The tech is over-hyped, so is there a business case for Musk's Neuralink?

In an article published in The Baffler, Shit for Brains, Danielle Carr does a good job of deflating Elon Musk's claims for Neuralink and of laying out the history of José Delgado's excursions into the same territory a half century ago. She ends with some speculation about how he might recoup his investment:

While it’s not immediately obvious what business models will emerge to capitalize on neural data, a rough shape of the answer is suggested by Rune Labs, a tech venture founded by an alumnus of Alphabet’s bioscientific wing Verily Life Sciences. Most medical device manufacturers are behemoths of the old economy, lacking the resources to curate the vast amounts of data their devices generate. Ditto for university researchers, who rarely have the margins in their research grants to purchase or build the computational tools necessary to correlate large quantities of behavioral and neural data. Enter Rune Labs, which offers device manufacturers and researchers a deal: give us access to the data generated by your neural implants, and in exchange, we will provide access to state of the art data storage and computation.

From their end, Rune Labs has developed a variety of phone apps to glean data about self-reported mood. (Similar research is ongoing in “digital psychiatry” to build apps that harvest data about everything from voice modulation to exercise which can then be coupled to the information about brain activity gleaned from neural devices.) The only restriction on Rune’s use of neural device data is that they have to keep patients anonymous. More and more, this looks like the business model that will define neural implants. As Alik Widge remarked, “The idea that your data is the product is already here with brain implants. Neuropace has already said that they’re moving toward being less of an implant company and more a brain data company.”

Of all the wild speculations Elon Musk made during the Neuralink launch, the most accurate prediction was his quip that the device is “sort of like if your phone went in your brain.” “Sort of like,” indeed: Neuralink is like a phone in that it is yet another machine built for generating data. While the device does not represent a major advance in brain-machine interfaces, and the pipeline for applications beyond movement disorders is at best decades long, what Neuralink does offer is an opportunity to harvest data about the brain and couple it to the kinds of data about our choices and behaviors that are already being collected all the time. The device is best understood not as a rupture with the past, but as an intensification of the forms of surveillance and data accumulation that have come to define our everyday lives.

H/t Leanne Ogasawara.