Have you ever dreamed of having an experimental micro-chip implanted in your brain as part of a human testing protocol?
No?
That sounds like a dystopian sci-fi horror movie?
Fair enough, but if you know anyone who *does* have a hankering for in-brain electronics, now's their chance. Elon Musk's Neuralink brain chip has officially been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for its first trials in human subjects.
Exciting, isn't it? What could possibly go wrong?
Just look at the Tesla's performance track record.
Spoiler alert, it's terrifyingly terrible, which is why Musk's big Neuralink announcement inspired a lot more mockery than celebration online.
Truly, Musk's big invention sounds like a horror-show in the making, at least if you're more toward the luddite side of things.
Musk touted Neuralink as a possible treatment for brain-related medical conditions like paralysis and blindness. But the product's track record so far isn't exactly comforting.
Neuralink was previously rejected for trials by the FDA because of the difficulty of removing the chip without damaging the brain and the possibility of the chip's wires migrating into people's brain tissue, which is basically the opening scene of a David Cronenberg film.
Musk has also been accused of having eugenics-related goals with Neuralink after he said the product could "solve a lot of brain-related diseases" and named autism and schizophrenia as two such "diseases" his chip could "solve." Musk has been accused of being pro-eugenics for other reasons, like his obsession with upping the birth rate.
Musk has also become synonymous with technical mishaps, after several deadly incidents involving his Tesla electric vehicles were followed by the "rapid, unscheduled disassembly"—Musk-speak for "explosion"—of his SpaceX company's Starship rocket.
And then, of course, there's Musk's tenure as CEO of Twitter, which has been nothing short of tyrannical to hear employees tell it.
Roll it all together, and Musk's track record and management style hasn't exactly inspired confidence in the idea of him implanting microchips into people's brains.
Twitter had a field day trolling him for the idea.
Further adding to the profound creepiness of Musk's Neuralink--it's track record with animal testing, which has resulted in the killing of roughly 1,500 animals and sparked a federal investigation into Musk's potential violations of the Animal Welfare Act.
This is surely all fine.
Nothing to worry about.
