Risks

Parallels With Other Technology

There is a possibility the future of wearable and implantable tech may end up as is currently a reality today with the smartphone…

The smartphone was once thought of as a tool in your pocket that could play music, take phone calls, respond to email and very few other limited tasks. Over the years, the smartphone has taken over our lives, everyone has one… even if you don’t require one for any meaningful or productive tasks. The smartphone began its life as a tool and now, we can’t live without it.

It isn’t hard to imagine a similar future for wearable and implantable tech.

"The vast majority of Americans – 97% – now own a cellphone of some kind", Pew Resarch Center, 2021. The graph on the right, provided by the Pew Research Center, shows the uptake in cellphones and smartphones between the years of 2002 and 2021. In this short time, the market share of smartphones in the United States is up to 85% of the cellphone market. The kind of growth market disrupting technologies, such as the smartphones, are able to achieve is unprecentented in how quickly they can change the world. For the better, or for the worse.

How this mirrors possible futures for Neuralink

The effect the smartphone has had on society is visible everywhere we go. Many jobs now require employees carry a smartphone so they are always contactable. This is a benefit to the company, especially if clients must be dealt with, as it means there is less of a chance clients of customers will move to a competitor that is more available more of the time.

This increase in efficiency, is the same increase in efficiency a company would see by requiring that employees hired are fitted with Neuralink type devices. This efficiency increase would most likely come in the form of instant computer interaction that means even the slightest of inefficiencies of getting words out of our minds and typed on a keyboard promise to be eliminated.

Data and Security Concerns

Another important question for the future of Neuralink and other implantable technology is, who owns the data is produces and stores. Should data that is created by our brain be our property? Or the property of the creator of the device that is able to collect it?

Currently with social media platforms, the users generate the data. This is enough for the companies collecting the data to claim ownership and sell this data to advertisers.

If the law regarding data privacy moving forward is overlooked before this implantable technology evolution, we could find ourselves in a world where the devices we require to keep up, owns data produced by the brains in our own skulls.

Neuralink does currently collect data from the Link for research and development purposes, so this function does exist in testing models. Whether this functionality will be included in the final product, and whether it will be able to send data back to Neuralink is unclear.