A Wellcome Email From Your Friends at Neuralink
Neuralink: A Preliminary Account
Dear Ms. Catherine Majthenyi
Head Programmer
PRISONERSCINEMA Film Festival
It is only Neuralink, not a temporal pincer movement. Neuralink is not where the “long gone horse and rider have went, are going, or will Go.” And it’s not pain. It is, rather, the reduction thereof. It’s not thalidomide, we have determined this in our labs. It is not the dawning of a pale digital ontology, which our white papers argue has arrived already. It’s not what Heidegger points you towards, that which Barthelme reminds us, is dread. It will not prevent your audience from “ever trusting anything as new ever again.” It is unlikely to perforate temporal security of sequentiality. It is not, we assure you, “Handing the keys of human cognition over to nothing more secure than UHF radio waves,” Catherine. Nor will Neuralink be irremovable. Neuralink will not be remotely controlled by quantum computers, not for the foreseeable few years. Neuralink was not Alex DeLarge’s Ludovico treatment; rather obviously it wasn’t then invented. Neither was the Roman Emperor Caligula a Neuralink user. Neuralink has nothing to do with Gore Vidal or his fellow pornographer Khan Tusion or the Arizona Republic’s Bill Goodykoontz. None of these things are Neuralink. It is not a “predestined election of telepathic breast perception,” insofar as even our brightest minds apprehend said concept. We can assure you Neuralink won’t encourage “a randy lecher” to “Link his hostile step-daughter’s face over Whitney Stevens’ self-deprecating fear-smirk as she is defiled by The Midnight Prowl.” That’s not even remotely how the technology works. That is definitely not our vision. Neuralink is not smut. Neuralink will not “give us everything we think we want while insulating us from all we’d rather not contemplate.” Not even remotely scalable. We do not lithograph directly onto the cerebellum. We lithograph onto wafers. Good, that’s established. Neuralink is not responsible for man’s inability to dwell poetically. It is certainly not “a motor hotel in Dib where the mudmen live.” We don’t even know where Dib is, or what mudmen are, or why these poor mudmen want to live in a motor hotel.
What we can pin to the specimen board: 1) Neuralink will help spinal cord injury victims plus also neurologically-damaged individuals. 2) By augmenting human computational power, Neuralink gives humanity a gambler’s chance against the “summoned demon” of super-intelligent AI we’ve trained with our own data sets to usurp us, evolutionarily.
While Rational criticism of our company is Wellcome, irrational criticism too often creates the crank’s manifesto preceding the mass shooting. This dark outcome can be avoided by remembering Neuralink’s adherence to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Recommendation on Responsible Innovation in Neurotechnology, which means a commitment to Promoting Responsible Innovation by:
· Prioritizing safety assessment
· Promoting inclusivity
· Fostering scientific collaboration
· Enabling societal deliberation
· Enabling capacity of oversight and advisory bodies
· Safeguarding personal brain data and other information
· Anticipating and monitoring potential unintended use or misuse.
We ask that you defer to the legitimate advocacy of neuroscientist Rafael Yuste’s NeuroProtection agenda widely adopted in what remains of Europe.
We also ask that you defer to the Four Human Rights advocated for by ETH Zurich neuroethicist Marcello Ienca, Human Rights of yours that Neuralink wishes to respect in your unique situation as a disgruntled (dangerous?) early-adopter of our beta model! We’d lie to assure you you’re entitled to:
1. The right to cognitive liberty
2. The right to mental privacy
3. The right to mental integrity
4. The right to psychological continuity
Fine Regards,
The Neuralink Aggrieved Party Outreach Team
Image by Andrew Brenza