For as much as Musk goes back to 'first principles', I am unclear how, from first principles, a metal electrode can healthily and sustainably interface with a l

For as much as Musk goes back to 'first principles', I am unclear how, from first principles, a metal electrode can healthily and sustainably interface with a living human cell. From first principles the size, material, sensitivity, and most importantly, energy dissipation and efficiency of metals are incompatible with living tissue in the long run, as far as I know. There might be ways to get around any of the above features, but in doing so you often end up sacrificing exactly the point of the chip (power vs speed, sensitivity vs utility, size vs sensitivity). To my mind the far more reasonable mechanism to interact with living neural tissue is given just a cursory 'in the future' remark in the mentioned essay, optogenetics. If you use light for the transmission of signals you get rid of many of the above issues. But, unlike Facebook's tech, you would actually need direct line-of-sight to the cells. The trouble with optogenetics currently is there is the same delivery problems associated with using CRISPR in a live organism. On the other hand, if you solve that delivery problem, you not only get all the medical benefits of being able to fix mutated genes, but you also get the (from first principles) useful access to optical I/O in the brain. And the fact is that optogentics actually has some significant capabilities even today. It's much more of a bottom-up approach, but that is traditionally the direction Musk has used for his success: http://web.stanford.edu/group/dlab/optogenetics/sequence_info.html http://web.stanford.edu/group/dlab/optogenetics/sequence_inf... https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mouse+optogenetics https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mouse+optogenet... Rockets and electric cars were invented decades, if not a century before Musk came in and 'redid' the technologies from first principles. In this case he seems to have approached this like a rich man, not a principled engineer - rather than from first principles, more simply, "let just hire lots of smart people". And I don't think the result will be without utility - lots of good things have come from such research groups. But the result of this experiment will look nothing like the commercial success of Tesla or SpaceX. A best-case scenario is a bell-labs investment into a multi-decade long exploration of technology.