At the India Today Conclave, 2024, Tech Today’s editor Aayush Ailawadi held a session with Moran Cerf, Neuroscientist, security specialist in Israel and Professor at Columbia School of Business.
Talking about Elon Musk’s Neuralink that has recently implanted its first chip in a human brain, he explained, “The essence of Neuralink is that our brain is the same brain from many millennias, and there are some limitations to what this brain can do. We have a harder time dealing with the world around us and the question is, can we enhance the brain by essentially creating a digital component that will interface with that?”
He said that with Neuralink, you will put a device in the human head and it will interface with the brain from within and from the cloud outside. It also gives access to the internet. He said, “There are people like Elon Musk and similar kind of entrepreneurs that are gambling that it will change the human race, save us and allow us to solve problems like find cures for disease that our biological brain couldn't solve. At the same time, there's another view to that that it could be the end the human race because it will connect us to the world in such a way that we will lose ourselves and expose us to hacking into our thoughts. It will also create a cast where people with the implants can do remarkable thinking while the others will be limited by their regular human brain.”
He also spoke about how he looks at artificial intelligence and how important it is for the leaders to set guardrails. He said, “I think there is tension between capitalism, desire to see the technology mature and guardrails. This is what happened with nuclear war also. We harnessed the power of the sun, planned it to use for one thing but ended up using it for war. Technology like AI will not tell you if they are good or bad, it is up to human beings to decide how to use them. Implants like neuralink can give us the power of 250 IQ points or maybe solutions to cure cancer. It can also help us solve Maths and physics questions that we have been struggling with for years. But what if people with the implants do not want to interact with regular humans and want to create their own ecosystem and we become a slave to them.”
He added, “The scientists are gonna push the envelope on creating neural implants or building nuclear energy or creating trains or many other things, because that's our job, and that's what it is. People need to start questioning their leaders about their opinion on AI or implants because once the technology is out, there is no going back.”
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