I believe that by this time you have all already read the news that Elon Musk presented Gertrude, a piglet with neuroimplants, a project of his company Neuralink. Gertrude is not the only pig with implants - there are two more, as in the story of the three piglets.
A live demonstration of what this pig is doing, its neurological functions, was followed across the screen. He looks neither like Ghost in the shell nor like Borg. Gertrude, whose implant was implanted in a part of her brain to control her sense of smell, sniffed and ate food, while the neurological activity of the animal was monitored on the screen. In another pig, Dorothy, the implant was removed, which is also an important demonstration - that once implanted, the implant can be removed without consequences and that the animal is still healthy.
In July 2020, Musk announced that on August 28, he would show what Neuralink, his company founded in 2016, which develops implantable brain-machine interfaces, is doing.
This is not a new concept: in 2015, an interface was created, the brain-spinal cord interface, which managed to bridge the injury to the spinal cord of the macaque monkey. Even in 2016, something similar to what Musk is doing was done - a chip was implanted in the brain, which restored the person's ability to move their arms. There’s Neil Harbisson - a cyborg artist, who had one antenna built into his skull, and the media describes him as the first cyborg.
In the midst of the paranoia in vaccination chipping, which, according to conspiracy theorists, Bill Gates is trying to achieve, Elon Musk chose the ideal moment to present what is being done in Neuralink. Yes, it is about chipping animals first, with an aspiration to chip people, using a 23 mm long chip, with very thin wires, 10x thinner than the diameter of a human hair. The main goal of this grandiose project is the therapy of brain damage and various traumas, injuries that led to paralysis. This technology would allow the immobile to walk. It could also help people with ALS to walk and talk. I believe the late Hawking would be a supporter of this.
The design was tested on 19 animal species with 87% success. Elon explained that animals with implants are no different from those without, that they are healthy, and enigmatically, in his style he added "maybe I have an implant too, and vito you don't know".
The process of implants and electrodes in the skull, according to Musk, does not require general anesthesia, and the procedure lasting about an hour would be performed by a robot. A small scar would remain, and the procedure would be bloodless.
Neuralink also experimented not with one implant, but with two, and they concluded that this was also possible. Neuralink originally envisioned the implant to be behind the ear. But now the company says the implant will be small enough to be placed on the skull, making it virtually invisible under your hair.
“We’ve simplified that to something about the size of a big coin,” Musk said. "It goes into your skull and replaces part of the skull. And then the wires connect within a few inches, about an inch from the device," Musk explained.
“It’s like Fitbit in your skull with little wires,” he added, noting that the implant itself will charge on a battery like a smartwatch. “So you can use it all day and charge it at night and have full functionality,” Musk said.
The implant would be able to communicate with your smartphone via Bluetooth and potentially other devices, such as a mouse and keyboard, allowing you to control your thoughts with your devices. This will involve reading brain signals to determine what actions you are trying to perform, and then translating those actions into computer
But Neuralink makes no secret of their long-term goal of creating a symbiosis of man and technology. And here lies the problem: namely, it arouses our greatest fears - from the fact that some scientific discovery intended to help and improve the lives of people with trauma may in the future, mic by mic turn into a master plan for the destruction of humanity, to the very horror of thinking that people in the future they could be semi-machines. What do I think about that? I am no different from a lot of other people. One part of me says that I want it - to be an improved version of ourselves, which, in the end, should be our goal - to be better than ourselves. Better perception, motor skills ... or that, as in Altered Carbon, we can connect to the internet and surf with our brains. Because anyway, the human body is dilapidated, and the way to overcome evolutionary difficulties is to improve. I don’t know what the implant could actually give me and improve.
That posthuman future, is there room in it for semi-robotic semi-organic beings with a much longer lifespan, a much longer youth? We don't know, we really don't know, what this means and brings.
On the other hand, the other half of me doesn’t want that. Will the implant connect us with other people, their stories, problems, burdens, thoughts? Well, I don't need that, I'm sick of myself. He doesn’t want my part to be a modem, a borg, what if it happens that we can’t “unbutton” ourselves from the net, what if we become slaves (and as if we’re not already in a way). Imagine, your implant breaks down and then you can’t get off the web of information that overwhelms you? Now we can still turn off the computer and smartphone, if nothing else. How are we going to pay the bills then? What will be our penalties if we don't do something? Punishing with irritating sounds, electric shocks?
Unfortunately, there is no way at all to predict how far these discoveries will take us. I remember our robotics engineer, Maja Hadžiselimović, who once said that she would like to have an implant and that she doesn't care too much ... So, we are facing evolutionary challenges, what if this divides the human race into advanced, those who Have an implant on those who have decided to stay 100% organic? There is also a fear that people could be operated remotely via implants. Imagine that in the distant future we vote over implants and someone hacks the system?
Do we think that there would be no stigmatization of both, xenophobia and hatred? Should we all receive an implant?
Both options would, in my opinion, have a lot of vulnerability. How can implants be protected from hacking? Maybe no one wants to disrupt a Gertrude implant, but a voter - yes. Will quantum cryptography jump into this story? We already have optogenetics - controlling the brain with light. but it is not allowed to do something like this on people.
What I think will happen, for sure, is the strengthening of the paranoia of the movement that opposes science, the group that claims that all this is being done in order to enslave people, to subdue them, this is like an ace in the top ten to them. There will be even greater confusion, division in already difficult times, when science is barely heard and crazy ideas are gaining momentum.
My son was the sixth in a row in Serbia to have a cochlear implant. The implant cost 27000e and the operation was performed on the right ear. By installing this implant in the ear, an adequate replacement of 22,000 bipolar hearing cells that transmit sound directly to the hearing center in the brain was obtained. In order to perform implantation, it is necessary that the auditory cells on that ear are totally dead. The sound effect is slightly different until the patient learns to listen. All the sounds that the implant places on the brain are of the same intensity. Both sounds from a distance and from near will be of the same volume. By practicing listening, it is quickly overcome and becomes like the original sound of a normal healthy ear. Implants have been installed in our country for 15 years. They work for hearing in Belgrade, Zemun, Novi Sad ...