| I am also an optimist and a techno-utopian... BUT: 1. This has not been tested on a single human yet, as it has no FDA approval. 2. Preliminary trials in full quadripilegic patients are several away (these are also not yet approved) 3. Should these trials succeed, this will still not be available as an elective procedure for healthy people (that will take much more time) 3. The skull exists and is a hard barrier that is not going away. A decade or so from now, should this be approved as an elective procedure, patients will have to have a hole drilled in their skull (note that most people find LASIK invasive, even after decades of successful surgeries) 4. Patients will also have to become comfortable with thousands of fibers being inserted (albeit in a minimally invasive way) through brain tissue by an automated surgical robot. 5. Should the procedure be successful, patients should finally, at long last, be able to control a mouse, or keyboard, or smartphone using their brain and imagining the movements instead of using their hands. There is perhaps, a cyberpunk future where crime syndicates mine Bitcoin in the brains of their victims, where malware pipes gigabytes of extremist political memes in seconds through the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of young adults. Maybe that will come one day, but this technology is only using the signals generated by the brain to control a mouse and keyboard. This existed twenty years ago in chimpanzee studies. The real innovation here is in materials science and surgery. This is amazing multi-disciplinary science in the pursuit of advanced medicine, and we should be applauding it for what it is. So, thank you Elon for funding this -- but more importantly, thanks to all the scientists, researchers, and engineers who have dedicated their lives the advancement of our science and medicine. I will not be electing to undergo this surgery in the future. |