Humanity quietly crossed a threshold this week when Elon Musk announced on X that the first person has received a Neuralink brain implant. “Initial results show promising neuron spike detection,” said Musk, later adding that the first Neuralink product is called Telepathy, which enables “control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking.”
Initial users of Neuralink, which Musk co-founded, will be people who have lost use of their limbs, giving a veneer of altruism to what is actually a radical project to merge humans with machines. “Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer,” Musk wrote on X. “That is the goal.”
But that’s not really the goal. The goal is to usher in a transhuman future by creating human-machine hybrids that will be “superior” to natural or non-enhanced humans. Musk and other tech futurists — some 40 other companies besides Neuralink are working on computer-brain interfaces — don’t exactly describe what they’re doing this way. It sounds creepy. Much more innocuous sounding to say you’re just helping disabled people with exciting new digital technology.
In reality, what Musk and Neuralink are doing amounts to building a second Tower of Babel or a revisiting of the serpent’s offer in the Garden of Eden: You will not surely die, you will be as gods. They want godlike intelligence and, ultimately, eternal life — and they’re willing to tinker with the human body and mind, deconstruct and reconstitute it even, if that’s
