Tag Archives: Elon Musk

Elon Musk Claims the First Human Subject Has Gotten a Neuralink Implant In Their Brain

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30 JANUARY 2024/BUSINESS & TECH/JOE KUKURA (SFist.com)

The first human patient has reportedly had the Neuralink computer chip implanted into their brain, according to a tweet from Elon Musk, marking either a milestone for people with neurodegenerative disorders, or one giant leap for oligarch mind control.

It’s a sign of who Elon Musk is that perhaps the most useful and meaningful company he has co-founded, the Fremont-based Neuralink whose technology could potentially give paralyzed people the power to move things, is best known for Elon knocking up an attractive young female executive to the dismay of pop star Grimes. So the maturity issues and unnecessary personal drama have thus far overshadowed what may be the most important (or dystopian) of any product in the checkered Musk portfolio.  

Neuralink, if it’s all it’s cracked up to be, would build a coin-sized computer chip that would be implanted into the human brain, and allow thoughts (in the form of brain chemical signals known as neurons) to control objects, likely connected objects like computers or smartphones. And according to Reuters and a tweet from Neuralink co-founder Musk, a Neuralink chip has been implanted into the brain of its first human subject.


Mind you, this is just Musk claiming on Twitter that “The first human received an implant from @Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well. Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.” There is no data presented here to back any of this up, nor anything scientifically peer-reviewable. (And Musk is the same guy who claimed that the glitchy mega-fail of the Ron DeSantis campaign announcement chat on Twitter was somehow a wild success).

But as Reuters points out, the FDA has given Neuralink clearance to do clinical trials on human subjects. So there is some adult oversight here.

CNN explains that the first product Neuralink is trying to develop is called Telepathy, which hopes its chips can be placed in part of the brain that controls movement. The chip would then send signals to a connected device, like a smartphone or computer, such that a person with paralysis or neurodegenerative diseases could then control said devices.


But Neuralink has had its share of screwups, too. Reuters reported in late 2022 that botched Neuralink experiments led to the deaths of more than 1,500 animals, which then led to a federal probe into the company. Plus as KTVU reminds us, Nueralink’s first request for human trials was rejected by the FDA, though the trials are federally sanctioned and underway now.

It’s also important to note that Neuralink is not the only company in the game. Other startups like Synchron also hope to build brain-computer interfaces, and they’ve got a couple-year head start on Neuralink, as they’ve been doing approved clinical trials since 2021.

“The idea of brain-nervous system interfaces has great potential to help people with neurological disorders in future,” British Neuroscience Association president Tara Spires-Jones said in an interview with the UK’s Science Media Center. “However, most of these interfaces require invasive neurosurgery and are still in experimental stages thus it will likely be many years before they are commonly available.”


In the case of Neuralink, the human thoughts (neurons) would communicate with an app. And yes this could be a massive breakthrough for the physically impaired. But it’s also crossing a rubicon where apps not only store your location data, but humans thoughts themselves. That may be cause for concern given tech companies’ track record on privacy, and there are also ethical concerns over the potential for manipulation of human emotions.

Related: Elon Musk Showcases Working Neuralink Implant in Pig, Livestreams Brain Activity [SFist]

Image: Neuralink surgically implant some computer components onto the surface of your brain to control equipments (Getty Images)

No utopia: experts question Elon Musk’s vision of world without work

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Using AI to create less and better work would benefit society but getting rid of it altogether would be unproductive, experts say

Caroline Davies

Caroline Davies Fri 3 Nov 2023 (TheGuardian.com)

Oscar Wilde and others envisaged a future in which technology removed the drudgery of work and led to shorter working hours. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images

Oscar Wilde thought hard work “the refuge” of those with nothing better to do while he envisaged a society of “cultivated leisure” as machines performed the necessary and unpleasant tasks.

Karl Marx’s dream was of a society regulated general production that allowed liberated workers to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner” without the drudgery of being tied to one job.

The 19th-century socialist activist William Morris advocated for more pleasurable work, believing that once the profit motive of the factory had been abolished, less necessary labour would led to a four-hour day.

So Elon Musk’s suggestion to Rishi Sunak that society could reach a point where “no job is needed” and “you can do a job if you want a job … but the AI will do everything” revives a debate on the issue of how we work that has long been discussed.

Yet a world without work, experts question, may be more dystopian than utopian.

“This is an old, old story that never actually happens,” said Tom Hodgkinson, co-founder of the Idler magazine, which for three decades has been a platform to examine issues surrounding work and leisure.

“There was a poem in ancient Greece saying, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we have invented the watermill so that we no longer have to grind our corn? The women can sit around doing nothing all day from now on.’ It’s that kind of recurrent idea.

“People like Bertrand Russell were talking about this in the 30s. What would we do without work? One view is people wouldn’t know what to do because people are more or less slavish. That they would just sit around watching daytime TV or porn all day.”

In fact, given more free time, such as on furlough during Covid, “they start living better”, Hodgkinson said. “They are starting neighbourhood groups, doing more gardening, doing up the house, spending more time with family, doing creative things, playing music, writing poetry, all the things that are part of what I would call a good life.”

Despite that, he said, studies had shown that paid work was beneficial for mental health, for status and identity.

“I think we need to do some sort of work. We should be moving towards a shorter working week, and more leisure-filled society,” Hodgkinson said, adding that a radical overhaul of our economic and education models would be needed to eliminate work on the scale that Musk predicted.

One significant body of research in 2019, led by Brendan Burchell, professor in social sciences and a former president of Magdalene College, Cambridge, established that eight hours of paid employment a week was optimal in terms of benefit in mental health, and that no extra benefit was subsequently accrued.

Setting aside the “awful jobs that really screw you up”, Burchell said, “your average job is good for you” in terms of social interaction, working collectively, giving structure and sense of identity.

A world without work “is a terrible idea of what society would look like for all sorts of reasons, as well as people’s mental health”, he said.

The labour market, as a way of distributing money around the economy, would have to be transformed, as would the education system, “to teach people how to fill their days, by writing poetry or going fishing or whatever, instead of going to the factory or the office”, Burchell continued.

Shifting to shorter working hours was shown to have “massive benefits for people”, said Burchell, but he added: “If we move to a society where lots of people are completely excluded from the labour market, then I get very worried that’s going to be a very dystopian future.”

In his book Making Light Work: An End to Toil in the 21st Century, David Spencer, professor of economics at the University of Leeds, also makes the case for less work, but not its elimination. “It would leave us bereft potentially of things that we value in work,” he said, citing communal enterprise, personal relationships and the development of skillsets.

So in essence, we would be a poorer, sadder, less skilled society. “Yes, there will be some loss through loss of work,” Spencer said. “I realise not all work is good. So we ought to automate drudgery, seek to use AI to reduce the pain of work, and therefore leave work which is good.”

He draws from Morris, who talked about bringing joy to work. “Skilful work is good work and it has a role in the creation of a better society,” said Spencer. “We ought to use technology to create less and better work. In that sense, the future can be really positive.

This was, he added, the future imagined by “Oscar Wilde, William Morris, and a lot of utopian positive thinking, where technology makes work lighter. It’s not eliminating work – it’s bringing light to work.”