Heh its a lot of deep ground to cover in a short post. LoL.
I see your point about research and that's very interesting what you mentioned about edison. I concede that I did not know that. Pretty cool, if a bit morbid, idea.
You are right there is a change it doesn't go as planned, there are countless possibilities with the brain.
Reminds me of how kurzweil thought he could reduce the brain into "bytes" and publically stated he thinks the human brain carries no more data than microsoft word but that didn't pan out nor turn out to be true either (He is not a Psychologist, just a general genius).
Obviously things are more complex than that (again, ask any PhD Psychologist).
Back to Elon, I have a bit more confidence in his ability to succeed.
Trouble is he's an athiest, even if a friendly one, and there are problems with that.
If you see people as only meat suits you're getting only half the picture (yet again, psychology...).
Research is very useful so overall I agree with you. But, just like AI itself, its better to catch problems way early than to wait for them to be mass-adopted and create a mess.
Look at Facebook and Social Media as a whole; it connected people but destroyed their privacy and ruined relationships, even entire countries in fact, because the people who built it were just nerds.
Irony since Elon is in the business of preventing problems of the future, yet with Neuralink in particular he may be creating a whole new one.
Reminds me of Dr Malcolm in Jurassic Park 2 "We won't make the same mistakes, we're making whole new ones".
IF the research leads to medical breakthroughs with ethical oversight, then I'm all for it.
If it leads to a runaway situation where people are lining up in a frenzy like the latest iphones to jack into the matrix and find out OOPS THIS IS COOL AT FIRST BUT NOW KINDA SUCKS then not so much.
Being intelligent is not the same as being ethical, and having good intentions is not the same as being fully competent and aware of all of the variables.
It can be easy to discount the knowledge required to fulfill a personal bias or goal.