The first invasive brain chip that Neuralink embedded into a human brain has malfunctioned, with neuron-surveilling threads appearing to have become dislodged from the participant’s brain, the company revealed in a blog post Wednesday.
It’s unclear what caused the threads to become “retracted” from the brain, how many have retracted, or if the displaced threads pose a safety risk. Neuralink, the brain-computer interface startup run by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Ars. The company said in its blog post that the problem began in late February, but it has since been able to compensate for the lost data to some extent by modifying its algorithm.
Sure, the possibilities are endless, so the first thing we’ll get that has any research money and effort put into it is how to turn it into an advertising platform and then maximally enshittifying it as soon as there’s a market share to speak of.
Yeah, that “if I could trust it” is pulling a lot of weight there. Like I decline fucking website cookies. Tech like that has way more invasive potential. Maybe they wouldn’t even need to advertise and could directly make you just buy things or give them free labour. You’d just need a module to make a person act like a normal happy person and then with that could potentially do anything “under the hood” without being detected. The possibilities are endless in the dystopian direction, too. Realistically, “if I could trust it” isn’t a requirement that can be met.
Oh, they’d never do anything as sinister as that. That may still be illegal (if the ultra-rich lobbying hasn’t taken care of that obstacle by that point).
Instead, they’ll just make sure that whatever essential core service they’ve built a monopoly in by just muscling the poorer competitors out of the race will cease to be offered to you if you refuse to hand all your money over to them.
See also: insulin, hospital treatment, etc. This is just a new playing field to find old prey in.