Neuralink is coming, and it won’t be pretty. The device, which offers miracle cures for paralysis, also ushers in a new era of human-to-machine interface that has so far primarily been the dark fantasy of dystopian fiction.
The idea is a noble one, and it belongs to that purveyor of grand ideas, Twitter, Space X, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Twitter may usher in a free speech revolution, Space X promises to normalize consumer space travel, Tesla offers self-driving cars, but Neuralink offers an evolution into a new kind of human.
The human of Neuralink is neither human nor machine but a hybrid, and combination of thoughts and gears, for whom thoughts do not generate only from the mind, but can be generated externally, by a device plugged into the brain and affecting internal intellectual interactions.
The device is straightforward enough, and the implications for the disabled are rather staggering. Neuralink is a brain-computer interface, or BCI. At present, human beings interface with computers through the intermediary of both the human body and the computing device. We type with our fingers onto a keyboard, we see the computer screen with our eyes, the body remains separate from computer, and computer stands alone from human being.
With Neuralink, those intermediaries of body and device are done away with, and what remains is a direct connection between thought and…
Read the full story here: LIBBY EMMONS: Neuralink Seeks to Transform Human Beings Into Simply Another Data Port in the Internet of Things | Human Events | humanevents.com