Now to parallel the probing of space with SpaceX, his private spaceflight company that sends satellites and people to space, multi-billionaire tycoon Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink, recently received U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance to probe into the mind space of humans.

The FDA approval “represents an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people,” Neuralink said in a tweet.
I have to ask, would it be a good thing for the owner of a social networking site, where users broadcast short posts, to have control of a chip in someone’s brain?

This approval also arrives as Neuralink faces federal scrutiny and investigation following reports about the company’s animal experiments. It is alleged that the company was critically botching surgeries on monkeys, pigs and sheep, which resulted in animal deaths. In one instance, the company implanted 25 out of 60 pigs with the wrong-sized devices. All the pigs subsequently died.

On several occasions, Musk has told employees to imagine that they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster. These hack jobs were due to the rushed schedules and pressures Musk put on the staff to receive his FDA approval.

Softening the impact of mind control, Musk manipulates public opinion for compliance by proclaiming that his brain implants could cure a range of conditions from obesity, autism, depression and schizophrenia. This brain implant is hoped to help paralyzed people walk again and cure other neurological ailments.

He also boasts about enabling web browsing and telepathy. He made headlines late last year when he said he was so confident in the devices’ safety that he would be willing to implant them in his own children.

Apart from colonizing Mars, the billionaire believes he will one day be able to physically plug the human brain to artificial intelligence. This is why he started Neuralink in 2016. At this point he has crossed compliance and entered controlled acceptance.

With access to the sensitive data of the 330 million active users of X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink could develop invasive neurotechnologies, which are implants able to read and manipulate people’s brains by influencing their behavior, memories, thoughts and feelings.

The warning of this brain implant goes way beyond an oily discharge that follows pharmaceutical ads on television. Side effects associated with deep brain stimulation bypass include confusion, trouble concentrating and headaches, seizure, stroke and death.

There are also concerns with hardware complications. The implants may also cause scarring around their implantation sites, which could lead to other health problems such as seizures or paralysis.

In the 1930s, the horror of the frontal lobotomy began with an ice pick implanted into the brain. It was the most brutal, barbaric and infamous medical procedure of all time. “To help people,” an icepick was hammered through the eye socket into the brain and wiggled around a bit.

A Portuguese neurologist, who drilled holes into the human skull before insertion, performed the first frontal lobotomy.  When an American psychiatrist, not a neurologist, adapted this procedure, using an icepick and hammer, the word “lobotomy” became widely known.

This was one of the biggest disasters in modern medicine and a frightening example of what happens when a new treatment is owned by someone with low moral standards and put to use before it has been extensively tested. Take away all the issues with the physical and mental aspects of brain implants, also referred to as neural implants, and think about “brainjacking.”

Brainjacking is a cyberattack in which a hacker obtains unauthorized access to neural implants in a human body. Hacking surgically implanted devices in a human brain could allow an attacker to control the patient’s cognition and functions, potentially resulting in drastic consequences.

According to the Oxford Functional Neurosurgery, medical implants become vulnerable to various cyberthreats. Almost every connected device can be hacked. A cyberattack compromises the victim’s device and controls its operations. The most concerning issue for the health-care sector is cyberattacks on implanted medical devices. Cybersecurity experts state that certain connected medical devices implanted in a human’s body or brain could be hijacked, hence brainjacking.

Brainjacking could cause severe damages to human implants, including interruption of stimulation, draining implant batteries, inducing tissue damage, information theft, impairment of motor function, alteration of impulse control, modification of emotions and induction of pain.

Because the same person who owns one of the leading companies in the world producing neurotechnologies for implantation in the brain is also the owner of a social media platform that collects sensitive data on millions of users, this fact alone should make us all a bit worried.

Whoever gets involved with neurotechnologies to scan and manipulate the human brain should be operating in the complete realm of ethically truthful and honest. That’s not the case with Elon Musk. What we are talking about here is an eccentric individual who already uses his X feed to act like the oligarch of the web.

On paper, there is no connection between Neuralink and X. They are just owned by the same person. Tweets can help a neurotechnology business that wants the capability of influencing the human mind. They reveal a lot about people. They not only give hints of political and religious beliefs, but also thoughts, emotions and moods. This process would tell the analyst things, such as if they tend to be more positive or negative, a risk-taker or fearful.

Using artificial intelligence, it is possible to analyze the feelings of a person from their verbal language. This process, called natural language processing for sentiment analysis, could derive psychological information from a person through their tweets with a fair degree of statistical reliability.

We are no longer talking about helping humans who are impacted by mental and neurological problems, who could benefit greatly from such technologies. The true goal is to market a device that can be used to record intracranial activity and optimize mental processes. This is the new world order that a reckless tycoon, holding an icepick and hammer, is nudging us into living in.  — dbA

You can find more of the unfiltered insight and the Art of Dan Abernathy at www.contributechaos.com.
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