China beats Elon Musk to launch worlds first commercial brain chip

Hackers are excited.Surveillance advertising corporations are elated.

Political thought-police are enraptured.China has just approved the world’s first brain-computer chip.And they’ve beaten billionaire tech-bro and MAGA evangelist Elon Musk to market.The coin-sized device, called NEO, is the first surgical implant to pass clinical trials for commercial sale.Version one is optimised to enhance the nervous system of patients suffering spinal cord injuries and paralysis.It’s about to enter mass production for the Chinese state-run health system.But the Chinese Communist Party and Musk see this as just the first step on a path towards super-productive (and compliant) human-cyborgs.Musk has not been backward in coming forward about the technology’s benefits.“Restoring control of people who are tetraplegics and restoring sight, I think, are pretty big deals,” he told an event in Israel last month.“They’re sort of what I might call Jesus-level technologies.”His brain-implant start-up Neuralink promises users the ability to perform routine tasks using thought control, such as typing and moving a mouse.Reversing paralysis, restoring sight and raising the dead remain in the realm of theology.But that’s not incorporeal as it once was.Brain-chip advocates, however, go even further.

They envisage a future in which everyday citizens are endowed with digital telepathy and telekinesis.Musk, a staunch pro-Trump Make America Great Again activist, has also floated the idea of brain chips ending the “Woke Mind Virus”.That’s all related to the technology’s potential to store (and rewrite) memories and treat psychological conditions.“Brain implants may sound dystopian, but they are a promising part of neuroscience research,” argues Griffith University cybersecurity expert Dr David Tuffley.But the technology will “theoretically allow hackers to access sensitive neural data, such as patients’ thoughts and memories,” he adds.Rise of the cyborgs“We...