Elon Musk is inventing stuff that already exists again

For more than a decade, Big Tech has been reinventing systems and services that have long been crucial pieces of urban infrastructure. They do so under the guise of "innovation" and tech-salvation – hollow platitudes that have become the marching orders for industry titans and start-ups alike. The examples are vast, with varying levels of obviousness: UberPool and Lyft Shuttle are just expensive versions of the city bus; co-working spaces are offering services that have been provided by public libraries for decades, without all the cool books. More recently, Elon Musk's Boring Company opened an underground tunnel in Las Vegas, serviced by a massive fleet of Teslas. Subterranean tunnels designed for quick transport...sound familiar? If you haven't seen the footage of the Las Vegas tunnel, it fell victim to precisely the phenomenon it was designed to avoid: traffic. Shit's hilarious.

But now Musk is putting his efforts elsewhere. Last week, Neuralink, his brain-computer interface (BCI) company, announced that it was looking for a clinical trial director, which means, yep: willing human volunteers will be able to have an experimental chip shoved into their skulls. According to Musk, the chips will allow users to, among other things, "save and replay memories. You could potentially download them into a new body or a robot body."

In typical Musk-announcement fashion, this is totally devoid of any technical specificity. In fact, from further research, I couldn't find any definite explanation of how a back-and-forth between the human brain and an exterior machine would actually work. Even if the electrodes are able to "read" neural signals, what about the communication back to the brain? How will the machine discern what the signals actually mean? These are questions that even BCI engineers admit can't yet be answered. Worse yet, Neuralink claims that the chip will communicate with an external computer via Bluetooth, quite possibly the most unreliable technology of the twenty-first century. Not great.

All technological feasibility aside, doesn't Musk's claim about "saving and replaying memories" sound a lot like, you know, how memories work? Is that not precisely what a memory is? The functionality of the hippocampus or something?

Even if it was a momentary lapse in diction – perhaps he meant that we could download our "experiences" and not our "memories"? – Musk is again too caught up in the supposed righteousness of his technology to realize that this already exists – not within urban infrastructure but within human physiology.

Now, yes, I recognize the life-altering potential of brain-computer interfaces; and yes, I recognize that technology is perhaps the only solution to seemingly insurmountable problems like the global food shortage. I just find it telling that Musk would rather compare his brain-chip to a FitBit than speak at length about the ways it could improve the lives of those with neurological disabilities.

For the sake of those who have been waiting for years on a largely empty technological promise, I sincerely hope the clinical trials go well. For now, let's leave the playback of memories for the Black Mirror universe.