The dream — or nightmare — of virtually instantaneous human-machine communications is a long-standing science fiction trope. Japanese aficionados have feasted on the concept for 30 years, since the publication of "Ghost in the Shell," a story of police and political intrigue in a world in which human beings and computers are networked and the heroine is a cyborg — a human brain in the body of a robot.
The real world took a step closer toward that vision this week with the announcement by Neuralink that it has developed a robot that could implant threads deep inside the brain to facilitate communications between humans and machines. The prospect of a genuine link between the two remains a distant prospect, but we must as a civilization begin to grapple with the legal and ethical dimensions of this future and ensure that it proceeds in ways that advance, and not undermine, our interests as a species.
Neuralink announced it has developed a technique that allows it to insert a bundle of threads, each about the quarter of the size of a human hair, next to neurons in the brain. The threads are filled with sensors that capture information from a large number of brain cells and transmit that information, wirelessly, to a computer for analysis. Eventually, information will flow back and forth between computer and human. In one conceptualization, the threads would send information to a chip, which would transmit it to an external Bluetooth-like device behind the ear.