It's a dangerous game to play. If you study the brain in any detail, you come away with an appreciation for just how delicate it is. It is vulnerable to physical shocks. It is vulnerable to countless chemical imbalances. It is vulnerable to biological threats from viruses to bacteria to fungi, even prions (proteins).

When they talk about compromising the skull and replacing that hard bone tissue with a silicon wafer, it worries me. It needs to be more resilient than that if we don't want to have patients being asked to wear a helmet everywhere they go in case they bump that spot on their head.

The electrodes as well are potentially dangerous. The material itself has to be biological inert and non-reactive, or it'll irritate brain tissue along the entire pathway it is infiltrated. Further, something like this is a huge red flag for infection. Bacteria will rapidly follow such a track through tissue and an infection which might have been manageable suddenly becomes life-threatening. That's bad enough if we're talking about certain skin bacteria following veins or tendon sheaths up an extremity. It's unbelievably dangerous if something like that got into the brain. And the physical construction of the implant specifically bypasses basic biological defenses like the blood-brain barrier.

I don't know precisely what they're made of, but those wires pose a physical threat as well. Imagine one of these patients is involved in a rapid deceleration (like a car crash, or even a near miss where you slam hard on the brakes). The head is pulled forward by momentum, then whiplashes back when the car and the seat belt stop the head forcing it back. Those wires could act like garrote wire slicing through nearby nerve tissue if the material they're made out of is too inelastic or if they're anchored in some way to a target region of the brain.

I can see why thousands of people might sign up. Some might just be very adventurous, but I suspect the majority of them have debilitating neurological conditions and see this as a potential cure. But man, there's about a million ways to get this wrong and end up with people dying a very horrible death.

However, I agree with you on the white hat comment. This is technology that will eventually be developed, and it'd be far better if it's done out in the open, here in the US, where we have a culture of scientific openness, and reasonable moral constraints built into our laws than if it were developed in a place like a Chinese Uighur camp. The Chinese have already cloned human beings, ostensibly with the goal of producing organs on demand for "donations" without really considering the ethical concerns like we have in the West. At least with Elon in charge, we have a better chance of avoiding the worst of dystopian outcomes.