Thread by @anilkseth

1/🧵 Lots of fuss and bother about the announcement from @neuralink today about having implanted their tech in a human brain for the first time. bbc.co.uk/news/technolog…

2/ This technology is definitely advancing, and there are many exciting implications, especially in medicine: restoring function in people with paralysis, or after loss of vision, or some other sense, &c. And its great to have more players in this field to drive progress.

3/ But it's important to stress that there's nothing new here, at least not yet. Other groups have been developing brain implants for decades, and have demonstrated many more impressive results than today's highly prelimary announcement.

4/ Last year, researchers in Lausanne helped a paralysed man walk (), and Stanford scientists used a brain computer interface (BCI) to decode speech in someone with motor neurone disease ()nature.com/articles/s4158…
nature.com/articles/d4158…

5/ One of the developments I've been most impressed by comes from Jens Schouenborg at @lunduniversity whose group is developing electrodes that sway flexibly as the brain moves, like a kelp forest swaying as waves come in and out neuronano.se

6/ When Musk speaks, the world listens. Perhaps his engineering nous will indeed give the field escape velocity. @neuralink's precision surgical robotics, large numbers of neural contacts, and huge amounts of compute leading may well make a big difference.

7/ But BCIs are as much a scientific problem as they are an engineering challenge, if not more, and it's not evident that the hard-charging engineering approach of @elonmusk will smoothly transfer over.

8/ After all, nobody wants a 'rapid unscheduled disassembly' happening inside their own heads

9/ There are also ethical issues. Medical research just has to proceed slowly. @neuralink has already gotten into hot water at least once () - though the present studies did have full FDA approval, so hopefully lessons learned there.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb…

10/ And while most BCI companies focus on medical applications, @neuralink paints a picture of a future in which all of us might use implants to enhance ourselves in various ways - a sci-fi scenario riven with ethical quandaries.

11/ But how likely is this really? Will I really undergo elective brain surgery so that I can doom-scroll with my mind alone? I already have effective brain-world interfaces: e.g., my hands, and my mouth. A new hole in the head just seems excessive.

12/ And will people be comfortable - indeed should they be comfortable - giving companies direct access to their neural data? This raises the worrying prospect of both remote mind-reading and, even more so, remote mind-control.

13/ Maybe it's a failure of imagination on my part, but while I am super excited about the medical potential - & fully support @neuralink's efforts here (if they do it right) - I'd rather unlock human potential in other, less invasive (literally, and in terms of privacy) ways.

14/end FWIW here's my bit on @TalkTV #PrimeTime (top of the show; ) and a longer segment on @BBCNews #Newscast pod (from min. 13; )watch.talk.tv/watch/replay/5…
bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0…