Recruitment Pigs! 

The title may have shocked you when you first read it but does this following word make any connect?

“Neuralink”. 

Yes, now you smile to yourself because many of you may have read it in the news or seen the video.

The billionaire entrepreneur is trying to recruit workers or volunteers for his neuroscience startup. Last year he used rats and this year he went further into evolution and used pigs.

While last year we just saw a rat posing coyly for a photograph with a Neuralink connected via an USB port, this year it was the turn of a pig strutting around with the Entrepreneur chaperoning it.

Gertrude, as the pig was lovingly called, was said to have its brain implanted with a small computer for two months.

This was at a live stream event to recruit employees for his Neuroscience startup, Neuralink. The small computer is a small coin-sized implant in Gertrude’s brain and described as a “fitbit in the skull with tiny wires”.

While the previous design meant for humans had super thin wires, thinner than the human hair, connected to a device mounted behind the ear, the new device is much smaller, does not require the ear device and has been claimed to be implantable directly in the brain by a surgical robot under local anaesthesia.

The goal of Neuralink is creating a wireless brain-machine interface with the hope of curing neurological conditions and allow paralyzed people to control a computer mouse, among other things.

The device is said to be removable and the entrepreneur showed off Dorothy, another pig, whom he claimed, had one of the devices implanted in its brain and subsequently removed.

While the goal of the entrepreneur is commendable, I couldn’t help but smile that the humble pig is playing a significant role in making progress towards a world where artificial intelligence would take on a whole new meaning.

Would the insult, “You swine” be taken as flattery in the future? Just thinking…

Yatindra Tawde