AI Library
The Double Structure of Digital Sovereignty
Europe’s Departure from Palantir and the Chains of American Big Tech
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
This is a record of 2026, when European intelligence agencies and defense ministries began removing analytics tools from America’s Palantir. It covers the replacement decisions made by France’s General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI), Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), and the Netherlands Ministry of Defense; the incident in which US export controls severed an ally’s ac…
New English Edition
Artificial Intelligence in Horticulture
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Across five chapters and ten sections, this book examines computer vision for crop diagnosis, harvesting robots and autonomous field systems, smart greenhouses and digital twins, precision irrigation and supply-chain quality control, high-throughput phenotyping, and predictive breeding.
New English Edition
Artificial Intelligence in Food Crop Agriculture
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Across six chapters and eighteen sections, the book examines digital agricultural infrastructure, remote sensing, crop diagnosis, yield forecasting, precision irrigation, genomics, molecular breeding, agricultural robotics, climate-smart agriculture, and global food security.
New English Edition
The Future of Forestry and Agroforestry
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Driven by Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation
Across five chapters and fifteen sections, the book follows satellites, drones, LiDAR, digital twins, forest-specific language models, wildfire and pest forecasting, forestry robotics, agroforestry, timber traceability, and forest carbon markets.
New English Edition
Smart Livestock Farming: AI Enters the Barn
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Sensors listen, cameras watch, and artificial intelligence helps farmers decide.
Across five chapters and fifteen sections, the book follows precision livestock farming from animal health and reproduction to robotic milking, virtual fencing, digital twins, methane reduction, welfare, and data ownership.
Table of Contents
Han Dong-hoon, Busan Buk-gu Gap: A Record of the 100 Days Before and After the Election (Mar. 26-Jul. 3, 2026)
Kim Kyung-jin
Table of Contents and 13 sections
From March 26 to July 3, 2026, this record follows the spring after expulsion, the Busan Buk-gu Gap by-election, victory as an independent, and the first bill submitted in the National Assembly.
Table of Contents
Artificial Intelligence and Medicine
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
AI in clinical care, hospitals, education, and research
AI in medical imaging, risk prediction, treatment planning, hospital operations, education, and research, with patient safety, privacy, and accountability.
[AI Library] Chapter 5. Neuralink Hardware: The N1 Implant and the R1 Robot
Brain Readers: Neuralink and the Final Human Revolution
Chapter 5. Neuralink Hardware: The N1 Implant and the R1 Robot
Kim Kyung-jin
A. The Structure of the Coin-Sized N1 Brain Implant and Its 1,024 Electrodes
In the summer of 2019, Elon Musk stood on stage at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. On his palm sat a small, coin-sized circular device. "This is the Link," Musk said. A murmur rippled through the audience. Existing brain-computer interface devices required massive connectors protruding from the top of the head and thick bundles of wires. Participants in the BrainGate project had to plug cables into sockets jutting out from their scalps, a sight reminiscent of a sci-fi movie laboratory. Musk wanted to erase all of that.
The N1 implant measures roughly 23 millimeters in diameter and 8 millimeters thick. It's a bit thicker than an American quarter. Musk called it "a Fitbit in your skull." If a Fitbit counts your steps and measures your heart rate, the N1 reads your thoughts themselves. During surgery, a coin-sized circle of skull is cut away and the N1 is fitted into the opening, sitting perfectly flush with the bone. Once the scalp is closed, no trace is visible from the outside. Even the scar hides beneath the hair. "It has to be invisible" was the core design philosophy. This wasn't just about aesthetics. Making it possible for users to wear the device in daily life without feeling like something foreign was attached to them; that was the essential condition for bringing brain-computer interfaces to the general public.
An astonishing world is compressed inside this small disc. The heart of the N1 is not its outer casing but the 64 flexible threads extending beneath it. Each thread carries 16 electrode contacts arranged in microscopic precision. Multiply those together and you get 1,024 channels. One thousand and twenty-four. The significance of that number is immense. The Utah Array, long treated as a standard in medicine, had roughly 100 channels. Neuralink reads ten times more information, through a softer, more flexible medium.
The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons. Each neuron fires electrical spikes to transmit information. Every one of those spikes represents a thought, an intention, an emotion. More channels means eavesdropping on more neuronal conversations at once. Neuralink's engineers capture individual neuron firing signals through these electrodes at a rate of 20,000 samples per second. The collected analog signals are immediately amplified and converted into digital signals by a custom-designed semiconductor chip inside the N1. This chip runs on such low power that it generates no meaningful heat inside the brain, yet it processes enormous volumes of neural data in real time and transmits them wirelessly.
Looking inside the N1, you find multiple layers of technology stacked together. At the bottom sits the input section where the electrode threads connect. Above that lies the analog front end, which amplifies, filters, and digitizes the faint brain signals. Sending all the raw brainwave data as-is would overwhelm any wireless link. So the N1 selects and compresses only the key information from moments when neurons clearly fire. Think of it less like streaming a high-definition video feed and more like sending only the compressed frames where motion was detected. Above that layer sit the wireless communication module, the battery, and the charging circuit, all stacked one on top of the other. Everything had to fit inside a space of 23 millimeters by 8 millimeters.
The brain is an organ exquisitely sensitive to temperature changes. A rise of just 1 to 2 degrees Celsius can damage brain tissue. International safety regulations require that implantable medical devices raise the temperature of surrounding tissue by no more than 2 degrees. Neuralink's engineers had to stake everything on low-power chip design. The result: the N1 processes brain signals and transmits them wirelessly while producing so little heat that it barely affects body temperature.
The N1 implant does more than just read signals. Neuralink's goal is two-way communication. Each of the 1,024 electrodes was designed to deliver electrical current that can stimulate nearby neurons. For now, the focus is on the recording function, reading the brain's signals and sending them to a computer.
But the hardware is already capable of sending tiny currents to stimulate neurons. This capability will be essential for providing artificial vision to blind individuals or rerouting signals around damaged brain circuits. Stimulating the visual cortex to show a blind person points of light; restoring motor sensation so a paralyzed patient can feel movement again. The "symbiosis between humans and AI" that Musk envisions begins with this two-way communication.
In January 2024, when this chip settled into the brain of the first patient, Noland Arbaugh, it was a historic moment. When Arbaugh moved a cursor on screen for the first time after surgery, all 1,024 electrodes were simultaneously listening to the intention "move my hand" arising from his motor cortex. The N1 implant is a translator that converts the brain's biological signals into digital ones. It is also a portal that extends human will beyond physical constraints. Each of those 1,024 electrodes is like a probe launched into the uncharted universe of the brain.
B. The Sewing Machine Robot R1: Surgical Precision Beyond Human Hands
Neurosurgeon Dr. Matthew MacDougall said this in an interview with Lex Fridman: "The human surgery part that I do is really simple. It's one of the most basic neurosurgical procedures you can imagine. I do the parts that the robot can't do, and the robot does the parts that I can't do." The robot he was talking about is the R1.
The 64 electrode threads attached to the N1 are only 4 to 6 micrometers thick. That's about the size of a red blood cell, roughly one-twentieth the width of a human hair. Inserting threads this fine and floppy into the jelly-like tissue on the brain's surface with pinpoint accuracy is beyond what a human surgeon's hands can do. Christine Odabashian, head of Neuralink's insertion hardware team, described the process this way: "Imagine plucking a single hair from your head and trying to push it into a block of Jell-O wrapped in plastic wrap. At the exact right depth and position. Sixty-four times. Within a reasonable time frame. If you asked a neurosurgeon to do that, they probably wouldn't be too happy about it."
The R1 robot is often compared to a sewing machine. This isn't a marketing metaphor; the way it works practically demands the comparison. The R1 uses an ultra-fine tungsten-rhenium alloy needle to hook the loop of an electrode thread and drive it into the target spot on the brain's cortex. The needle enters and withdraws so fast the motion is invisible to the naked eye. It stitches electrodes into brain tissue the way a sewing machine stitches thread into fabric. The needle is sharpened to a molecular point, and the robot hooks an electrode thread onto the needle tip like a loop, pushes it into the brain tissue, then pulls the needle cleanly out.
The most critical technical challenge in this process is blood vessel avoidance. The brain is laced with tiny blood vessels tangled like a spider's web. If an electrode punctures a vessel, bleeding occurs, and bleeding leads to brain damage. Over time, scar tissue forms around the electrode, encasing it, and eventually the signal is cut off. The R1 robot uses high-performance cameras and lighting to photograph the brain's surface, then maps blood vessel locations in real time using computer vision algorithms. The robot identifies tiny gaps between vessels and plans an insertion path for each electrode. As of 2025, Neuralink has integrated optical coherence tomography (OCT) to build real-time vascular maps. By combining multiple optical pathways into one system, the robot can perform blood vessel avoidance on the fly.
The true power of the R1 lies in its speed and precision. DJ Seo, Neuralink's vice president, described the robot's capability this way: "This robot can manipulate very tiny threads. The threads are just a few red blood cells thick. And it inserts them reliably into a moving brain while avoiding blood vessels. It does this very reliably." The robot takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes to insert all 64 threads. If a human surgeon tried to do this manually under a microscope, it could take hours, and fatigue would raise the risk of error. The next-generation robot unveiled in 2025 cut the time to insert a single electrode down to 1.5 seconds. Reducing total surgery time minimizes the patient's risk of infection and the burden of anesthesia.
Brain tissue is soft and elastic, like tofu. When you try to pierce it with a needle, the tissue compresses and tries to bounce away. The R1 overcomes this by jabbing the needle in and pulling it out at extreme speed. It can also detect the brain's micro-movements caused by the patient's breathing and heartbeat, adjusting the needle's position to match. Motion compensation technology is built in. The difficulty is comparable to hitting the dead center of a moving target, shot after shot, without missing.
The current surgical protocol follows a collaborative model. A human surgeon performs the craniotomy and opens the dura mater, then the R1 takes over for electrode insertion. As Dr. MacDougall put it, "the parts the robot can't do" and "the parts that I can't do" are divided between them. But Musk's goal is to make this surgery as simple as LASIK. Walk into a clinic during your lunch break, let the robot operate, and return to work in the afternoon. DJ Seo, Neuralink's president, said in an interview with Lex Fridman: "We want to get to one-click level."
The manufacturing cost of the R1 robot is also dropping fast. The first version of the needle cartridge cost $350 and required 24 hours of manual assembly. As of June 2025, the next-generation cartridge costs $15 and assembles in 30 minutes. Neuralink has said it intends to apply these kinds of cost reductions across every component, with a goal of bringing the total procedure cost down to the level of LASIK surgery, roughly $2,400 to $3,200.
During Noland Arbaugh's surgery in 2024, the R1 proved its worth. The robot avoided blood vessels as designed and planted all 64 threads in their precise locations. When Arbaugh woke up after surgery, 1,024 electrodes were seated inside his brain, with no signs of serious bleeding or brain damage. It was a signal flare announcing that surgical precision had crossed beyond human limits into the domain of machines. The R1 robot is made of cold metal, but at the tip of its needle rides a burning determination to restore human dignity.
C. Flexible Electrode Threads and Wireless Charging Technology
Putting a foreign object inside the brain means fighting the body's defense systems. Our immune system treats any hard material that enters the brain as an enemy. It wraps scar tissue around the intruder to wall it off. This is why previous rigid metal electrodes and silicon arrays failed over the long term.
The Utah Array, long used in medical settings, was an array of stiff silicon needles packed tightly together. The problem is that our brains are as soft as tofu or pudding, and they slosh around inside the skull every time we move our heads or our hearts beat. When a rigid needle is stuck into soft brain tissue, the brain's movements cause the needle to make tiny cuts in the surrounding tissue. Wounds form, scar tissue builds up, and eventually it encases the electrode and blocks the signal. The device's useful life is over.
Neuralink attacked this problem with an obsession for flexibility. The electrodes they developed are not rigid needles but extremely thin, flexible threads made from polyimide, a biocompatible polymer, coated with gold or platinum to conduct electricity. The flexibility of these threads defies intuition. They are as light and soft as a spider's silk thread floating in the breeze, moving with the brain tissue in a gentle wave when it shifts. This minimizes mechanical stress on the brain and suppresses scar formation from immune response. That is the core of Neuralink's biocompatibility strategy.
But flexibility came at a cost. The threads are so floppy they're almost impossible to push into the brain. That's exactly why the R1 robot and its tungsten needle were necessary, as described earlier. And during the first human clinical trial, an unexpected problem emerged.
After his surgery in January 2024, Noland Arbaugh showed remarkable results in the first few weeks. He moved a cursor with his thoughts, played chess, and raced through Mario Kart. But about a month after the operation, trouble appeared. Roughly 85 percent of the threads implanted in his brain had retracted from their original positions. Arbaugh recalled that period in an interview: "It was really hard. I had just gotten so into this device, I was riding this high, and then within a month it felt like everything was crumbling."
According to Neuralink's analysis, Arbaugh's brain moved about three times more than the company had anticipated. Air trapped inside the skull after surgery escaped, causing the brain tissue to shift. The ultra-flexible threads couldn't keep up with the brain's movement and were pulled out along with it. The incident exposed a structural limitation of flexible electrodes. Only about 15 percent of the 64 threads remained in place. The situation looked dire.
Neuralink's engineers responded to this crisis with speed. Instead of performing another surgery, they pushed a software update. They modified the algorithms so the surviving electrodes could read signals at higher sensitivity. They improved the signal decoding methods to match the previous performance level with less data. Arbaugh's performance recovered and eventually surpassed his earlier records. Arbaugh said: "I'm here to do my part. So that these things happen to me and don't happen to the next people. That's why I'm here."
During the surgery on the second patient, Alex, the team inserted the threads deeper and minimized the gap between brain tissue and the implant, structurally addressing the retraction problem. They also took steps to reduce brain movement during the procedure. As a result, no thread retraction occurred in Alex's case. The Silicon Valley method of learning from failure and improving immediately had been applied to brain surgery.
Another technical challenge was power supply. Running a wire from the chip buried in the brain out through the skin behind the ear would create a pathway for infection, so it had to be avoided. A fully wireless system was needed. But placing a battery inside the body is an extremely dangerous proposition. If battery fluid leaks or the cell ruptures, the consequences are fatal.
Neuralink adopted electromagnetic induction charging for the N1 implant. Just as you set a smartphone on a wireless charging pad, the user wears a dedicated charging cap or rests their head on a charger built into a pillow. A small coil inside the N1 picks up the external magnetic field and converts it into electricity. The battery lasts roughly eight to twelve hours and is designed to recharge wirelessly while the user sleeps or rests.
The biggest engineering constraint with wireless charging is heat. Unlike charging a smartwatch under a patch of hair, here the losses generated by the charging coil can translate directly into rising temperatures in the skull and surrounding tissue. According to Neuralink's design criteria, the outer surface of the implant must not rise more than two degrees when in contact with brain tissue. The charging system had to be unified into a single package: coil and ferrite arrangements that maximize coupling efficiency, controlled charging power profiles, internal temperature sensing with automatic shutoff, and a wearable charger comfortable enough for everyday use.
Early users like Noland Arbaugh gained freedom thanks to this wireless system. Whether sitting in his wheelchair or lying in bed, he could control a computer with his thoughts alone, free of cumbersome wires. This 'connection without cables' was the most important ticket for brain-computer interfaces to leave the laboratory and enter daily life. Flexible threads brought harmony with the brain; wireless technology brought harmony with the world.
D. The Engineering Challenge of Going Wireless, Miniaturized, and Power-Efficient
Engineering is the art of compromise. But when you are building a device that goes inside a human brain, there is almost no room for compromise. The device must be extremely small. It must have no wires. The battery must last a long time without generating heat. It must process the brain's enormous data streams in real time. These requirements contradict each other. Making the device smaller shrinks the battery. Transmitting more data generates heat. Neuralink's engineers had to find the optimal answer inside this equation of contradictions.
Earlier brain-computer interface systems required a port mounted on the head, connected by thick cables to a large computer. This raised infection risk and restricted the user's movement. Early BrainGate participants needed researchers to physically plug a cable into a socket protruding from the scalp before every experiment session. It was like a shackle that constantly reminded the patient, 'I am a test subject.' Neuralink eliminated all of that, choosing instead to transmit data wirelessly.
The biggest bottleneck was bandwidth. Imagine 1,024 electrodes sampling brain signals 20,000 times per second. Transmitting that enormous volume of raw data over Bluetooth in real time is impossible. Bluetooth has limited transfer speeds, and sending more data causes power consumption and heat generation to spike.
To solve this problem, Neuralink used on-chip spike detection. The N1 chip filters data at the first stage, right inside the brain. Instead of sending every bit of brainwave noise, it identifies the moments when a neuron has clearly fired and transmits only that compressed information. Think of it this way: rather than streaming raw high-definition CCTV footage, you send only compressed clips from the moments motion was detected. According to a Neuralink paper submitted in 2021, this system-on-chip measures just 5 by 4 millimeters yet handles recording and stimulation across all 1,024 electrodes, with total power consumption of only 24.7 milliwatts.
The signal-to-noise ratio was another fierce battle. A neuron's action potential registers as a very small voltage change at the electrode. The surrounding environment is full of noise sources: muscle signals, movement artifacts, power supply interference, and wireless transmission activity. The implant must simultaneously deliver ultra-low-noise amplifiers, proper bandpass filtering, high-resolution analog-to-digital converters, and minimal crosstalk between channels. To meet these demands, Neuralink designed custom low-power semiconductors in-house. The chip also carries a dedicated circuit for monitoring impedance. An onboard digital-to-analog converter plays a test tone on a single channel while physically adjacent channels simultaneously record the response signal.
The pressure to miniaturize needs no explanation. The N1 chip must contain amplifiers that convert analog signals to digital, filters, analog-to-digital converters, a processor, a wireless communication module, and a battery management system, all in one package. All of these components must be packed into a coin-sized footprint while preventing electromagnetic interference between them. In a device handling faint brain signals, noise is fatal. Neuralink pushed semiconductor packaging technology to its limits.
Hermetic sealing was equally critical. The space beneath the skull is not a friendly environment for electronics. Moisture, ions, and subtle pH shifts attack metal traces, pads, and bonding points over time. For medical implants, material selection, encapsulation design, and feedthrough engineering are matters of life and death. The N1's casing must perfectly protect the internal circuitry from cerebrospinal fluid and other body fluids while being made from materials that are nontoxic to living tissue. Even the smallest gap would let fluid seep in and cause the device to fail, or allow battery chemicals to leak out and inflict fatal damage on the brain.
Wireless communication reliability and security also had to be considered. Wireless is convenient, but if the connection drops, usability collapses; if security is weak, the medical device becomes an attack surface rather than a treatment tool. The N1 communicates with external devices using the Bluetooth protocol. In clinical settings, real-world problems arise: interference, latency, and pairing management. On top of that, brain signals are the ultimate form of personal data. Encryption, authentication, and update mechanisms must be built in at the hardware level. Long-term maintenance tasks, including firmware updates, bug fixes, and security patches, must all be performed wirelessly and safely.
All of these engineering challenges go beyond building a better machine. This is the process of pulling the grand vision of 'connecting the human brain to the internet' down into the constraints of physical law. Clinical trial results from 2024 and 2025 show that Neuralink found a balance point among these contradictory requirements. Noland Arbaugh used the chip for more than ten hours a day, livestreaming and playing games. The second patient, Alex, moved a cursor within five minutes of surgery, went on to create 3D designs in CAD software, and played Counter-Strike.
But the challenge is far from over. Elon Musk wants to increase the electrode count to 10,000, then 100,000. The chip must get smaller still, and the charging interval must grow longer. The current N1 is only 'version 1.0.' Just as the iPhone went through round after round of innovation after its first release, Neuralink's hardware will keep evolving along three axes: wireless capability, miniaturization, and lower power consumption.
In an interview with Lex Fridman, Musk sketched the future this way: 'In five years we could reach megabit-level bandwidth. Faster than anything a human can do by typing or speaking.' Then he added: 'Without this, AI will get bored waiting for you to spit out a few words. It would be like talking to a tree.'
At the end of this evolution, hardware we cannot yet imagine may be waiting. Whether it will make humans more human or transform us into something entirely different, no one knows yet. One thing, though, is clear. The hardware represented by the N1 and R1 is steadily completing the physical foundation for connecting the brain to the internet. What we build on that foundation is now a question for all of us.
Kim Kyung-jin
Attorney · Former Member of the National Assembly · AI Policy Researcher
© 2026 Kim Kyung-jin. All rights reserved.