Brain Chips_ The Future of Phones

Move over, cell phones! The future's calling, and it's in your brain! Tech mogul Elon Musk has gazed into his crystal ball (or maybe it was a Neuralink prototype) and declared that brain chips will make cell phones as outdated as rotary dials and MySpace pages. Musk's Neuralink biotech company has been hard at work turning science fiction into science fact. Just last January, they implanted a brain chip in 30-year-old quadriplegic Noland Arbaugh. This chip, about the size of a coin (no need to check the couch cushions), was delicately placed in the brain's "move-it-or-lose-it" region. The chip records and transmits brain signals wirelessly to an app that decodes movement intentions, all while staying fashionably compact. No antennas sticking out, we promise. Musk revealed his vision of a phone-free future in a tweet (sorry, I mean a post on "X") responding to a parody account named Not Elon Musk. The tweet asked, "Would you install a Neuralink interface on your brain to control your new X phone by thinking?" Musk, in his usual style, replied that "in the future, there will be no phones, just Neuralinks." Goodbye pocket dialing, hello brain dialing! Neuralink's press release last year sounded like something out of a superhero origin story. Their Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface (PRIME) program aims to develop a "fully implantable, wireless brain-computer interface" that could turn people into real-life telepaths, or at least help them control a computer cursor with their thoughts. It's like magic, but with more wires and less Hogwarts. The potential benefits are enormous: revolutionary treatments for paralysis, blindness, obesity, autism, depression, schizophrenia, and more. It's like a Swiss Army knife for your brain. During a 2018 interview with Joe Rogan, Musk even suggested that Neuralink could one day allow humans to communicate without using words. Imagine the blissful silence of Thanksgiving dinners!