How Would a Working Neural Lace Change our Ethics and Economy?

I had an interesting conversation the other day about Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company that’s attempting to make a neural lace that improves our bandwidth for interacting with external devices, and it got me thinking about the potential ethical, and economical repercussions of such a device.

First of all, what I mean by bandwidth is the amount of information that can be read or transmitted in some amount of time. Analogous to a pipe with water flowing through it at some velocity, by increasing the diameter of the pipe, a higher volume of water will be output. In the case where someone wants to access information from a search engine, they will:

• Remove their mobile phone from their pocket
• Access the web browser and type the query into the address bar with two thumbs
• Navigate to a website that seems reputable by reading its name and a snippet of the content, and thinking about whether that’s relevant to what they expected to find from their search
• Potentially open the website and continue reading and processing to find further information

Specifically for the problem of low bandwidth for accessing information on the internet, a solution could target and improve any of the points in that process. Neuralink and its competitors, which include Facebook and a private company called Kernel, are attempting to make devices which could potentially allow for software to be built on top of them that allow for a higher bandwidth connection to information on the internet, and also to other devices such as potentially: Video games, medication adherence trackers, social media, document editors, and e-mail. Elon Musk claims that a functional neural lace device is possible, which is highly debated, but whether it’s possible or not it seems like now is the right time to start a discussion on the potential repercussions of this technology.

The impact on the economy is the most apparent, but is fairly nuanced. In a capitalist economy such as the ones in the USA, Canada, and Europe, most people are raised to see the likes of geniuses being the most highly successful, while those who are highly intelligent rise to the higher levels of a hierarchy and those who are relatively dim perform more laborious and less economically fulfilling work. This is, of course, marked by a few outliers who appear to be incredibly lucky or extremely hard-working and motivated in spite of their lack of education. However, assuming the neural lace device is affordable and safe enough that most people decide to get the implant, there must suddenly be a reshuffling of the hierarchy of intelligence in the society. The first few to create the software for the most useful applications, such as an internet connection with a standardized language to read it to the brain, and a communication network, will see incredible wealth. But then, almost anyone would be capable of creating those applications assuming the language is written in such a way that the brain can easily interpret the data it receives. Memia Labs coined the term Human Intelligence Markup Language (HIML) for this.

Meanwhile, somewhere between 2 and 5% of the population will still be responsible for farming the food that the rest of the population relies on. It appears to me like the barrier of entry for jobs that currently require a high degree of intelligence and education, and that are highly striven for like engineering software in Silicon Valley and Seattle or managing millions of dollars in hedge funds in New York, will be lowered to the point that the economic superiority of degrees in math, finance, science, technology, and engineering will be wavering. Rather, it may be that people will crave creativity and media that is easier than ever to acquire but still just as difficult to teach and create, and will still rely just as heavily as before on manually laborious jobs, which would now be performed by workers who are wholly capable of doing more intellectual endeavors.

The repercussions of such a device on our ethical values is somewhat up to individual interpretation of the origin of our current ethical values. Assuming that our ethics are derived from reasoned, rational communication, as Kant would argue, it may seem like a brain-to-brain connection with all other humans in our society could improve our ability to discuss our moral frameworks. However, such a connection would just be an extrapolation of the internet conglomerate that already exists, which can serve as slow-paced trial of what a higher bandwidth connection to each other would accomplish. We’ve seen success stories, like the public outcry for gay marriage which has changed the majority of all first world country’s views, and failures, like the current division in the United States over the values of their president. In this sense, the distinction may seem arbitrary. But, in my opinion, increasing the bandwidth with which our society is able to communicate may have a measurable effect, as long as we assume that what is pushing real reform is intelligent conversations that generate news. Another possible circumstance is that reform relies on news events, which bottlenecks our progress after reaching some amount of bandwidth for discussion after they occur.

Another, more serious thing that concerns me is the security of the information that I’m sending over my network. Obviously this fear is abstract in this situation since I have no idea how such a device would function, so I’ll assume for now that the security will be figured out to the point where it’s reasonably safe to use without fear of getting a neural lace virus. But that doesn’t alleviate the fear that the creator of the device would almost certainly fully have the ability to track information you send and receive. It’s also almost absolutely certain that the government of the nation, in this case the United States, would want to keep this pathway open in order to track potential criminals as they have done for our internet browsing history and text conversations. And finally, it’s certainly the case that even in the face of these facts, those who are wary of getting the device at its release will be risking being intellectually left behind if they hold off from using something so revolutionary when their peers don’t. As such, the device will be necessary to have a good life, the way our society is set up, and will also potentially create a situation where you are never safe to think again, unless such legislation is made well before the device is functional.