Neuralink put a chip in a pig named Gertrude

Her name is Gertrude.

She’s a pig. She has a coin-sized computer chip implanted in her skull, connected to neurons in her brain by thin, flexible electrode threads. When Gertrude’s snout touches something, you can see her neural activity spike on a screen in real time. Little pops of electrical signal, the actual firing of neurons in a living brain, displayed on a monitor while the pig happily sniffs around for food.

Neuralink showed this at a live presentation on August 28th, and I’ve been going back and forth about how to feel ever since.

The technology

The chip is called the N1 Link. It’s about 23mm in diameter, roughly the size of a large coin. A surgical robot (designed by Neuralink) inserts 1,024 electrode threads into the brain, each thinner than a human hair. The robot can do this while avoiding blood vessels. The chip reads the electrical signals from those threads, processes them, and transmits the data wirelessly.

The stated medical applications are real: treating spinal cord injuries, neurological disorders, brain-computer interfaces for paralysis patients. The idea of giving a paralyzed person the ability to control a computer cursor with their thoughts isn’t new. BrainGate has been doing this in research settings for years. What Neuralink is doing differently is making the hardware smaller, the surgery less invasive, and the system wireless.

That matters. A lot. The difference between a research prototype and a consumer device is exactly this kind of engineering polish.

Where it gets complicated

Here’s where I start losing my footing.

Musk’s stated long-term vision isn’t just medical. It’s cognitive augmentation. Connecting human brains to AI. Giving people the ability to communicate telepathically, access information directly, merge biological intelligence with artificial intelligence.

I’ve read enough Asimov and watched enough sci-fi to know where this story goes in fiction. It usually goes badly. But fiction isn’t prediction. And the medical applications alone are worth pursuing. If you can restore movement to a paralyzed person, you do it.

The question that keeps me up is the transition. At what point does “medical device that treats injury” become “cognitive upgrade that creates inequality”? If brain-computer interfaces eventually let some people think faster, access information instantly, or communicate at bandwidth speeds, what happens to the people who can’t afford the chip?

We already live in a world where access to technology creates advantage. This would be access to technology inside your brain. That’s a different category.

Gertrude

I keep going back to the pig.

She seemed fine. Genuinely fine. Eating, sniffing, walking around. The chip in her brain didn’t appear to bother her at all. MIT Technology Review and others have raised valid concerns about the neuroscience and the timeline. The gap between reading a pig’s neural signals and building a bidirectional brain-computer interface for humans is enormous.

But Gertrude seemed fine. And the neural signals on the screen were real. And the technology worked.

I watched the demo twice. The first time, I felt excited. The second time, I felt something closer to vertigo. Not fear exactly. More like the sensation of standing at the edge of something very tall and looking down.

Both reactions feel right. I don’t think they cancel each other out. I think they coexist.

The pig is fine. The future is complicated. And I’m going to keep watching.

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