Neuralink: Thumbs up or down so far?

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Elon Musk’s Neu­ralink is neu­ro­science the­ater (MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review):

Rock-climb with­out fear. Play a sym­pho­ny in your head. See radar with super­hu­man vision. Dis­cov­er the nature of con­scious­ness. Cure blind­ness, paral­y­sis, deaf­ness, and men­tal ill­ness. Those are just a few of the appli­ca­tions that Elon Musk and employ­ees at his four-year-old neu­ro­science com­pa­ny Neu­ralink believe elec­tron­ic brain-com­put­er inter­faces will one day bring about.

None of these advances are close at hand, and some are unlike­ly to ever come about. But in a “prod­uct update” streamed over YouTube on Fri­day, Musk, also the founder of SpaceX and Tes­la Motors, joined staffers wear­ing black masks to dis­cuss the company’s work toward an afford­able, reli­able brain implant that Musk believes bil­lions of con­sumers will clam­or for in the future.

“In a lot of ways,” Musk said, “It’s kind of like a Fit­bit in your skull, with tiny wires” … Although Musk claims implants “could solve paral­y­sis, blind­ness, hear­ing,” as often what is miss­ing isn’t 10 times as many elec­trodes, but sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge about what elec­tro­chem­i­cal imbal­ance cre­ates, say, depres­sion in the first place.

Despite the long list of med­ical appli­ca­tions Musk pre­sent­ed, Neu­ralink didn’t show it’s ready to com­mit to any one of them. Dur­ing the event, the com­pa­ny did not dis­close plans to start a clin­i­cal tri­al, a sur­prise to those who believed that would be its next log­i­cal step.

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