Longevity, Technology, Elder Justice, and Elon Musk

If Elon Musk has his way, he'll be around for a very long time. Among his many businesses, one that hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as SpaceX, Tesla, or X, is Neuralink, a company that’s developing implantable “brain–computer interfaces.” Their flagship "Link" is an implant that stimulates and monitors brain activity and connects it with external devices that users can control through their thoughts alone.

While the promise that technologies like “Link” hold for helping people with severe disabilities is mind boggling, so too are the potential risks. They include the hacking of neural data for surveillance, or worse, coercion or control. And there are other ethical considerations. At least in the early stages, these technologies will only be affordable for the fabulously wealthy like Musk, who has suggested that technologies like his will someday prolong life if not eliminate death altogether. In an interview earlier this year, he said "Ultimately, you will have a whole brain interface that I guess is a sort of form of immortality in that if your brain state is stored, you're kind of backed up on a hard drive. You can always restore that brain state into a biological body or maybe a robot or something."

Musk isn’t the only titan of technology who’d like to live for a very long time, or indefinitely. Oracle founder Larry Ellison donated more than $430 million to anti-aging research and proclaimed that he wanted to live forever, adding “Death makes me very angry. Premature death makes me angrier still.” In 2006, billionaire entrepreneur and Paypal founder Peter Thiel pledged $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit that has vowed to make 90 the new 50 by 2030, and later upped his investment to $7 million. Thiel is dismissive of those who passively accept death, declaring that “I prefer to fight it.”

Existing laws and ethical guidelines don’t begin to adequately address the challenges these technologies pose to autonomy, privacy, and equity. Without them, these potential "super-consumers" of resources may go unchecked. And regulatory safeguards, as we know, are not among Musk’s favorite things.