Miguel Nicolelis

Miguel Nicolelis (born 1961) is a Brazilian physician-neuroscientist and one of the founders of brain-machine-interface research — his Duke University lab enabled monkeys, and later paralysed patients, to control robotic limbs with their thoughts, and his exoskeleton let a paralysed man make the opening kick of the 2014 World Cup. Few people have done more hands-on work at the frontier of merging brains and machines.

Against the singularity

That frontier work is precisely why his skepticism carries weight. Nicolelis rejects the idea that the brain is a computer that could ever be simulated or “uploaded.” He argues that the brain’s essential properties emerge from unpredictable, non-linear interactions among billions of cells — dynamics no digital machine can capture. On this basis he has repeatedly dismissed the technological singularity championed by Ray Kurzweil as “a bunch of hot air.”

With mathematician Ronald Cicurel he co-wrote “The Relativistic Brain,” expanding the case that human cognition is not reducible to computation and therefore cannot be replicated in silico. His critique is not that AI is useless but that the field routinely overclaims: mistaking pattern-matching for understanding, and marketing for intelligence — a caution shared, from different directions, by Gary Marcus.