The first person to be fitted with Elon Musk’s controversial Neuralink brain-computer interface has admitted the system could be hacked or misused.
Twenty-nine-year-old Noland Arbaugh was left paralyzed from the neck down after a diving accident at a Christian youth camp in June 2016. He volunteered for an experimental procedure that involved a computer-controlled “sewing machine” that implanted electrodes directly into his brain tissue.
The operation, which only required a local anesthetic, does not even require an overnight stay in the hospital, according to Neuralink CEO Elon Musk.
Noland says he’s not really that worried about the danger of being hacked, telling Joe Rogan, “At this point, at least the hacking, [the Neuralink interface] he really wouldn’t do much.”
He added: “Maybe you could see some of the brain signals, you could see some of the data that Link collects, and then you could control my cursor on my screen and make me look at weird things, but that’s about it,” reports the Daily Star.
Noland and the Neuralink programmers “taught” the system how to interpret his thoughts. He claims that moving the cursor on the screen by just thinking about moving the hand is actually faster than when someone physically moves the mouse.
He explained: “The signal is already being sent before you move your hand, your mind is saying ‘OK, it’s going to move your hand’, so the signal has to be sent all the way down and back in order for you to move. your hand, so the speed that it all happens [with Neuralink] it’s almost a bit preemptive.”
Once the system was operational, Norland, an avid chess player, challenged his computer to a game, leading Musk to praise human-machine interaction as “telepathy.”
Signals can be sent to the computer not only from the brain, but also in the opposite direction. Neuralink recently shared a video of a pig fitted with a prototype version of the device, which demonstrates how engineers can manipulate the animal’s legs using a computer.
“This is just the beginning,” Norland said. “The pig unconsciously raises its leg.”
He conceded that as use of the system becomes widespread, someone will inevitably try to exploit it. “Propaganda will take new leaps and bounds,” he added.
But Norland remains hopeful that checks and balances will be in place before Elon Musk’s cyborg system expands. “I hope they regulate it by then,” he continued.
“But as we’ve seen with things like AI art, they’re even trying to catch up. They’re saying ‘Oh, we should have thought of that before all this came out’.”
Another problem that needs to be solved is the issue of after-sales service. About 85% of the electrodes in Norland’s brain have already detached, so the system is not working at full capacity.
He hopes to receive an improved interface at some point in the future. He added: “They’re going to have to test whether surgery to replace Neuralink is safe at some point… so they’re going to have to do it on people who already have it. I imagine that kind of study might be something I’d be involved in.” “