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Ethical Concerns Raised Over Elon Musk’s Neuralink

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Interesting segment on ABC’s GMA show delved into billionaire Elon Musk’s cutting edge brain technology–Neuralink implants–that are supposed to revolutionize how we deal with neurological disorders. The GMA segment came against the backdrop of news reports that the first Neuralink implant on a human had taken place.

The guest, Dr Leah Croll described Neuralink technology thus (0:38): “Basically this is the concept of using a brain machine interface to help people. Neuralink is a device that gets implanted within the brain, and then reads the electrical signals that our brain cells are constantly sending to one another, and then it can translate those signals into actions outside of the body, in this case the ability to control a computer or smartphone.”

Dr Croll added that this is by no means novel technology saying, “It [Neuralink] is absolutely not the first player on this field. This area of research really started back in the 90s but in recent years the pace of that research has just accelerated immensely…”

But as we know all too well, with every cutting edge technology, there are bound to be negative effects, and to that, Dr Jen Ashton popped this million dollar question (1:50): “Physically, what are the risks, and ethically, what are the risks that you can see with this type of technology?”

Dr Croll responded that because we are dealing with brain implants here, we should treat Neuralink procedures as any other brain surgery, and worry about all the physical risks we normally associate with such surgeries–bleeding, damage to brain tissue etc. As for the ethical concerns raised by Neuralink, she said (2:26): “When we get into the ethical realm, that raises so many questions because we are in completely uncharted territory here. There’s concerns about the data that this device is collecting and how secure it might be, there’s potential for privacy concerns to come into play, bad actors could potentially come into play and hack these devices. So there’s a lot of discussions that the medical community is going to have to have with the legal community, the ethical community, the technological community, so we can work together to figure out how we regulate something like this.”

Any reasonable person watching this GMA segment would conclude that even though Elon Musk’s Neuralink technology, on its face,exhibits the potential for significantly improving how we treat neurological disorders, the technology comes with serious ethical concerns that necessitate guardrails before proceeding.

This also means time has finally come for the government to come clean regarding the plight of targeted individuals, who have complained for decades about being the subjects of these “mind reading” technologies while being laughed out of the room as some crazy conspiracy theorists. This GMA segment establishes conclusively that we do indeed have technology that can read minds and more importantly, that this research has been going on since the 90s. It’s also worth pointing out that while Dr Croll correctly insists that there must be guardrails put in place before this technology is deployed to the public, targeted individuals have endured this very invasive technology with zero ethical guardrails. Should they be compensated for the irreparable harm this invasive technology has subjected them to? Should Congress hold hearings into government research projects in this field such as DARPA, to ensure that there have not been abuses? These are the questions one hopes the media will pose to the government as we delve deeper into the Neuralink era.

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