IIt's been a great year for neurotech, except for the people who fund it. In August, a tiny brain implant was successfully decoded Inner speech of paralytic patients. October's eye restored vision patients who have lost their vision.
It would be better, experts say, if the most prominent investors in the space—tech moguls such as Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman—were less interested in uploading their brains into computers or merging with AI.
“This greatly distorts the debate,” said Marcello Ienca, a professor of neuroethics at the Technical University of Munich. “There are long-term concerns about the narratives they use.”
Michael Hendricks, a professor of neurobiology at McGill, said: “Rich people enamored with these stupid transhumanist ideas” are confusing public understanding of the potential of neurotechnologies. “Neuralink is developing legitimate neuroscience technologies, and then Elon Musk comes along and starts talking about telepathy and stuff like that.”
Silicon Valley companies have increased investment in neurotech in recent years, and in August Altman co-founded Merge Labs, a competitor to Musk's Neuralink. Apple and Meta are working on wearable devices that use neural data: bracelet for Meta, EEG headphones for Apple.
At the moment, according to Ienka, most of the major US technology companies have devoted research to neurotechnologies: Google's neural mapping. projectfor example, or Meta's acquisition of Ctrl Labs. “Neurotech games are really going mainstream,” he said.
These technologies have significant short-term potential for treating a variety of neurological problems, from ALS to Parkinson's disease and paralysis. The problem is that their investors don't always see curing diseases as the end goal.
Musk has said Brain-computer interfaces like Neuralink will one day allow people to “upload [their] memories” and “download them into a new body or robot body.” Altman, although calmer on this issue, on the blog about the upcoming “fusion” of humans and machines, which he suggested would occur either through genetic engineering or by connecting an “electrode to the brain.” (In 2018, Altman invested at a “100% fatal” brain uploading startup, paying $10,000 to join the waitlist.)
To be clear, technologies like brain uploading are still a long way off, Hendricks and Ienka say: in fact, they're probably not possible, at least in the foreseeable future. “Biological systems are not like computers,” Hendricks said.
However, some are concerned that far-fetched narratives could block real advances in health care – for example, by pushing regulators to take sweeping, fear-driven measures. laws.
Kristen Matthews, a mental health privacy lawyer at US law firm Cooley, said all this “sci-fi hype could trigger regulation that would hinder the development of technologies that could otherwise actually help people who need help.”
“This is completely unrealistic and hides the real issues,” said Hervé Schneeweiss, a neuroscientist who presided a group of experts advising UNESCO on global neurotechnology standards, adopted on Wednesday.
The real frontier of neurotechnology is best understood as encompassing three distinct categories. There are medical devices such as speech decoding brain implants or Neuralink electronic devices. chip this allowed a man with a spinal injury to operate a computer. There are consumer wearables, a new frontier that includes devices like EEG in-ear headphones or, more broadly, glasses like Apple's VisionPro, which track your eye movements.
There are also sci-fi projects such as Nectom, a brain-uploading program. launchor Corewhich aims to link the brain to the computer, or Neuralink's recent efforts to trademark name Telepathy.
The first category promises the most powerful advances: restoration of vision and hearing, treatment of neurodegenerative diseases or, possibly, psychiatric diseases. disorders. But these devices are extremely tightly regulated – like all medical devices – and are much less advanced than the more hyped reports sometimes suggest. Recent paper in Frontier in Human Neuroscience condemned the “misleading propaganda” surrounding brain-computer interfaces, saying the technology is still in its infancy.
The second category, consumer wearables, presents a more complex regulatory challenge. Although there have been numerous reports of privacy-invading brain-measuring devices – such as the much-debated Chinese EEG helmets that are allegedly monitoring construction workers from fatigue or students to focus – it is much less clear that they ever worked or posed a real risk to surveillance.
“The evidence-based reliability of the systems is very limited. There are very few repeatable studies,” Ienka said.
Hendricks says devices like the EEG headphones now sold by companies like Emotiv, for example, are unlikely to be effective surveillance tools because the data is too noisy and, like lie detector signals, unreliable in some cases.
Chneyweiss, however, argues that they raise real concerns: “If they were used in the workplace, they could track how tired your brain is or something like that, and the data could be used to discriminate.”
Meanwhile, science fiction applications often rely on the assumption that healthy people will voluntarily receive invasive brain implants – for example, to communicate with computers or move objects with the power of thought.
This is unlikely. If this were to happen, and if technology were to advance, it could well raise concerns about surveillance. But Hendrix said it's highly unclear whether such surveillance would be significantly more useful than the vast amounts of granular data—browsing histories and purchase data—that big tech companies already have.
“We have so many ways to influence people through language and simple visuals,” Hendricks said. “I don't think that [brain implants] will take a long time to catch up.”
As for brain booting, Hendricks said the idea came from people in technology who “think too much about computers,” convincing themselves that the brain is hardware and personality is software that can be run on it – either a computer or a robot.
“If I could actually be uploaded into a computer to make me immortal, then I'd be happy to just kill myself right now while someone tells me, 'Oh, you're living in that metal box over there,'” he said. “But I don't think many people would take that bet. I think instinctively we know it's bullshit.”
