Computer Chips in Our Brain… Are We Ready For This?

Now Elon Musk is an amazing entrepreneur.  The success he experienced with PayPal, Tesla, Space-X, etc. is remarkable.  However his latest endeavor may be going a bit too far for my taste.  The recent article is frighteningly titled – Elon Musk hopes to put a computer chip in your brain.  Who wants one? – Let me be the first to say, that I do not want one.

First the product.  The computer chip will be connected to wires with electrodes on them and will be embedded in a person’s brain by a surgical robot.  It would collect electrical signals sent out from the brain and interpret them as actions.  I won’t be naive enough to say there is little benefit to this, as researchers have been experimenting with things like this on rats and monkeys apparently for decades.  However, this would require brain surgery and I don’t see myself ever making the decision to have brain surgery when nothing is particularly wrong with my brain.  The risks simply outweigh the reward.

In all fairness, I am not the target candidate as the goal is for this to help individuals with an impairment.  Musk stated that for example a paralyzed person would still be sitting in a wheelchair, but perhaps they’d be able to drive it by thinking rather than using a joystick, and even control a prosthetic arm connected to the chair as well. 

As I stated, I believe Elon Musk is an amazing entrepreneur.  He could have sat back and coasted based on the 9 figures he received from exiting PayPal, yet he went “all in” again on Tesla, Space-X and others.  This demonstrates the passion to achieve success that lives inside an entrepreneur. I just believe that these types of endeavors should be undertaken by scientists and people in the medical field and not be driven by a technology entrepreneur.