It is likely that if you do not usually read news related to technological advances, Neuralink’s work may still be unknown to you. Neuralink is a company dedicated to neurotechnology and the development of brain-computer interfaces. Hold on a second, I swear I’m not talking about science fiction or something that will happen in 100 years. I’m going to talk about things that happened in 2021. The guarantee? Elon Musk is the founder of the company.
After years of trials and demonstrations that left us wanting more, in April 2021, Neuralink showed advances that left us speechless. Pager, a 9-year-old macaque monkey, demonstrated his skills playing a ping-pong video game. In the video presented by Neuralink, at first, you see Pager moving a joystick to move the paddle in the video game. In exchange for doing it correctly, Pager could take a sip of a banana smoothie through a straw. So far, nothing surprising.
Monkey plays video game with his mind using Neuralink brain implant[128]
However, Pager had a chip implanted in his brain through 1,024 electrodes. This allowed the capture of electrical signals emitted by the monkey’s brain when planning and executing each of his movements. Thus, after decoding, processing, and learning from these data, the team of scientists behind Neuralink proceeded to disconnect the joystick used by Pager. The macaque never noticed this and continued moving the joystick to control his paddle in the ping-pong game. Here begins the truly astonishing part. When they disconnected the joystick, Pager continued playing and receiving his sips of banana smoothie. How did Pager transmit his movements to the computer if his control was disconnected? Through his mind! The software implemented by Neuralink read his neural signals to detect his movement intentions and thus move the game’s paddle so Pager could continue receiving his reward. They even reached the point where they removed the joystick from the monkey’s reach, but he saw that the screen continued moving his ping-pong paddle. How? By thinking about it! We repeat: the way Pager transmitted his movements to the computer consisted only of him thinking about it.
After this achievement, Musk announced that his next experiment could consist of demonstrating that a person with paralysis, equipped with the Neuralink chip implant, would be able to use a mobile phone faster than a naturally unimpaired person using their fingers. Following this, his goal, for which no timeframe is defined to date, would be to restore movement to paraplegic people through signals sent by neurons to the body to walk again, even with a prosthesis. According to Musk, as this technology advances, it will be possible to record and decode the brain’s electrical signals using thousands of electrodes implanted in the motor cortex of people. In this way, Musk hopes to combat neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s, dementia, and spinal cord injuries, as well as merge humanity with Artificial Intelligence. Transhumanism, then, defined as the enhancement of physical, intellectual, and psychological capacities of people through their fusion with technology, is just around the corner. Before you get scared, remember that since 1958, the lives of many people have been extended thanks to cardiac pacemakers, a tiny device that helps fight heart failure. Generally speaking, this trend is not new; what is new now is the ability to connect these devices inside the body to the Internet and interact with them in real-time. The series Years and Years portrayed very well in one of its scenes a family conversation set in the future, where the daughter tells her parents that she doesn’t feel comfortable and feels trapped in her body. After reading a lot, she decided she wanted to be trans. Her family reacted positively, supporting her and telling her they would love her no matter if they now had a son, daughter, or whichever gender and pronoun she chose. To this, the protagonist clarified that she didn’t want to be transgender but transhuman, sparking a heated family discussion.
The use of Artificial Intelligence in the field of biotechnology is still in its infancy. Can you imagine understanding human biology and manipulating it as if it were computer binary code, full of zeros and ones? We are almost there, especially after the human genome was fully deciphered following 20 years of research[129]. The advances that AI will bring to biotechnology will be enormous, not because it will replace human labor but because we will be able to conduct research leading to new discoveries much faster than currently possible. Even Charles Darwin, the father of the Theory of Evolution, probably never dreamed of this idea.
In the coming decades, AI will give us powers similar to those of a deity, allowing us to change our genetics with all that implies. This could improve our body’s resistance to various viruses or foods. Like it or not, data indicates that today you are more likely to die from sugar-related causes, such as diabetes, than from a firearm.
We are no longer mysterious souls; we are hackable animals[130]. Harari even dares to think that even if we manage to prevent the rise of digital authoritarian regimes, the ability to hack humans could undermine the meaning of being human. In fact, as we use AI more to make decisions, authority will also shift its center of gravity from the human species to algorithms. Today TikTok and Instagram tell us what is fun, Google what is true, Netflix or YouTube what to watch, and Mercado Libre or Amazon what to buy. Much of human life is based on making decisions that lead to different scenarios with their own consequences. So what will become of us when most of our decisions are made by AI? How long before hiring processes are fully automated with AI? It’s one thing to go to a job interview and be rejected by another human, who with their body language can tell us things they dare not say with their vocal cords. But what if an algorithm rejects us? Whom do we complain to? What explanation do we ask for? These algorithms might be thoroughly audited and provide us with detailed reports on why we didn’t get the job. But the information we receive could be mind-boggling. If the algorithm is oriented toward increasing the company’s effectiveness and profits, it might find thousands of patterns unimaginable to us but make sense to our AI. Algorithms make decisions very differently from humans; it’s math, no mixed feelings. In fact, of all human inventions to date, this is the first tool we’ve developed that can make decisions on its own. Current AI models often empower us, but be careful not to wake up in a few years with the news that they have taken power from us instead of giving it to us.
Imagine how far we can go if Moore’s Law continues to hold, which is based on an article published in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, stating that the processing capacity of computers doubles every 18 months. Let’s hope antivirus software for technologies like Neuralink works very well! It is impossible to imagine the damage a hacker could do by accessing these chips implanted in the human brain’s cortex.
At the same time, if we add enough data and computing power to biotechnology, there will come a time when the algorithm knows us better than we know ourselves. Our fears, fantasies, health status, political views, and many more things will be laid bare before the power of algorithms. Can you imagine living under the control of an authoritarian regime that, under the guise of caring for your health, forces you to wear a smart bracelet that detects, among other things, heart rate, blood levels, and your mood? Today, we are already giving the algorithms of the companies that provide our smartwatches something as private and unique as the beats of our hearts. Imagine if you were forced to attend your country’s leader’s speech and applaud in the square, but their secret intelligence team discovers that your mood wasn’t good during the speech due to the tracking device you are obliged to wear. I don’t want to imagine how something like that could end. This could be the ultimate tool for domination, as by knowing our preferences, the algorithm could even predict our reactions to certain actions or words, thus manipulating our future feelings and actions. Everything will be reduced to zeros and ones.
If we move to a less terrifying plane, we could even begin to explore the impact of generating all these data on the music industry. Currently, various AI tools are available to create unique musical compositions. If we could extract data from the chemical reactions in our brains when we listen to music, we could individually identify the notes that give us the most pleasure and those we dislike and the sounds that help us concentrate and those that distract us. In this way, the music industry could modify songs by current artists to try to appeal to as many people as possible, even those who don’t usually follow contemporary music. Could algorithms even detect when we feel sad? In many cases, when someone is sad about a particular situation, they tend to listen to music that generates nostalgia and has lyrics that relate to their current feelings, easily falling into the “sad music” category, with softer melodies. Based on the traumatic event we are going through, this music triggers the production of the hormone prolactin, known as the hormone responsible for feeling sadness. In this way, AI algorithms could not only try to sell us the trending songs, with the necessary modifications to make them appealing to us, but they could also be used to combat stress and sadness with musical recommendations that gradually lift us out of our emotional slump. I don’t know if this is healthy, if it helps accelerate our internal healing or puts barriers to it, but with AI, we can find that range of sounds and frequencies that generate more serotonin, endorphin, dopamine, and oxytocin, known as the happiness hormones.
Now, coming down to a more present scenario, the recent abolition of the right to abortion in the United States, following the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe v. Wade[131] decision that had granted this right to pregnant individuals, brings a new risk associated with mobile apps used to track menstrual periods. As a result of this measure, anyone in a state where abortion is illegal who uses the Internet to search for information, products, and services related to reproductive health may become subject to online surveillance. This places a large portion of society in a situation where their privacy is at risk. It doesn’t take a person posting on social media that they are going to have an abortion; the very data from the apps installed on their phones could be used to incriminate them if summoned by judicial authorities. Let’s not make it too complicated; just imagine a person telling someone else they are going to have an abortion, and the recipient of the message morally opposes the situation and decides to report the pregnant person to the authorities. If this happens, investigators could perform a forensic analysis of their phone and trace whether they searched for services related to abortion or if the information available in their reproductive health app shows signs of missed periods, or even if their phone’s location history shows they approached a clinic or place known for performing abortions.
Stop the world, I want to get off! Mafalda would say, but we have already established that there is only one door open to the future, and it involves the constant evolution of technology. Early models and the conceptualization of Artificial Intelligence have existed for decades, but its widespread use and recognition among the general public took time to arrive. The same will happen with biotechnology. We are still in a very early stage of it. In fact, we only need to understand that today almost all the data we generate is external to our bodies. We generate clicks, track our steps, and our purchases, but we have not yet crossed, on a large scale, the boundary of our skin. If the external data we generate is considered the new oil, then the data we extract from our bodies will be directly equivalent to enriched plutonium. I have no doubt that one of the industries where Artificial Intelligence will have the most impact is health. While the human life expectancy was around 31 years in 1900, today we are closer to 72 years[132], and the number will probably continue to rise with new drugs and even genetic modifications to human DNA through Crispr technology[133]. Are we ready to live longer lives? Is the social and economic system ready for it? Will pension funds hold up, potentially with fewer active workers?
[128] The Telegraph. (2021). Monkey plays Pong video game with his mind using Neuralink brain implant. YouTube. Viewed January 3, 2022, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcz-Hq1NP98.
[129] Pennisi, E. (2022). Most complete human genome yet reveals previously indecipherable DNA. Science.org. Viewed April 11, 2022, at https://www.science.org/content/article/most-complete-human-genome-yet-reveals-previously-indecipherable-dna.
[130] World Economic Forum. “How to Survive the 21st Century | DAVOS 2020.” YouTube. 2020, Viewed January 25, 2021, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOsKFOrW5h8 (World Economic Forum, 2017, 12m03s).
[131] Liptak, A. (2022). In 6-to-3 Ruling, Supreme Court Ends Nearly 50 Years of Abortion Rights. The New York Times. Viewed June 25, 2022, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/us/roe-wade-overturned-supreme-court.html.
[132] Roser, M., Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Ritchie, H. (2013). Life Expectancy. Our World in Data. Viewed June 29, 2022, at https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#life-expectancy-has-improved-globally.
[133] Zimmer, C. (2022). “CRISPR, 10 Years On: Learning to Rewrite the Code of Life.” The New York Times. Viewed June 29, 2022, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/27/science/crispr-gene-editing-10-years.html.