First off - interestingly he presents this as a medical aid - to help neurological problems with the spine & brain due to aging. He describes the interface as like a 'fitbit' for your skull that can be easily replaced when upgrades are available...oh dear more continuous upgrade culture...

Another observation - Musk loves his little piggies so much that he has a pen in the studio & rolls out three little piggies - he finds it hilarious as he stutters his way through the revealing of the pigs - the middle pig really didn't want to behave - as we know pigs are very very intelligent - This serves no actual purpose on the demonstration other than Musk telling us that these are the actual pigs with the chip in...do we believe him? It is nothing more than a PR exercise. These little piggies are on the way to market - global brain interface market.

We then see one of the Pigs as its snout is stimulated and a real time data recording this...to be fair it does seem to be working. Bleeps are happening and data is happening - but there is no other evidence to suggest the pigs we see are the ones making the data he is showing us...he does not stimulate the other pig with the neuralink as a differential response or a control subject.

He then shows us a pig on a treadmill and marvels at how the 'fitbit for the brain' senses where its limbs will be in real time. It seems obvious to me that if you limit what an organisms doing by putting it in a limited space & task - the odds are that you can predict where its physiology will be going...also its not much movement - limiting the scope of the devices output has enabled the experiment to appear successful.

The ghost of Eadward Muybridge is rolling his eyes at this point. All this does is unconvincingly demonstrate this is an effective real time brain activity monitoring device. This in itself should cause anti Pavlovian alarm bells to ring.

The device will be connected via smartphone app to bluetooth

key point; A Pig on a treadmill with a fitbit in its brain...

Q&A; will the neuralink enable gaming? yes they want it to be so fast a paraplegic will be able to play starcraft with their brain.

Elon Musk asserts that the device will one day enable paraplegics to move again - but does not address how someone with a severed spinal cord can move limbs just by brainwaves...if a humans physical condition prevents movement - the brain will just send signals but the body will not respond if it's not physically capable - brainwaves cannot cure physical damage.

It's one thing to be able to control data in a virtual environment or control a robot - but this claim is a stretch. It does however open up a very interesting question. To get the benefits of Neuralink, will Paralysed / Paraplegics have to replace their limbs with robotic ones? My guess is that this technology opens up the door for becoming a cyborg as an answer to the 'disability problem'. Of course Elons Project & many others will be relying on a steady stream of poor victims of sports & work related injuries, trauma resulting from conflict & Road traffic accidents [assured by driverless car errors, no doubt]

Brain-machine interface enthusiasts often gush about “closing the loop.” It’s for good reason. On the implant level, it means engineering smarter probes that only activate when they detect faulty electrical signals in brain circuits. Elon Musk’s Neuralink—among other players—are readily pursuing these bi-directional implants that both measure and zap the brain. Singularity hub As if from a dystopian novel, some are fetishising the idea of cyborgs, where we mix our own bodies with mechanical or technological parts, and others are fearing it. “It does feel completely mad but the very fact that people are having discussions about it, I think they’re thinking seriously about it,” says Stacey Gregg, the writer of Override, a play that sees a couple run away from their technology-obsessed reality so that they can raise their future child in a world without super-limbs. Irish Times

[the following is my note; unrelated to what is in the test] ...Perhaps we may see in the near future a way that DNA can be teased to cause a dormant repair gene in the host and then rebuild damaged parts. - this could lead to superhuman healing and regrowth.

can you say super soldiers? This is alluded to 1hr3minute in with reference to the movie Predator; enhanced vision utilising any spectrum of light... The device will be able to eventually save & replay memories. so looking like this will be developed to become a brain facebook...with possibilities of "consensual telepathy of non linguistic concepts" [referred to; 1hr4mins]

An interesting thing to note is the assertion that human brains can transmit non-linguistic concepts. This is a very dangerous avenue to proceed down. Language & it's development relies on the brains language centre misunderstanding & creating many alternative assumptions of what a concept could be or could actually mean, in the process of crunching ideas. This in turn creates innovation & leads to new concepts forming - ad infinitum. To treat concepts as pure unarguable dogmatic data could see the development of an over-simplified NEWSPEAK - which seeks to stop independent innovative creative thought processes.

I found myself wondering what would happen if the head were to receive a trauma IE an accident playing sport etc... could it be that the terms and conditions may prohibit certain activity as to nullify any litigation? This is all very shady indeed.

Here's an interesting peek into the mind of Musk; at 54 mins we hear a member of the team say; "...its very easy to keep pigs happy...they have very low needs and its easy to build an environment to have amazingly good welfare"

Musk: "It's easy to make pigs happy, they really love food - thats the great thing about pigs - you know...in many respects pigs are quite similar to people..."

Expect this device to be implemented in conjunction with the rollout of smart homes in mega cities as the interface for gamified labor [task & reward] in a virtual society of pseudo-casino based augmented reality.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” George Orwell, Animal Farm

The thing to remember is that as the control mechanism starts centrally directing & dictating your thoughts for you and simplifying the things you think about - - happening as education is turned into training - Humanities are underfunded and phased out - all critical thinking is expunged as the notion of Data & programming as learning is normalised. Once the mechanism of this entrainment system becomes embedded it becomes easier to determine what humans are thinking - Complicated things will be banned...because they cause the thoughts that question the dictated reality. A reality that will see the further compression of the notion of enforced choice masqerading as a free market - or as freedom & democracy. Humanity as a pig on a treadmill...its movements and positions easy to track because it is limited in movement - and it's brain easy to read because it is being allowed to exist within a controlled feedback loop of stimulation fed - dosed to - prescribed to the subject. As a controlled reality. As a New Normality. well Elon, none of the pigs are wearing face nappys - so my guess is; pigs a far more intelligent than humans! Timid New World index