Brave New Brain

Elon Musk wants to Grok you. Be very afraid.

“The future is going to be weird.”

—Elon Musk

In the coming months, Elon Musk’s neurotechnology company Neuralink is planning to begin high-volume production of Telepathy, an implantable brain-computer interface (BCI) that enables users to control digital devices with their thoughts alone.

An advertising brochure boasts that Telepathy is a “fully implantable, cosmetically invisible” device, consisting of a coin-sized transmitter installed under the skin on top of the skull and a web of 64 ultra-thin threads containing 1,024 electrodes laced through the brain’s motor cortex. The threads, which are so delicate they can’t be inserted by hand, instead are implanted by Neuralink’s “R1” surgical robot with a neurosurgeon standing by to oversee their placement.

The Neuralink BCI has enabled people paralyzed with severe brain or spinal cord injuries to mentally control devices like a computer mouse or keyboard.

Paralyzed from the neck down after a diving accident, Noland Arbaugh, the first person to receive the BCI in January 2024, can reply to emails, use Instagram, and play chess with brain power alone. A second patient implanted the following year was using upgraded design software to create 3-D objects by thinking them onto a computer screen.

Currently, there are 21 “Neuralnauts” in clinical trials, and Musk foresees a big enough potential market for what he’s described as a “Fitbit in your skull,” to ramp up production ahead of the demand.

Musk’s Telepathy is unquestionably cool, but it’s nothing new. Researchers have been experimenting with BCIs since the 1970s, often with amazing results. As early as 1977, Jacques Vidal the father of BCI technology at UCLA demonstrated that research subjects could use crude scalp-recorded EEG signals to navigate a cursor through a digital maze. By 2004, more precise and powerful BCIs enabled a quadriplegic patient not only to move a cursor to check his email, but to open and close a prosthetic hand. By 2013, scientists at University of Washington Seattle had developed a brain-to-brain interface that allowed two researchers to play a computer game cooperatively using only EEG impulses.

In typical fashion, Musk has exploited rather than innovated BCI technology, enhancing its commerciality by miniaturizing the device and making it wireless via Bluetooth, eliminating the cumbersome cables of previous models.

Though not yet approved as a medical device by the FDA, Telepathy was granted breakthrough status in 2024, which could speed up the review process and bring it to market sooner. In anticipation, Musk has vowed to triple the electrode count of the device to 3,000 in 2026 and make the surgical robot needed to implant it fully autonomous. Neuralink is also developing “Blindsight” technology to restore vision by stimulating the visual cortex.

The competition is heating up: Precision Neuroscience in New York City has developed an electrode implant thinner than a human hair; across the East River in Brooklyn, Synchron is testing a device that’s inserted into the brain through a blood vessel; and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman is raising funds for a BCI startup to compete with Neuralink.

Together, they’re making progress towards the “modest goals” proposed by pioneering bioengineer Ed Maynard, to “make blind people see, paralyzed people walk, and deaf people hear again.”

Of course, helping people with disabilities isn’t what Musk ultimately has in mind. The world’s richest man is focused on “enhancement”—his sci-fi dream of turning BCIs into mass-produced products for “healthy human implantation,” merging our brains with AI to achieve “machine-human symbiosis,” and to “give people superpowers” so they don’t get “left behind.”

In Musk’s mind humans will be obsolete in about 10 years and the only way to survive is to mate with AI.

Why not? As Musk has famously asserted: “We’re already cyborgs. Your phone and your computer are extensions of you, but the interface is through finger movements or speech, which are very slow.”

Yes, but with which AI will this mind meld transpire? Musk’s Grok? The one ranting about “white genocide” in South Africa, praising Hitler, and enabling child pornographers?

And what’s the tradeoff? We plug in and get all the world’s knowledge, but what does Grok get? Well, Grok gets the one thing AI lacks—your human emotions. As one enthusiast commented: “Spike detection based on emotional behavior could be a game changer for future human behavioral interpretation to develop an emulation to mimic human intelligence.”

In other words, Grok gets your soul.

Musk has predicted that hundreds of millions of people will have a Neuralink within the next two decades, but don’t expect the BCI hook-up to be democratic. Given the premium price—health insurance isn’t going to pay for it—only the already soulless super-rich will be able to afford it. They’ll be like gods—omniscient, omnipresent, the new Übermenschen: bionic Bezos, Zuperberg, mega-Musk.

The rest of us could wind up in the Matrix, where AI has us all in thrall thinking life is hunky dory when, in reality, we’re suspended in a hive of glass pods having our vital juices sucked dry.