Story highlights Ed Finn: What Elon Musk's Neuralink proposes is a world in which the mind can be edited like software

Finn: If it's possible to edit the mind, the bedrock of truth and lived experience will be irrevocably changed

Ed Finn is the author of "What Algorithms Want" (MIT Press). He is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the Department of English. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) The announcement of Elon Musk's newest foray into the future, Neuralink, opens up a new chapter in one of humanity's long-running dreams. What Neuralink proposes (and narratives like the recently-rebooted "Ghost in the Shell" have explored for decades) is a world in which the mind can be edited like software, changing memories, beliefs or personalities at the stroke of a keyboard. But we've learned a lesson from the thickening layer of computation in our lives, turning every toaster and toothbrush into a "smart" device: be careful what you wish for in networked intelligence.

Ed Finn

Musk and other entrepreneurs like him are building business models around their assumptions about the human brain: that it has an operating system, and its language of signals can be represented computationally. Bryan Johnson, the CEO of a startup called Kernel, hopes to use technology similar to Neuralink's to cure epilepsy and other brain disorders. He talks about the potential for " reading and writing neural code ." Musk spoke recently about increasing " the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output ." Both of these startups are focusing on a radical proposition: they want to write, not just read, in the language of the brain.

The vision is compelling and terrifying at the same time. Being able to correct the misfirings of our most enigmatic organ would be transformative for those who suffer from Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and a host of other diseases haunting the mind. On the other hand, consider the implications: if any brain can be rewritten, if all of us are running on the same intellectual code, what does that say for the notion of individuality, or identity, or free will itself? Once it's possible to edit the mind, the bedrock of truth and lived experience will be irrevocably changed, at risk of silent manipulation on a profound level.

What these companies are working on is the first, crude attempt to build a computational input-output system for the mind. Musk calls the interface he is hoping to build a "neural lace," borrowing the term from one of his favorite science fiction writers, the late Iain Banks. But science fiction writers, particularly the cyberpunk authors who inspired "Ghost in the Shell," have been dramatizing the risks of versions of this idea for decades.

Neal Stephenson's seminal novel "Snow Crash" is particularly evocative because it weaves the modern myth of the computational mind together with a much older story, the Tower of Babel. In "Snow Crash," hackers are susceptible to a kind of linguistic virus written in the ur-language of the brain itself. When that novel's Silicon Valley billionaire cracks the neural code, let's just say he doesn't use it to cure epilepsy.

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