







In late March, news broke that Elon Musk had embarked on a new project dedicated to linking human brains to computers. According to the Wall Street Journal, Musk had founded a company called Neuralink, which was developing a "neural lace" technology that would "allow people to communicate directly with machines without going through a physical interface." He promised on Twitter that within a week or so a long piece explaining the project in detail would be published on the popular blog, WaitButWhy.





At that point I wrote a blog post of my own, wondering how this new endeavor fit with Musk's previously expressed concerns about the existential threat artificial intelligence supposedly poses to the human species. Musk is among the few members of the techno-science elite—Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking are others—who have publicly warned that AI is developing so quickly that machines could soon become smart enough to take control of their own destinies, and ours. My blog post asked whether Neuralink represented a defense against the AI threat or a surrender to it. Along with many others, I looked forward to WaitButWhy's piece for answers.





The post, titled " Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future ," took a bit longer than a week to appear, and when it did its length was daunting: more than 36,000 words, or 200 pages, the size of a small book. Nonetheless dozens of readers reacted with ecstatic pleasure. Comments on the WaitButWhy web site labeled it "a masterpiece" "mind-bending," "insightful," "ingenious" and "awesome."





My reaction was considerably less positive. The tone of the piece was occasionally charming and the stick figure drawings were fun, but overall it seemed bloated, self-indulgent, and too cute by half. Its musings about the impacts and promise of technology in particular struck me as ill-informed, glib, and almost entirely lacking in critical judgment.









The author of the piece is a guy named Tim Urban, whose WaitButWhy posts on a variety of subjects have earned him a large and passionate following. He's celebrated for disproving the notion that the Internet has killed long-form writing. One of his fans is Elon Musk, who previously had reached out to Urban, inviting him to write about Musk's other ventures. Lengthy essays on Tesla and SpaceX followed. This latest piece was written with Musk's blessing and the cooperation of Neuralink's team of researchers.

Without further ado, then, here are three reasons I find "Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future" confirmation of a line from Proverbs: "In the multitude of words, there wanteth not sin."





1. Get to the fucking point already.

The explanation Musk had said would appear in a week or so arrived nearly eight weeks later. That wouldn't be a problem if it had been worth the wait, but it turned out Urban could have saved himself a lot of time and trouble if he'd cut the piece by two thirds. After introductory promises that what we'll be talking about here is nothing less than the destiny of humankind, there are long, long lectures on the evolution of the brain, the physiology of the brain, the development of language, and the evolution of communication technologies, consuming thousands of words and teaching us:





a) little that any reasonably educated person didn't already know, or couldn't easily learn from Wikipedia, and a) little that any reasonably educated person didn't already know, or couldn't easily learn from Wikipedia, and





b) nothing at all about Neuralink. b) nothing at all about Neuralink.





Urban is 32,000 words in before he gets round to describing what Neuralink is up to and why Musk thinks it could counter the existential threat from AI. This might explain why, outside of special-interest web sites, there's been a striking lack of response to "Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future." Commenters in more mainstream outlets, I suspect, simply didn't have the time or the patience required to digest it.





I've taken the time, which, due to a series of interruptions in my personal life (driving across the country and looking for a job, to name two), turned out to be much longer than anticipated. Let me begin, then, by answering the question I started with: Does Neuralink represent Musk's defense against the AI threat or his surrender to it?





The answer is, Both.

















Urban writes that he interviewed Musk in 2015 and asked if he would ever join the effort to build super-intelligent AI. “My honest opinion is that we shouldn’t build it," Musk said then. Two years later, his views had changed. " I was trying to really sound the alarm on the AI front for quite a while," he says, "but it was clearly having no impact [laughs] so I was like, 'Oh fine, okay, then we’ll have to try to help develop it in a way that’s good.'”





Developing AI "in a way that's good," it turns out, means finding a way to merge with it, literally. Human beings must incorporate AI into our brains, Musk believes, so that we can maintain a "tight symbiosis" (his words) with AI as it develops. If we don't, we run the risk that AI will evolve in ways antithetical to our interests and eventually decide to take charge, lest we interfere with its plans. AI must not come to see us as "other," Musk says. If it does, the best we can hope for is that it will treat us nicely, as we treat our pets.





So, Musk hasn't changed his mind about AI's existential threat, but he has decided that it can't be stopped, and that if we can't beat 'em, we'd better join 'em. His strategy is reminiscent of the old gangster adage, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Like his plan to colonize Mars, it reflects a dark vision of a dystopian future. He cautions as well that we ought not waste time acting to prevent that future—the emergence of super-intelligent AI will be upon us before we know it.





Information regarding how Neuralink hopes to achieve this "tight symbiosis" with AI emerges in the later sections of Urban's piece. Basically the idea is to develop a brain implant—Urban calls it a "wizard hat"—that would serve as a wireless interface with a "cloud-based customized AI system." Musk and Urban emphasize that such an implant represents only the next logical step along a path we've long been traveling. We're already cyborgs, they say, united with our machines. The difference here is that our machines will be inside us.





This "whole-brain interface," Urban writes, w ould AI wouldn’t be 'other'—it would be you…" allow us "to communicate wirelessly with the cloud, with computers, and with the brains of anyone with a similar interface in their head." The flow of information between your brain and the outside world, he adds, will be so effortless, "it would feel similar to the thinking that goes on in your head today." As Musk puts it, "If we achieve tight symbiosis,



All of this left me with the same basic misgiving I had when I heard Musk's initial Neuralink announcement: Shouldn't we be trying to become less cyborgian, rather than more?





2. Enthusiasm Unbound













Tim Urban has a bachelor's degree in political science from Harvard, but he apparently educates himself on the topics he chooses to write about. He possess a passion for study and an active curiosity, both excellent qualifications for a writer. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem especially adept at questioning his own assumptions, or especially inclined to seek out those who would question them.





multiple tipping points that will lead to unimaginable change." In the course of his essay Urban reveals himself to be an extreme technology enthusiast. He's convinced that the development of technology is the driving force behind the emergence of what he calls "the Human Colossus," which he depicts in one of his drawings as a stick figure standing on top of the Earth. He believes the development of "newer and better" technology is the species' "core motivation." The dramatic pace and scope of technological advance today causes him to conclude that we've arrived at the hinge of history. "The Human Colossus has reached an entirely new level of power," he writes, "—the kind of power that can overthrow 3.8-billion-year eras—positioning us on the verge oftipping points that will lead to unimaginable change."





















Two points this argument overlooks:





1) Enthusiasts have been declaring at least since the start of the Industrial Revolution that technology is on the verge of leading us to unimaginable change. In some ways it has, but it's also true that certain fundamental characteristics of human life—birth, death, disease, family, community, inequality, conflict, work—remain. The dream is that technology will create a utopia in which we'll be freed from all needs and cares. Urban doesn't promise this explicitly, but that's the implication. He's the latest enthusiast to believe that he was born at the dawn of a new millennium. It's a way of thinking you're special. Never mind that after several centuries of identical promises, we're still waiting for utopia to arrive.





does end up harming a lot of people," he writes. "But it also always seems to help a lot more people than it harms. Advancing technology almost always proves to be a net positive." People who think that advancing technology might not be a net positive simply haven't thought about it hard enough, he says. "New technology always comes along with real dangers and it alwaysend up harming a lot of people," he writes. "But it also always seems to help a lotpeople than it harms. Advancing technology almost always proves to be a net positive." People who think that advancing technology might not be a net positive simply haven't thought about it hard enough, he says. 2) Urban also shares with other enthusiasts the conviction that technological advance means progress. He makes an effort to be balanced on this score.





You have to wonder why Urban would get into this debate in the first place, and since he does get into it, why he didn't think harder about it himself. The purpose of the project he's writing about, after all, is to prevent technology from enslaving humankind. He acknowledges a number of existing problems associated with technological advance—the threat of nuclear war, automobile and airplane fatalities, the spread of fake news, cyberattacks, the enhanced ability of terrorist groups to recruit new members, and the ability of sexual predators to find new victims—but shrugs them off as trivial compared to technology's gifts. Any number of other technology-related problems might have been mentioned, some of which—global warming and the election of Donald Trump come to mind—pose threats to the future of the planet at least as plausible as a takeover by artificial intelligence.





Urban doesn't ignore the possibility that the Neuralink project, should it succeed, could present some undesirable side effects of its own. His essay includes a section titled "The scary thing about wizard hats." That he says "thing" when he means "things" is a sign he wants to get this out of the way quickly, and he does. He lists four potential scary things:



trolls might mess with the computer in your brain,

the computer in your brain might crash,

the computer in your brain might be hacked by people who want to steal your thoughts, and

the computer in your brain might be hacked by people who want to put thoughts into it.

Why the Wizard Era will be a good thing anyway even though there are a lot of dicks." Urban devotes all of 321 words to these problems before moving on to the next section, which is titled "





3. Trying On a Wizard Hat



