Neuralink's grand vision isn't scientifically supported

Controlling a computer with your mind is the same as with your hands

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

To be a scientist is to suffer from Gell-Mann amnesia constantly. I'm not saying that us neuroscientists have it worse than others, but the phenomenon of noticing discrepancies between the hype and the actual science of things is unavoidable. This is especially true when it comes to neuroscientific projects unfolding in the public eye, like Elon Musk’s company Neuralink.

For years now neuroscientists have been watching Neuralink recreate (to much fanfare) progress that has been known within the field of brain-computer interfaces for decades by academics. It’s also always been a tricky field for companies—right now there are hundreds of blind people stuck with useless or failing eye-implants with no one to repair them, since the companies have gone out of business.

That doesn’t mean I hate Neuralink! I'm not against the company's existence, since it actually does help people, and I'm not against the research itself, which might one day be significant. But I am against the outside perception that both:

(a) Something very new is occurring here (researchers have come up with ways for people to control computer games with just their minds for over 20 years).

(b) That Neuralink will develop as Elon Musk thinks it will, toward some sort of device that allows for “telepathy” between us and machines (a rather useless product given the research showing humans are limited to—no matter the medium—inputting and outputting information around talking speed, ~10 bits per second). We seem to be innately bottlenecked by biology, rather than merely inconvenienced.