Elon Musk Debunks Evolution
On the same day the story broke, the entrepreneur Elon Musk announced that one of his companies, Neuralink, was planning to save the human race by building a hard drive to be implanted in the brain. The goal, Musk explained, was to wire a chip into your skull, giving you the digital intelligence that is poised to surge far ahead of mere biological intelligence. Without that chip – that is, without fully incorporating artificial intelligence into ourselves – our species, Musk argued, is doomed. In the robotic, algorithm-dominated universe that lies just ahead, we will be restricted, if we survive at all, to a few protected zones, comparable to the steadily shrinking territories, little more than big cages, where the last chimpanzees and mountain gorillas eke out their existence.
“My faith in humanity has been a little shaken this year,” Musk declared, “but I’m still pro-humanity.” If this is what it means to be “pro-humanity”, what would it mean to be anti? Musk is a remarkable visionary who dreams that his neuroscience company, with its proposed “electrode-to-neuron interface at a micro level”, will cure such afflictions as dementia and paralysis. But there is a huge gap between, say, repairing spinal cord injuries by implanting electrodes in the brain and implanting an intelligence-enhancing AI chip, as Neuralink aims to do. The one restores an injured human to full mobility; the other alters the very nature of the human, at least as it has been conceived for millennia across a substantial part of the globe.
