Hey’all. Welcome to my 5-part series on Neuralink, a team developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces. Here, I’ll discuss some fundamental questions that humans are trying to solve with this state-of-the-art technology and its reasonability through the eyes of contemporary thinkers.

Serendipity - By Henrik Veres

Serendipity - By Henrik Veres

Part 1 - An Introduction

“Cogito, ergo sum - I think, therefore I am”
― René Descartes

As an introduction, this post solely focuses on what Neuralink is trying to solve and how Elon’s transhumanistic goal for a symbiosis of Humans and AI have led us here. Since I won’t be explaining the technology, a basic idea about Neuralink and its current stage of development is a prerequisite for this series. Hope you’ll consider covering it before diving into this post.

Men, regardless of time and space, always tried to define consciousness and reality as they perceived. To put it simply, purpose in life always stemmed out of your definition of reality or consciousness. So it was always mandatory to have a base for building something on it. Once they were defined, people used to protect the same by theorizing what is and what isn’t. We had metaphysical as well as material explanations on whys and hows of life. We developed theories and studied the nature of reality in the efforts of defending these definitions. Advancements in science and technology that we see today are indebted to these acts of redefining age-old convictions. Since new paradigms always brought more complexities, it was obligatory to answer more and more questions after each milestone. We live in a time where the complexities are growing exponentially along with science. Let’s see how our search for answers led to Neuralink and how it will raise more questions.

The Spotlight

While Elon Musk is one of the best polymaths of our time, he also happened to be a person with some deep transhumanistic visions. Though he does some marketing stunts from time to time, his views on how we evolve as a whole have always been optimistic in their own ways. In this last decade, we have seen exponential growth in both technological innovations and computational power. This has led humans to think whether their purpose on this planet is to do some redundant tasks that can be automated or concentrate on the things only a human brain can do (art or exploring new intriguing thoughts for example). This might not be precise, but Capitalism always has its incentive in these cases. It’s the inherent characteristic of any Capitalist economy to cut its cost or improve efficiency indefinitely. Kaizen Costing is an excellent example of how this thought penetrates to daily tasks of businesses. It was expected that any profit-oriented business or authority will go for affordable automation solutions over the error-prone human labor in long run. This thought has led Elon and his team in predicting that an uncontrolled AI could potentially damage humans (in its initial state) through rampant unemployment and all. He expressed his concern by saying that we need to regulate AI back in 2017 through his Twitter.

“Nobody likes being regulated, but everything (cars, planes, food, drugs, etc) that’s a danger to the public is regulated. AI should be too.”
― Elon Musk on Twitter

This was never a perfect solution since humans can’t regulate something collectively. We have seen a similar situation in the case of COVID-19. The whole world witnessed different Governments taking different decisions based on their perception of that particular issue. So the Neuralink team might have thought of an alternative to cop up with the machine-intelligence explosion that we will be facing in coming decades. There was only but one solution for this forthcoming crisis. And that is through making a symbiosis with machine intelligence and using it to its full potential. Neuralink thought of enhancing human brain functions through giving access to machine intelligence on request!

Our Discussion

“Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.”
― Friedrich Hegel

Now that we know what motivated their team to come up with Neuralink, it’s time to address all the complexities expected in any entropy. I’ll be using Hegelian Dialectic in this series to explore the reasonability and implications of this particular technology. We will examine the idea of consciousness as we know it in the thesis part itself. To identify the dilemmas of any self-aware entity and how it contradicts many fundamentals on which it’s built, we will use the anti-thesis section. By the end, we will check whether the idea of singularity in the form of Neuralink can be a synthesis for all those questions that arose along the way.

Buckle up and have a wild ride!