanity’s social structures is a much bigger deal than the ability to communicate ideas.

Unfortunately, our current technological trajectory puts these two aspects of language at odds with each other. Email, texting, messaging, and chatting all focus on increasing the efficiency of the transaction. But that efficiency comes at a cost, and we lose the social aspects of language.

So why do we think moving the device inside our brain will make things any better?

My biggest question about Neuralink:

Tim says this:

New technology also comes along with real dangers and it always does end up harming a lot of people. But it also always seems to help a lot more people than it harms. Advancing technology almost always proves to be a net positive.

While I agree that this has been true of most of the technology created, I think the jury’s still out for mobile connectivity. This isn’t to say mobile connectivity is innately bad. I actually think it could be really good. But I don’t think we’ve yet found a way to tease out the positive and negative effects. I’ve already mentioned some of the negative side effects we’re seeing, but as far as I know, nobody has found a way to combat those side effects while maintaining the benefits.

I think we ought to get that figured out before we start embedding this technology in our bodies.

This is the sort of problem that Elon seems especially good at tackling. Tesla Motors gives us the benefits of cars without the detrimental environmental effects. And assuming its too late to avoid those effects, SpaceX gives us an opportunity to escape disaster and start over.

Neuralink is different. It doesn’t offer a course correction the way other Musk Companies do. Instead, it accelerates our current direction.

I’ve heard that Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.” Neuralink is giving us a faster horse. But I’m really not convinced that a horse is what we want.

So my question for Elon and Tim and everybody at Neuralink and Charles and everyone else in the world, really, is the one I’ve already asked three times:

Why do we think moving the device inside our brain will make things any better?