The Neurocritic: The Mundane Spectacle of the Three Little Pigs

“This Neuralink is implanted in the region of the brain that uh where where the snout the snout is located which is actually quite a large part of the pig's brain.”¹

Elon Musk held a press event (product demo) to make grandiose claims about the Neuralink 1024-channel brain implant currently under development by his start-up.

Three pigs were unveiled, all healthy and happy: Joyce (the one without an implant), Dorothy (who formerly had an implant), and Gertrude, the star of the day with her snout boops. The crowd applauded, impressed at this monumental accomplishment. However, recording spike trains from the brains of animals is as old as time. And actually, wireless Implantable Neuroprosthetics in Pigs is so 2011...²

The title of this post in TNW said it best:

I was excited for Neuralink. Then I watched Elon Musk’s stupid demo

“Here’s the one fact you need to know: Neuralink's actual device is less capable than similar medical BCIs already on the market. The big claim to fame here is that Neuralink hopes one day to bring this technology to the masses.”

And really, invasive intracranial technology is likely to obsolete by the time the requisite advances in neural decoding would occur (if ever). As Kording Lab member Ari Benjamin told BBC News:

“Once they have the recordings, Neuralink will need to decode them and will someday hit the barrier that is our lack of basic understanding of how the brain works, no matter how many neurons they record from.

Decoding goals and movement plans is hard when you don't understand the neural code in which those things are communicated.”

Another winner in the snark department was MIT Technology Review, with:

Elon Musk’s Neuralink is neuroscience theater

“...Neuralink has provided no evidence that it can (or has even tried to) treat depression, insomnia, or a dozen other diseases that Musk mentioned in a slide. One difficulty ahead of the company is perfecting microwires that can survive the ‘corrosive’ context of a living brain for a decade. That problem alone could take years to solve.

The primary objective of the streamed demo, instead, was to stir excitement, recruit engineers to the company (which already employs about 100 people), and build the kind of fan base that has cheered on Musk’s other ventures...”

The cult of Musk is indeed cheering, in a rather credulous fashion (e.g., Why Neuralink Will Change Humanity Forever).

Footnotes

¹ It's actually correct that the representation of the snout in pig somatosensory cortex occupies a disproportionately large portion of the cortex.

² Borton et al. (2011) reported on their “complete neural prosthetic developmental system using a wireless sensor as the implant, a pig as the animal model, and a novel data acquisition paradigm for actuator control.” At that time, the system had 'only' 16 channels, but the field as a whole has evolved since then.

ADDENDUM (Sept 1, 2020): from Neuralink Progress Update, Summer 2020