Neuralink & Why BCI Is The Next ChatGPT
Note from the author: The following is an article made without any correlation with the company Neuralink or Synchron.
“FDA Approves Human Trials” & “Neuralink Successfully Implants A Chip In Its First Living Human Brain”
The other day, I was listening to the news as I usually did, when I heard the headline that after the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) had given a startup their stamp of approval to go ahead with the testing of BCI in human volunteers, this company Neuralink had successfully implanted their first chip inside a living patient, Patient 0. That was when I started wondering, what was this chip, and why did it matter so much that it took over the headlines? Be prepared, because after you finish reading this entire article, your mind will probably be blown away.
What Is It
The chip I’m talking about you may have never even heard of, and it’s known as a brain-computer interface (BCI), which is a fancy way of saying a gadget that links our brains up with a computer. The particular one that appeared in the headlines is one currently being tested and manufactured by the company Neuralink founded in 2016. Surprisingly, it’s another startup by the world-ranking No.1 billionaire Elon Musk. He’s also behind famous companies like EV maker Tesla, private space company SpaceX, as well as The Boring Company (the one that digs tunnels). Anyway, this man has yet again taken aback people of another sector, and I believe it’s his best one yet.
His company made this microchip, the N1. Elon Musk claims that with it, “the future’s gonna be weird,” which is kind of an understatement.
The Potential for BCI Technology
Although currently, BCI technology is meant to help those with specific conditions like paralysis, it doesn’t mean that BCI doesn’t have anything to do with normal people, people like you. Despite its small size, its power is astonishing.
For disabled individuals, these cleverly crafted microchips could one day make blind people see the world and interpret speech from those who have trouble speaking. It could even help patients with a spinal cord injury ‘reconnect’ their brain with their body. That is possible thanks to one simple fact: Being paralyzed doesn’t mean your brain is too. Our body’s nervous system is essentially a system of wires that send and receive small electrical impulses, except those wires are replaced by their biological equivalent, the neuron. When we say a patient is paralyzed, it isn’t that the brain stops sending electrical signals, it’s only that the string of neurons along the route has been severed. BCI technology could potentially cure this, by firstly interpreting the brain’s electrical impulses (better known as brain waves), ‘translating’ them, sending them to another mechanism (implanted in the human spine), and stimulating the neurons there to make them move. Although it’s still a relatively uncertain technology, it may work, and if it does, it would improve millions of lives around the world.
So how does it matter to you in your everyday life? Well, a lot. Soon, we may be able to save and re-watch our favourite memories, in other words, we’ll have 100% photographic memory. It would also make sending text messages much faster, as typing with one’s mind would be a reality. Our brain capabilities may even be enhanced, like we could link up with a robotic arm or have increased IQ or something. There have already been successful examples of paralyzed people controlling a robot arm with their minds, so why can’t it be the case for healthy individuals as well? And all that is only the tip of the iceberg for BCI tech. Scientists could establish a database of skills, and we could ‘download’ the information from the cloud like our mobile devices. We may even upload our consciousness into the cloud one day, and possibly download our conscience into a new robot body. Who knows what the full potentials are for our brains and this BCI technology?
How It Works
Enough with the imagining, it’s time to get back to the present reality of BCI technology. If you needed a BCI back before Neuralink was a thing, there were a limited number of options. But neither which one a patient chose, it all relied on the same thing to get the job done.
What I’m talking about are the electrodes. They are the fundamentals of the entire BCI sector and are what researchers use to detect the brain’s electrical impulses (or small voltage changes) in practice. When it comes to these electrodes, the more the better. It’s like taking a picture; the more pixels you capture, the higher the resolution. The only thing different from what each different BCI company offers is the housing for these electrodes, which can come in many forms.
The one commonly used before Neuralink is the Utah Array. Invented by Richard Normann from the University of Utah, the Utah Array is made up of miniature electrode spikes attached to a square plate, and smaller than a fingernail. It has to be implanted through invasive surgery and needs to be connected to an external transmitter.
Then there is another kind of BCI which takes a different approach. It is the form of a cap except it’s full of wires and electrodes. It doesn’t require any surgery (isn’t invasive) and can cover the entire brain.
The Problems With Previous BCI Approaches
Although the Utah Array and BCI cap are okay, each has its problems, which kind of undermines their entire purpose. The Utah Array, despite having precise measuring, has a rather limited number of electrodes no more than a hundred, and the whole ‘external transmitter’ makes it visible that the patient had an implant, which isn’t exactly good for looks. Also, even if it’s a skilled neurosurgeon giving the patient an implant, any surgery has its risks, especially if it involves crucial organs like the heart and brain. When getting a Utah Array, there are risks like bleeding and tissue damage. The BCI cap is much safer, however, isn’t that precise in its readings, because it is reading your brain signals through the skull and flesh and hair.
The N1 Microchip & How It Solved Those Problems
It must have taken Musk and his neuroscience specialists to do their homework because they took a different approach from the traditional Utah Array or even the cap, and opted for a coin. Yes, that wasn’t a typo, they made a coin-sized contraption, holding everything a BCI would possibly need inside it, and much more value than any coin I’ve ever known.
Neuralink designed the N1 to be cosmetically invisible, all thanks to that coin design. So how does it transmit the information collected? It may be quite unbelievable, but it uses Bluetooth to connect with an app on your smartphone, eliminating the need for external transmitters or anything like that. Also, the battery is ‘included with the package,’ with a surprising whole-day battery life for its minuscule size. Musk even solved the challenge of charging a battery lodged inside a person’s skull -- by charging it wirelessly (possibly with a nightcap). The Neuralink equivalent to the Utah Array is “threads”, a metal sheet that sticks out of the N1, enabling a larger surface area. According to Neuralink’s website, there are “1024 electrodes distributed across 64 threads” and the threads are also “highly-flexible, ultra-thin” to “minimize damage during implantation and beyond.” Compared with the Utah Array setup, the threads offer roughly 10 times the number of electrodes, a milestone for BCI technology.
In addition to the N1 microchip itself, Neuralink even designed and manufactured a surgical robot, the R1. The reason they did this is because the threads are so thin (20 times thinner than a human hair!) that doing it by hand was impossible. Even the needle the R1 utilizes is thinner than the human hair!
The ideals that fueled the Neuralink chip development are modelled after the funny but interesting thinking of Elon Musk. He never is the first in any industry, however, he does manage to change it in a way that is quite irreversible. Think of what happened with his rockets. After uncountable hours of testing and experimenting, his company SpaceX managed to launch a rocket and make its different stages land back to earth, effectively making those rockets reusable. There is also his electric vehicle company Tesla. It changed the entire industry, accelerating mass EV adoption by making them seem cool, fashionable, and high-tech. The last of which was mainly achieved by Tesla’s self-driving tech, which has caused a ripple effect throughout the car industry. He’s trying to do the same with Neuralink, using old tech in a new chip, and becoming the ultimate innovator that fuels a long-awaited change.
Nonetheless, even with its aimed perfection, the Neuralink approach isn’t without its problems. Notably, no matter whether the surgery is by hand or by machine, it always has its risks. It was also an untested technology until recently it completed the first human implant, and according to Elon Musk on the platform X (formerly known as Twitter), the patient is recovering well. It’s a major step for Neuralink to achieve its goal of “bringing this technology from the lab into peoples' homes,” though the side effects of N1’s human implants are yet to be known. And on top of all that, even though lasting longer than the Utah Array, it can at most last an estimated few decades. That is still far short of the average lifespan of a human, meaning it cannot accompany a patient for their entire lifetime, at least without any more procedures.
A Competitor: Synchron
Each sector or industry, even a developing one, isn’t without competitors. And there’s one that uses a very different approach from both Neuralink, Utah Arrays, and BCI caps.
The company Synchron is experimenting with an invention utilizing already existing stent technology. Synchron’s Stentrode uses a stent-like structure that goes into the arteries of the brain. It doesn’t require any invasive surgery, and is cosmetically invisible from the outside, though does have two small external transmitters. However, although its greatest risk isn’t while getting the Stentrode, it may form blood clots a short time after. Synchron claims that after a certain period, new cells would start growing over the Stentrode, presumably lowering the risk of blood clots by a lot.
Why would you care if there’s some competitor of Neuralink lurking out there, when you’re objective is to learn more about Neuralink? Well, what I want to emphasize is although Neuralink may have a grip on the headlines for now, it doesn’t mean it’s the only BCI startup that has gained some groundbreaking achievements. There are so many competitors in the BCI sector, that as a reader, you shouldn’t be blinded by the echo chambers of social media and the internet as a whole to think that Neuralink is the only significant one.
Why BCI Is The Next ChatGPT
In the title of this article, I said that BCI will become the next ChatGPT. I believe this because it is very likely soon, the technology will be advanced enough to change everyone’s lives. Although BCI is still in its immature growing phase, just think of how quickly ChatGPT changed the lives of scholars, teachers, journalists, and a lot of other people’s jobs. From a database, ChatGPT evolved to become a powerful AI that can write essays, give cooking recipes from a picture, and even code.
How did ChatGPT become the artificial intelligence it is today? Even though it might seem to have occurred overnight, no result is a consequence of not investing time and effort. There had to be a time when developers constructed and grew its database, slowly, giving ChatGPT its foundation for what it is today.
I believe it’s the same with BCI. Shortly, possibly with something like a second-gen of the Neuralink chip, BCI would get the breakthrough needed to reach an equivalent status to ChatGPT. It will surpass anything we have ever created, including ChatGPT as it is more than a tool. It will be the connecting point of our brains and our technologies, the bridge advancing us to a much more powerful civilisation.
It may even connect us with artificial intelligence.
The Future & How BCI May Change It
In a scenario where the future houses a world where BCI becomes powerful, then what would it be like? It would mean that these chips can enable ‘telepathy’ to some extent. Think of it. Your mind is linked up with a smartphone, and the smartphone is linked up through the Internet of Things to a lot of other appliances. You could just think about dimming the lights, and they would dim on their own! Disabled people could finally speak with their families, evading the feeling they’re trapped without any means of communication!
It goes far beyond helping disabled people. It wouldn’t even just be a ChatGPT-level innovation. It will be something like the beginning of a new era where the powers of our human brains are fully unlocked, learning about our brains as scientists develop the technology. Some experts believe it will be a change so big it can be compared to when our ancestors stopped grunting and started talking. If we can have 100% photographic memory, and link up ourselves with smartphones, why can’t we link up with other humans? We could directly share emotions at a particular moment in time, letting them feel something that currently would be bound by the barriers of human speech and communication. It would be like throwing your emotions at someone even if it’s just for a brief 5 seconds.
There is also the possibility as I mentioned earlier, that we could transfer our minds into robot bodies, effectively becoming cyborg and possibly live for an extended time. Some have even talked about temporarily linking ourselves with robots, enabling scientists and researchers to explore planets in a robot shell in real time! Although it does sound kind of crazy, half a decade ago, it would have been a joke that a computer could write essays better than humans. We may even have the chance to integrate ourselves with that powerful AI, which would be a no-brainer if technology does advance to that point.
However, despite this seemingly utopia world where we finally become a higher-level civilization, it isn’t without its downsides, with some of them kind of relatable to what we have right now. Have a smartphone? Well, have you ever had the feeling that your old phone ran a teeny bit slower over the years? It may be that the company is hinting you to upgrade to its expensive new models. I’m not saying that is the case with any smartphone company, but let’s just say some sneaky BCI company decided that if you didn’t upgrade, it made your brain run slower! It would give these companies unchecked power over their users.
Ever experienced a hack? Whatever the answer might be, you might have heard of the toll hacks may give to an individual -- their bank details get stolen, their savings are gone, etc. In a world where people have brain chips, it would be hard to even ‘compute’ what a hack would look like. The hackers wouldn’t just have access to your bank card, but maybe even your thoughts and your deepest secrets! It would be an unthinkable invasion of an individual’s privacy. Everything you know, they would know too!
There are also questions on ethical issues regarding how a company would use user data. It is no secret that tech giants like Google have exploited user data for their own needs, like targeted ads and stuff. If they had access to your very thoughts, would it mean even more targeted cookies? The moment you think “Oh, the washing machine is broken,” an ad for them pops up in your mind! That would be quite scary. It’s still an area that remains uncharted waters, a blur that is undefined by governments and a blur in our minds.
But the biggest problem is, although you may be aware of the risks BCI can have, you would only have the choice to upgrade with everyone else. If your colleagues got the implant, and you didn’t, you cannot compete with them anymore -- they have like 1000 IQ, while you only have a normal 100 or so. It would be hard to find a good-paying and decent job by then without the brain chip. It will be exactly like how social media took over the world, and even the elderly are forced to keep up the pace, although they may not want to do so. If you don’t keep up, you’ll be “left behind” by society, quite grim if you think about it.
However, although most people may have the ability to upgrade, it’s not like everybody will be able to do so. Those who have trouble feeding themselves and their family fully wouldn’t have the financial background to support implanting a microchip into their brain. But as we said earlier, if you don’t have a chip, well sorry, because those good jobs are now unreachable even in that person’s dreams. Those who were already poor will only get even poorer as the financial gap widens. Maybe BCI companies would try to lower the cost, but even then, it would cost more than a couple thousand dollars (just think of how much currently an Apple iPhone costs!)
Conclusion
At the end of the day, BCI technology with Neuralink currently fueling the industry forward will certainly have an ‘un-computable’ impact on everyone’s lives, for better or for worse. It may be a great advancement in the medical field, and even boost our mental capabilities, though it may also pose a great risk to individual users. What do you think of this technology? Would you be willing to get it? Post your thoughts in the comments.
I hope you learned a lot about the brain-computer interface sector. Thank you for reading, and supporting my account, and consider liking and sharing this article so more people can learn.