Elon Musk wants to merge humans with AI. How many brains will be damaged along the way?

Of all Elon Musk’s exploits — the Tesla cars, the SpaceX rockets, the Twitter takeover, the plans to colonize Mars — his secretive brain chip company Neuralink may be the most dangerous.

What is Neuralink for? In the short term, it’s for helping people with paralysis. But that’s not the whole answer.

Launched in 2016, the company revealed in 2019 that it had created flexible “threads” that can be implanted into a brain, along with a sewing-machine-like robot to do the implanting. The idea is that these threads will read signals from a paralyzed patient’s brain and transmit that data to an…