Everyone, Hold Your Horses. Elon’s Neuralink is Too Futuristic

After the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) came out with the news that Elon Musk wants to “implant tiny electrodes in human brains” everyone from Silicon Valley to Delhi to all corners of the world were buzzing with excitement. “Did you hear the big news?” people asked. “Elon has found a way to connect our brains to computers” people said.

Reuters news agency picked up the report from WSJ. The headline was, “Elon Musk's new co [short for company] could allow uploading, downloading thoughts: Wall Street Journal”.

Can we all just back up for a second. The key word in that sensational headline should be ‘could’.

We all would love to have a machine do all our thinking for us. Imagine how easy it would be to type out a novel, do your taxes or cure cancer if all we had to do was think and there was a computer that made the data live for us at the speed of thought, the very thought renders arms bumpy with goosebumps. But is Elon capable of making a machine like that? The real answer is we don’t know.

Any reader who bothered to read any of the reports on Elon’s new company will find small but oh-so crucial modal verb kinks (we mean those “could”, “may”, “might” etc.).

First, if you read the WSJ, Reuters and all other media reports (assuming they all started from these two sources) you should know by now that Elon never made an official statement about trying to form a company that can help us “upload, download thoughts”.

The WSJ assumed (again a key word: ‘assumed’) that this company called Neuralink might be about connecting brains with computers by reading into Elon’s tweeting history.

The WSJ report says Elon “teases” by saying, “ “Making progress [on neural lace],” he tweeted last August, “maybe something to announce in a few months.” In January he tweeted that an announcement might be coming shortly.”

Call it putting two-eet and two-eet together (two+tweet = two-eet. Get it?). It’s possible Elon meant exactly what WSJ interpreted it to be. Neural lace is a term coined by sci-fi author Iain M Banks. In 2015, scientists made a breakthrough discovery similar to neural lace; an area called mesh electronics where “an ultra-fine mesh that can merge into the brain to create what appears to be a seamless interface between machine and biological circuitry”, was implemented on mice, which survived the experiments. So maybe there is hope for neural lace.

Or maybe it wasn’t.

The Daily Mail of UK reports, “Ray Kurzweil director of engineering at Google said in 2013 that it will also be possible to replace body parts with mechanical devices and that this could happen by the end of the century.”

Furthermore solid proof of the existence of Neuralink seems to be that it was registered in California as what WSJ calls a ““medical research” company”, which honestly, could mean anything in this day and age. Even Reuters stops guesswork on Neuralink at the headline. Reuters reports,

“It is unclear what sorts of products Neuralink might create, but people who have had discussions with the company describe a strategy similar to space launch company SpaceX and Tesla, the Journal report said.

So that means nobody knows what Neuralink will actually be about. As WSJ puts it, an individual who described himself as a founding team member of Neuralink has said plans for the company are still in flux, which, if one does not mince words mean, they still don’t have a clear plan for what’s going to happen with Neuralink. It doesn’t even have a clear set of investors besides Elon who might allow himself to go near bankrupt, again, funding this. The individual had also said the company is “embryonic” – direct translation: It’s still more a concept than a company ready to make our brains smarter than a computer, so please don’t get so excited.

And another big reason why Neuralink is still more a sensational possibility than surreal reality, is that there are other more realistic Elon projects that are yet to become reality: like making Tesla electric vehicles go mainstream; making solar energy go mainstream; making self-driving cars go mainstream; successfully launching rockets to send SpaceX satellites into orbit; taking tourists to the moon; sending astronauts to Mars, and of course keeping all of his major Tesla shareholders happy so that he won’t be kicked out like he was from PayPal, the company he cofounded.

To be fair if anyone can make Neuralink a thing of reality, it’s Elon. No one would have thought travel holidays to the moon would be a sober discussion before Musk made it one.

But let’s be realistic here. We won’t be “uploading and downloading” our thoughts to computers automatically for a very long time to come.