(CBR) Your brain, with a USB-C port in it. That’s Elon Musk’s vision for Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI). In a controversial July 2019 white paper he claimed that his company Neuralink had taken a huge step towards building a “scalable high-bandwidth BMI system” that would let the human brain “stream full broadband electrophysiology data” to a network, using a combination of ultra-fine polymer probes, a neurosurgical robot that sews them into the brain, and custom high-density electronics.
A “single USB-C cable provides full-bandwidth data streaming from the device” the paper noted: the device having been stitched, in theory, to your cerebral cortex. Neuroscientists were varying shades of intrigued, appalled and dismissive: the custom hardware would only pick up noise, they suggested: interpretation of brain waves simply wasn’t that advanced; the ethical issues were pronounced; the body would reject this level of intervention; where was the peer review of the paper?