The Truth about Brain Chips.

you know that having a brain chip could allow someone who doesn't even have eyes to see for the first time ever we're so caught up in these monthly Tech releases oh there's a new laptop oh there's a new iPhone that sometimes it's hard to see when there's something so much bigger right in front of us and potentially ready for humans within a few months so this is what you need to know about brain chips The Good the Bad and the Ugly now just to get the obvious question out of the way the only reason that

any kind of brain implant is even possible is that our brains are basically naturally occurring electronic devices every single action that you take comes from your brain sending electrical signals through your nervous system to your various body parts and so what neuroscientists realized is that by inserting electrodes into our brain that can both record and send these pulses of electricity and then connecting those electrodes to a chip that can relay information to and from your brain we can effectively restore and even enhance our existing brain function that's it that's how a brain chip works so

what's good about them this is the neuralink N1 it's a very real brain chip that's already worked with monkeys and pigs and it doesn't take very long seeing it in action to realize this tiny thing could be about to change millions of people's lives for the better procedure is kind of freaky this neuraling company have basically built a dedicated robot the R1 solely for the purpose of precisely planting over a thousand electrodes into various parts of your brain automatically keeping track of the fact that this is a living organ with constantly moving targets then the

chip which is about the size of a coin and connected to the electrodes by wires 20 times thinner than human hair is planted not inside the brain like the electrodes but actually in place of a small part of your skull kind of like two seconds how hot can it be it's any brain surgery [Music] hey not too shabby but the good news is that this makes the N1 completely invisible from the outside of your body while being able to charge wirelessly from the surface of your skin and because it's automated by Machine the entire operation

is done in less than 60 minutes and so just so you understand the entire picture there are two strong reasons why people are pushing for brain chips to become a thing the first is to restore the brain to potentially cure people with brain related conditions so let's say that you've been completely blind from birth your brain works but your eyes or your optic nerves don't what the N1 chip allows you to do is to I'm not even exaggerating here stick a camera onto your head link that camera feed to your smartphone which translates the video

data into brain language the phone sends that data to the chip in your skull which via electrodes planted directly into your brain's visual cortex can then send electrical impulses to bypass the eyes and translate that camera feed directly into your brain and while first generoling chips use 1024 electrodes which could simulate an image roughly equivalent to this there is already talk of a next-gen N2 chip with closer to 16 000 electrodes which could produce something way closer to fully working vision and when you think about it the same concept could work for basically anything related

to the brain or your nervous system in general like neuralink has already tried rigging a pig's spinal cord with electrodes and it has legitimately allowed them to send a trigger from her brain and stimulate the movement of her limbs through it which is basically them showing us we can restore the connection between your brain and your limbs or we can cure full body paralysis and then the second key perk of a brain chip is what comes after once you've figured out how to fix brain conditions you're also 90 of the way to learning how to

take the brain even further brain enhancement for example there's no reason why you couldn't use the same Tech that allows a blind person to see to give the people who can already see fine even more clarity or extra context on everything they look at or who knows the ability to zoom with their eyes like no joke you can just watch a movie with no screen no fancy glasses or contact lenses just with in your brain in fact pretty much any smart device that you currently own your phone your Smartwatch your earphones their functionality can all

be replicated to a whole new level by just being able to directly stimulate the parts of your brain that your organs would have previously been doing indirectly it could even mean being able to take and store pictures in your literal internal storage giving yourself a 100 photographic memory having full control over your mood as opposed to it being some external factor or being able to contact someone and have an entire conversation within your head remember language is just a learned skill because when it started I guess it was better than pointing at things and grunting

but you can see how this could be the next Frontier for human communication I know how this all sounds it sounds like sci-fi and it's taking me time to digest this too but you and I are actually living in a world right now where there is a monkey with a brain chip who is using it to telepathically play video games or in another demo could type with his mind to ask for a snack and then select which snack he wanted and this is where it gets really crazy Elon Musk who is also the one who

founded this neuralink company has even publicly hypothesized that these chips that they're starting to build now may one day be able to digitally resurrect its user after death regularly taking digital snapshots of your brain which is basically like a backup that can be uploaded to a database after you die and just restored into a new body now I know this Tech is really scary our lives are just fine why don't we leave people alone but what Elon is really worried about is not Society now but Society in 10 to 20 years time he's looking at

the pace of progression of artificial intelligence and saying that this is the biggest threat to the human race where AI is going gives us basically two options we're either going to need to keep up with it by merging with technology or to become obsolete but I am planning a separate video All About AI so if you want to see that then sub to the channel would be brainy so that's the ideal future that neurolink is striving for but before they're truly ugly let's take a second to talk about the present reality they're still pretty bad

because while the N1 chip itself is an impressive Improvement on pre-existing Medical Technology as it currently stands that is all it is more electrodes allowing for more effective treatment for issues like seizures it is undeniably a good thing but it's also pretty easy to argue that with all the media attention neuralink have been getting because it's Elon Musk because the vision is just so ambitious that its current state is being overhyped by people who just hadn't already heard that the technology exists in some cases other companies have already managed what neurolink is saying that they

will one day be able to do like in 2021 neuroscientists at the University of California came across a real human patient who'd had a severe stroke that paralyzed his entire body including the brain's connections to his vocal cords so he couldn't speak so they had a brain wave by inserting electrodes into the nerves that would have normally gone to his vocal quality they could intercept them and figure out what sounds he wanted his vocal cords to make and instead send that output to a computer that could say those things on his behalf the point being

that neurolink is not the only company with a successful brain chair and this company has also received just straight up criticism from some neuroscientists while a lot of them are impressed by their Chip's ability to transmit data wirelessly there's one very prominent researcher who's called what neurolink are doing solid engineering mediocre Neuroscience which is slightly worrying for a company whose figurehead has a pretty notorious history of over-engineered solutions to problems he might not fully understand hyperloop anyone but then there's the even bigger question of these animals before a brain ship is approved for the use

in humans it needs to be very thoroughly tested on them and yeah neuraling's been quite public about their use of lab animals to test the N1 chip and Elon himself has even been very vocal about the serious ethical precautions that he and his team are taking trying to at every step make it clear that the animals are happy to do what they're doing they can now choose when to participate which is why came as kind of a shock when leech documents showed that neurolink has killed around 1500 test animals since 2018. a lot of these

deaths are due to the unfortunate fact that researchers need to conduct post-mortems on some of the animals After completing tests which you could see as a necessary evil but New Link employees have also complained that musk's demands to make progress as fast as possible have led to rushed experiments that needed to be repeated which has double the number of animals unnecessarily killed in the process and literally as I've been researching for this video news just broke that neurolink is being investigated for potentially transporting ships removed from deceased animals carrying hazardous pathogens including some that are

resistant to antibiotics without the proper containment measures which poses a very serious threat to not only the other animals but also the human researchers and everyone around them which I guess is why there are a lot of doctors around the world who don't want neuralink to be a success but what a lot of it really rests on is FDA approval neuraling just announced at the end of last year that they've applied for it if they get it human trials can start immediately if they don't they can't and so I don't think it's an exaggeration to

say that the future of our entire species rests on this decision by the FDA no pressure guys so things are not all smooth sailing under the hood for these brain chip companies this is fine but what if I told you they might be even more dire if they're successful let's think hypothetically for a moment let's say that decades from now brain computer interface chips do reach the level that Elon Musk thinks they will to become as popular as smartphones are now you've got one everyone you know's got one to the point where they are hard

to live without so for a start there's a risk of hacking I've been hacked before and even though I eventually did get my stuff back it was an absolutely gut-wrenching Panic filled experience so like imagine the damage someone could do to your life if they could not just access your social media accounts but your entire brain they could change your very thoughts your feelings your perceptions your memories and I mean the function of your organs these are the risks you take when you put connected technology inside your body like it's such a weird idea right

now but in a future where we merge with tech we could get infected with computer viruses what if Elon introduces muralic blue where you have to pay a monthly subscription to retain access to your memories what if there's a bug and your chip sends a bad bit of code to your brain what if the company tries to encourage you to upgrade chips by slowing down your existing one but your legs just start lagging I mean musk specifically talked about how the N1 chip can be seen a bit like the iPhone 1 and that it will

be really quick to swap out and upgrade to the latest one if you wanted to get more functionality so let's be very clear they are definitely seeing this whole continuous bio enhancement concept as a way to keep making money do you want that kind of company hooked up to your mind what if you need to do a factory reset but even if we sidestep all of these concerns you'll still just have no space from Tech and that's not healthy either you know how people say it's not good to spend all your time on your phone

this would be like your phone being with you every single hour of the day awake or asleep with zero barrier you could be consuming content every second communicating at all times you could revisit every single memory that you've ever had it's a level of capability but I don't think humans were meant to have or will be able to deal with and that is the more Insidious privacy concerns like advertising elon's been very clear that neuralink will not make money via adverts I mean you'd have really no Escape we cannot do that but imagine if a

company like xiaomi who've been known to release unbelievably cheap high-spec phones that pay for themselves through adverts in their software made their own brain chip I don't know if I could handle seeing a grammarly ad pop up within my brain as I'm part way through spooning Weetabix into my mouth in the morning wait did you download grammarly and that's without even considering the ethical issue of whether companies could tailor your mental ads by monitoring your thoughts it would be like the next tier of collecting your browser cookies to estimate what you think like with direct

access to your brain advertisers would always know exactly what you wanted which is basically the Pinnacle of targeted advertising like imagine the second you feel hungry you're presented with the option to order a Happy Meal and you can select it without even moving a muscle but then even more importantly with personal technology this advanced what happens to people surely the more capable these chips become the more we rely on a machine to determine our actions and then the less human we are and there's got to be a line there somewhere after which we don't really

have any agency like we're just highly optimized heartless shells okay so can you just opt out I don't think so if these chips truly become capable of multiplying the user's intelligence by orders of magnitude which it looks like they will based on how fast artificial intelligence itself is progressing right now it means that if you wanted a good job and good income you wouldn't really have a choice you'd have to get a chip too to keep up with the rest of our species as mental capabilities and then if you can't which is also not unreasonable

given how expensive one of these might be are you just a second-class citizen Elon said that they're trying to make the link as affordable as possible but what he really means by saying it will be accessible is that in his own words the link will pay for itself by giving you a much higher capability to make more money once you've boosted your brain power which sounds nice but you can tell it's the words of a billionaire we can't simply have every single person on planet Earth telepathically trading nfts until they paid off their skull rent

there are thousands of different jobs that are very important to our current world and not all of them will pay enough to be able to always afford the latest branches so check out 17 more futuristic inventions like neurolink that's here I'll catch you there