A somewhat alarming (at least to me) headline popped up involving Elon Musk today, but this one doesn’t have to do with Twitter, SpaceX, or even Tesla. The story involves Neuralink Corporation, Musk’s wild plan to implant computing devices into people’s brains, effectively turning them into cyborgs. Apparently, the initial development work and animal testing have gone well enough that Musk is now in talks with the FDA about human trials and he expects to have the first one implanted in a person as little as six months from now. (Bloomberg)

Elon Musk’s Neuralink Corp. aims to start putting its coin-sized computing brain implant into human patients within six months, the company announced at an event at its Fremont, Calif. headquarters on Wednesday evening.

Neuralink has been refining the product, which consists of a tiny device and electrode-laced wires, along with a robot that carves out a piece of a person’s skull and implants it into the brain. Ongoing discussions with the US Food and Drug Administration have gone well enough for the company to set a target of its first human trials within the next six months, according to Musk.

I understand that this technology holds some amazing possibilities, particularly for the disabled. They have already demonstrated a wheelchair that can be steered by the power of a person’s mind. With Musk’s Neuralink technology, innovations like that could be taken much further.

But does anyone else find this all a bit disturbing? If we can do that for the disabled, how long will it be before people without any disabilities will want to experiment with giving themselves inhuman abilities via a technological upgrade? Are we really heading toward becoming a society of cyborgs?

I was reminded of this while reading an article from Science Alert which posed the question, what will man look like after one million years? The author reminds us that most species on earth are “transitory.” Animals in particular arise, evolve in some fashion, and eventually go extinct for various reasons. On average they seem to last roughly one million years. Modern man has been around for 300,000 years or so. If we make it to one million, what will we look like?

In his 1883 essay, Man in the year million, [Science fiction author H.G. Wells] envisioned what’s now become a cliche: big-brained, tiny-bodied creatures. Later, he speculated that humans could also split into two or more new species.

While Wells’s evolutionary models have not stood the test of time, the three basic options he considered still hold true. We could go extinct, turn into several species or change.

An added ingredient is that we have biotechnology that could greatly increase the probability of each of them.

Up until now, evolution has been a passive process that’s driven by environmental factors. Minor variations that offer a better chance for survival (and reproduction) tend to slowly out-evolve the earlier models. Those that failed to adapt went extinct. But now we are reaching the point where we can “force” evolution in ourselves, perhaps in ways that would never have occurred naturally. Are we sure that’s a good thing?

Also, not everyone may be interested in going along with this plan. The author speculates about the potential for populations of “holdout humans” who refuse to become cyborgs. It could be the beginning of a process where we actually do splinter off into two species, potentially coming into conflict with each other.

Is all of this reminding anyone else of the plot of a movie from the 80s starring Arnold Schwarzenegger? Mankind doesn’t really seem to have evolved all that much over the past 100,000 years, at least physically. If anything, the modern era of technology may be causing us to devolve as our devices and machines do more and more for us and we become increasingly dependent on them for survival. Perhaps we should keep in mind the fact that DNA has lasted for a very long time thus far. But technology always breaks down and fails sooner or later.

I’ve already decided that I’m never going to own or use one of those virtual reality helmets that Meta is pushing. I prefer to live in the real world. And I’m fairly sure that you’ll never see me signing up to be a cyborg, either. Anyone interested in forming an initial brotherhood and sisterhood of “holdout humans” can contact me at the usual places.