This is your brain on Elon….

Great news! Neuralink has been approved by the FDA for human testing, and is now soliciting volunteers willing to have a computer chip the size of a quarter inserted directly into their brains. [1]

Neuralink is the company Elon Musk founded to develop a brain-computer interface (BCI). The human tests will involve paralyzed people who’ve lost the ability to speak (and, obviously, can’t type). The idea is that they can think of a word and the BCI will transmit it to a computer, which can use AI to understand the word, display it on screen or speak it out loud.

The news comes on the heels of a gruesome report in Wired about how monkeys used in early Neuralink trials died. [2] (Not from terminal diseases, as Musk has claimed, but as a result of the implants. It’s really, really nasty.)

The Neuralink. Drop it into a jukebox and see what it plays. Source: IEEE Spectrum/Neuralink.

It’s also on the heels of a Wall Street Journal story regarding a grand jury investigating whether Musk illegally diverted funds from Tesla to allegedly build himself a glass house outside of the company HQ in Austin, Texas. (The man is a walking metaphor.) Musk denies the house exists. Perhaps he just can’t see it.

ICYMI: Would you let Elon Musk plant a chip inside your brain?

And, oh yeah, it turns out he had an Apartheid-loving grandfather who moved to South Africa because Canada wasn’t racist enough for him. [Insert acorn/tree reference here].

It’s been a busy week for Space Karen.

From Musk Until Dawn

I’ve flung a fair amount of abuse at poor Elon — like here, here, here, here, and also here — of which I believe he is 100 percent deserving. So let’s cut him some slack and note two positive things he’s done.

1. Making electrified vehicles sexy

Electric cars had been around for more than 100 years before Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla. [3] They started to become widely available commercially in the mid 1990s. But the cars were underwhelming, and the way they were marketed was terrible. Buying an e-Car (Nerd Alert!) was something you did for the good of the planet, like recycling or using mouthwash. A sacrifice. A sign of what a virtuous person you were. But virtuous or not, you were definitely not one of the cool kids.

The name of this electric vehicle, built in 1899, is Never Satisfied. Insert your own joke here. Source: Car and Driver/Michelin.

Americans don’t like doing things that are good for them. They like doing things that make them feel good. (And they especially like doing things that make them feel good about being American — thus the enduring appeal of Ronald Reagan to old-school Republicans.) [4]

Going from zero to 60 in less than four seconds is fun. Breaking all the rules (and getting away with it) is fun. Turning on Autopilot mode and watching Harry Potter on your Model X’s 17-inch screen as you plow into a tree is not exactly fun, but it’s not boring.

Tesla quickly became the tech toy of choice for every girl and boy (with a six-figure income). And now electric cars are the future.

2. Making space flight more affordable

Seven years ago I attended a conference on private space exploration. I came away with the feeling that the low-earth orbit economy [5] was maybe 3 to 5 years away. Today I feel the same way— it’s 3 to 5 years away. It may always be 3 to 5 years away.

But if it ever comes to pass, we will have Elon to thank, however grudgingly. SpaceX made low-orbit flights much cheaper — from $60 million to $90 million per launch for SpaceX, versus around $150 million for NASA— by using rockets that could be recovered and reused. [6] That’s a key reason why SpaceX has been awarded nearly $5 billion in contracts by the space agency.

Even if the occasional unmanned rocket does explode. (Maybe the robot pilots were also watching Harry Potter.)

You might argue that Space X is run (and run well) by Chief Operating Office Gwynne Shotwell, and that Elon doesn’t do as much hands-on management as he does with, say, a certain social network. I might argue that. But I don’t know if that’s actually true.

There’s a third thing Musk has achieved, though I don’t think it’s a positive accomplishment.

There are an estimated 724 to 756 billionaires in the US alone, with a combined net worth of $4.4 trillion. How many of them can you name? Can you get to 10? 20? My guess is that you’ll top out before then, and nearly all will be heads of tech companies and/or have connections to politics. Which means there are around 700+ billionaires flying below the radar in their Gulfstream G500s.

Billionaires tend to react to public scrutiny the way roaches do when you flip on the light — they scatter and wriggle under the nearest baseboard. But Elon’s desperate pathetic need for being an attention whore has made most of those other billionaires invisible by comparison.

They are all probably extremely happy that people like Musk (and to a lesser extent Bezos, Gates, Warren Buffett, Murdoch, and a certain spray-tanned Floridian who may or may not qualify for that list) are soaking up all the attention.

Brain in vain

Listen. Digital brain implants are already being used to treat Parkinson’s and other neurological diseases. Brain-computer interfaces will prove beneficial to stroke victims, paralytics, and others who’ve lost the ability to speak, as well as singularity nerds who yearn to become Data from Star Trek. These things are coming. And if they’re not built by Neuralink, they’ll be built by somebody else.

ICYMI: Researchers built a computer with human brain cells and taught it to play Pong

So, please: Let them be built by somebody else. Anybody else. Certainly not someone who likes to cozy up to Nazis and thinks a poop emoji is the ne plus ultra of wit.

And if you still insist on becoming a guinea pig in this experiment, I have some instructions for you. They’re pretty easy to follow:

Step #1: Locate your brain. It’s usually found somewhere between your eyebrows and the back of your skull. Grey, looks a little like a cauliflower. Can’t miss it.

Step #2. Kiss it goodbye.

Need I ask? Insert your brainy comments in the box below.

[1] Hat tip to EATS for inspiring this topic.

[2] Trigger alert: Not for the faint of heart or stomach.

[3]. Musk was an early investor and came on as CEO in 2008, five years after the company was founded. But that’s also when Tesla actually began to take off.

[4] The Coup Plotter and his Florida Man impersonator do the same thing, only in reverse: “They want to make you feel bad about Slavery/Genocide/White Privilege — please burn all the books that mention this.”

[5] The idea of the LEO economy was that people would start to build factories in space to build materials like carbon nanotubes, or they’d mine space rocks for precious minerals. These low-earth-orbit factories would need supplies, water, personnel, etc — generating a steady amount of business for private space freight companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos), and Virgin Galactic (Richard Branson), as well as a lucrative tourist trade from the literal jet set.

(I am old enough to remember when ‘jet set’ meant you were one of the beautiful people affluent enough to afford air flight, and not being hauled like cargo crammed into a 17-inch-wide coach seat. Can you tell I’m writing this on an airplane?)

[6] Musk claims that SpaceX will eventually get the cost per launch down to around $10 million. Slightly more if you check a bag or purchase an in-flight beverage.