Elon Musk Reveals Computer Chip Brain Implant

This…might not turn out well.

Popular conspiracy theories often warn about brain chips (or surreptitious chips in everyday objects). They’re silly. They’re comical. They’re extremely unlikely.

Until a celebrity industrialist outright calls for a brain-machine interface and inserting “threads” of electrodes through brain tissue. Can’t see anything going wrong with that…

Of course, it sounds promising – Elon Musk described it “like a Fitbit in your skull,” about the size of a large coin, and the surgery won’t require general anesthesia. The whole process will be performed by a robot in less than an hour.

Any other method is impractical (that is, more impractical).

“If this is done by neurosurgeons, there’s no way it can scale to a large number of people,” Musk said. Hence the robots.

What could possibly go wrong? 

If successful, the implant could restore limb function, improve eyesight and hearing, and even treat Parkinson’s. The potential is there.

It’s just, you know, a computer chip in your brain.

Chad Bouton, a vice president of advanced engineering at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, noted that “There will be ethical and safety issues to work through, and for a long time, it's likely that you'll have to have a real medical need to access this technology.”

Understatement of the century.

Even if Musk and co. fight off the red tape, they’ll have to deal with an extremely skeptical public. Because again, it’s a computer chip. In your brain.

Read more about this here.