Musk’s man to machine mission ‘impossible’

The billionaire’s plans to implant chips into human brains finds a sceptical audience among scientists, writes Hasan Chowdhury and Hannah Boland.

If you can’t beat them, join them. Or if you’re Elon Musk, the billionaire boss of private rocket outfit SpaceX and electric vehicle firm Tesla, why not just become them?

The tech mogul unveiled plans to implant human brains with computer chips in an effort to merge man with machine, marking the start of a quest to prevent Silicon Valley’s most feared scenario: society’s demise at the hands of artificial intelligence.

Musk has long sounded the alarm on AI, claiming that rapid advances in machine learning risk ‘‘summoning a demon’’ that leaves humans in the dust as superintelligent systems out-manoeuvre our species.

‘‘At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. You’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape,’’ he has previously warned.

It’s for this reason the businessman is busying himself with an unprecedented venture. Musk told an audience at the California Academy of Sciences that Neuralink, the private vehicle for this vision, has been testing its ‘‘brain-computer interface’’ on monkeys and rats, and is expected to begin trials on humans by the end of next year.

‘‘With a high bandwidth brainmachine interface we will go along with the ride, we will have the option of merging with AI,’’ he said.

The prize at hand is clear. Neuralink is setting its sights on not just competing with AI by accelerating humanity’s path

towards a future of superintelligence, but also on solving some of the most complex neurological disorders.

Investors are also starting to throw their weight behind the vision. Neuralink, whose technology has barely been tested, has raised US$150m ($222m) since its founding in 2016, including US$100m from Musk.

It has also attracted some of the brightest minds in science as researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, plus Harvard and Stanford universities have jumped on board for a chance to address the issues.

But others are less convinced. Even for Musk, who has already tested his mettle with the shake-up of an automotive sector now leaning towards cleaner, alternative fuel vehicles, and the aerospace sector which has seen the cost of spaceflight plummet through reusable rockets, the task of solving brain disorders and advancing human intelligence is a tall order.

The first hurdle is likely to be a regulatory one. Daniel Mansson, a clinical psychologist, has been working on a ‘‘brain stimulation technique’’ to treat depression with his medical device start-up, Flow, and has seen how long the regulatory process can take for something that is non-invasive. Neuralink’s technology, on the other hand, is more complex and intrusive. The start-up has devised a 4x4mm chip that connects to a thousand microscopic threads entering the brain through four holes drilled in the skull.

The threads, tagged with electrodes, could theoretically detect electrical impulses in the brain to track activity in the body’s primary nerve centre, which would then feed back as data on a smartphone. The prospect of human trials by 2020 are likely to be a stretch when the US Food and Drug Administration stands in the way.

‘‘It’s a less invasive technology, and if [Neuralink] think that they are going to go through the FDA and get that done in a couple of years, I think maybe they’re exaggerating,’’ Mansson says.

The challenge has been acknowledged by Neuralink’s president, Max Hodak, who said the company was ‘‘under no

illusion’’ about achieving its goal alone and would need to bring on help from others. It is unclear, too, how Musk plans on using the chips to enhance human intelligence and solve brain disorders, with no real data presented as yet.

‘‘I think the possibilities for application of the Neuralink technology are pretty limited. It’s not going to make us smarter,’’ says Professor David Curtis, a specialist in genetics and psychiatry at University College London.

What is more plausible, Curtis says, is an application in which the brain implants allow patients with things such as locked-in syndrome to ‘‘communicate with the outside world’’, and possibly for people with motor neuron disease to gain better control of artificial body parts.

More fundamental questions linger over the place AI will have in society and whether or not anxieties over AI are overblown. Musk has not been alone in voicing concerns about AI, and has found common ground with worldbeating scientists, such as the late Stephen Hawking, who has also warned that further development of AI could ‘‘spell the end of the human race’’.

A primary driver for Musk has been the ‘‘democratisation of intelligence’’ to ensure humanity is on equal pegging with AI, but not everyone is convinced of a doomsday case – or even the idea that humans and AI will be in direct opposition.

‘‘Fears about an AI take-over are not justified by any research or

evidence. The idea of implanting stuff in our brains to keep up with AI is just nonsense,’’ says Professor Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of AI and robotics at the University of Sheffield.

Neuralink’s ambitions may seem a stretch, but it has been Silicon Valley’s recurrent dream for humans to one day morph into machines.

Ray Kurzweil, an AI expert and director of engineering at Google, has long held the view that humanity’s future is beyond biology.

He argues that technology is already binding with humans, and has forecast the ‘‘nonbiological portion’’ of human intelligence to predominate by the 2030s, by which time ‘‘the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking’’.

Alan Turing, the mathematician who is widely considered a founding father of AI, suggested almost 70 years ago that there is no known reason why a computer couldn’t do everything a human brain does – certainly a daunting thing to consider for Musk.

But he also suggested that if machines could eventually compete with people, where would they start?

It is for this reason, as Mansson suggests, that Musk’s dreams of a ‘‘symbiosis’’ with AI many not be entirely necessary and remain, for now, just a distant possibility.

‘‘I think they will succeed in doing something, but the vision that he has should be interpreted as a vision: something that’s far away.’’ –