IS ELON MUSK’S NEURALINK A SCIENCE FICTION HORROR SHOW OR THE SALVATION OF HUMANITY?

Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast

David J Puder

Science, Health & Fitness, Medicine

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2019

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One of the more controversial components of the Neuralink presentation was Musk’s inclusion of his beliefs about the future of humanity and artificial intelligence. During the press release he stated one of his goals was to create the ability to achieve a “full symbiosis with artificial intelligence,” essentially removing the “existential threat of AI” which he believes will one day “leave us behind” (Neuralink, 2019). This goal has been met with a bit more skepticism, especially by the national media, than the medical applications of Neuralink’s BMI. Forbes describes it as “a bit more fantastical” than the company’s primary goal of treating brain disorders (Knapp, 2019). Other publications have been far less kind, such as The Atlantic, which published its coverage of the Neuralink press release with the title: “Elon Musk’s Next Wild Promise: If someone is going to revolutionize what it means to be human, do we want it to be a tech titan?” (Mull, 2019). Although the New York Times surmised that “one of the biggest challenges may be for his scientists to match his grand vision,” (Markoff, 2019), it serves as a good example of what most major media outlets have chosen to do: stick to the facts.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy podcast, with over 32,000 mental
0:14.2	professionals listening every episode.
0:17.2	Why?
0:18.2	Because we need to stick together to survive a mental health field.
0:20.8	I'm here to talk about getting rid of burnout, increasing jobs satisfaction, and feeling
0:25.5	like an expert in what you do.
0:31.4	On today's episode, Dr. Cummings and I will be talking about brain machine interfaces,
0:36.6	also called brain computer interfaces and mind machine interfaces.
0:42.7	Recently, Elon Musk talked about this in a neural link announcement in which he talked
0:49.8	about this new device that they're going to put into the brain with a thousand connections
0:55.7	that can go both in and out of the brain, meaning that it can communicate with your neurons
1:01.4	and your neurons can communicate with potentially a machine, a computer.
1:07.6	And in this podcast episode, we're going to dive into some of the history of things that
1:13.8	have already been put in the brain, like deep brain stimulators, we're going to talk about
1:18.8	trans-magnetic cranial stimulation, which gives us knowledge about how targeting different
1:26.9	sites of the brain are going to help in things like depression and OCD.
1:30.3	We're also going to be talking about specific pathways which, in the future, we may target
1:37.8	with machines like this, OCD, depression, and schizophrenia, so we'll go through specific
1:44.8	pathways and how we can target those in different diseases.
1:49.1	Dr. Cummings and I have no conflicts of interest, either with psychopharm companies or with
1:57.6	any of these companies like neural link, and we'll also talk a little bit about other
2:02.2	companies that are competing for this spot, so it's not just about one company.
	...

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