After the Weight-Loss Drug Musk Took, the Next Step Will Be an AI Brain Chip That Replaces Willpower: The Ozempic Effect

Part 14 of 27 in Homo Conspirans: The Humans Who Come After Us

Homo Conspirans · Musk’s dream: “a world where chips fix the brain’s problems” → a humanity that hands willpower to machines

Willpower will change from a virtue people build on their own into a function handled by drugs and chips. After weight-loss drugs switched off appetite, AI brain chips will dial down cravings for alcohol, cigarettes, gambling and shopping, one after another. Humanity becomes a species that sets the size of its desires instead of fighting them.

On November 16, 2022, a user on X, then still Twitter, asked Musk, who had dropped more than 13 kilograms in a few months, how he did it. His answer was one line: “Fasting + Ozempic/Wegovy + no tasty food near me.” When the most famous man in the world said he was on an obesity shot, the drug ran short.[1] A year and a half later, in May 2024, one in eight American adults said they had taken a drug of this class.[2]

It was not only the weight that went

Semaglutide, the drug’s active ingredient, does not act only on the gut. It reaches the brain’s reward circuit too. In 2025 a U.S. team led by Christian Hendershot gave 48 adults with alcohol use disorder, none of them trying to quit, either semaglutide or placebo injections for nine weeks. Then the participants were allowed to drink freely in the lab. Those on placebo drank close to 60 grams of alcohol on average, and those on semaglutide drank about half that. Their cravings dropped as well.[3]

People started calling it the “Ozempic effect.” A single shot does what decades of firm resolutions could not. The thought of food that never left the mind, the thought of a drink on the way home, goes quiet.

Also read: Musk's AI Space Reactors Will Take Humanity to the Brink of Nuclear War: Nuclear Reactors in Space

The old faith in willpower

For a long time people thought of willpower as a muscle, a strength that tires with use and grows with training. In the late 1990s psychology turned this into a theory called “ego depletion.” But in 2016, when 23 labs reran the same experiment with 2,141 people, the effect came out close to zero.[4] People who seem to have strong willpower are probably not better fighters. More likely their cravings run smaller from the start.

The size of a craving is set by the brain’s reward circuit. That circuit was built over hundreds of thousands of years when food was scarce and sweetness meant a chance to survive. In a world of 24-hour convenience stores, fighting that circuit bare-handed was an unfair fight from the start. The drug does not win the fight for you. It shrinks the fight itself.

The shift also changes how people get chosen. Until now schools and companies picked people for their patience. Those who studied all night, turned down the drinks and stuck to their diets got ahead. Once anyone can set the size of their cravings, patience stops separating people. Its place goes to the ability to choose what to want.

After the drug, the chip

The drug spreads through the whole body and has to be injected every week. The next step is a device that touches exactly the right spot at exactly the moment a craving rises. In August 2022, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania reported in Nature Medicine on two women with binge eating disorder and severe obesity who had a device implanted in the brain’s reward center. Whenever the device picked up the low-frequency brain wave that appears just before a binge, it delivered electrical stimulation at that moment only. Six months later, both women had far fewer episodes of loss-of-control eating, and both had lost weight.[5] Reading a signal and deciding on the spot is exactly what AI does best.

At the 2020 Neuralink demonstration, explaining why he wanted the chip to reach everyone, Musk said that as people age, almost everyone ends up with some brain problem, such as memory loss, anxiety or depression.[6] A single brain-chip update will be able to change the personalities of millions of people, and a chip that tunes cravings walks in through the same door as that risk.

January 1, 2046: settings instead of resolutions

The morning of January 1, 2046, an apartment in Ilsan, outside Seoul. Min-jun, 41, does not write any New Year’s resolutions. Instead he opens the “craving settings” screen on his phone, an app linked to the small neuromodulation patch he stuck behind his ear three years ago. Late-night snacks, 30 percent. Cigarettes, 0 percent. Online shopping, 50 percent. Alcohol goes up to 80 percent, but only for the holiday weekends.

His 16-year-old daughter opens an old diary she brought back from her grandmother’s house and laughs. Every year from the 1990s on, the first page says “Quit smoking this year for sure” and “Lose 10 kilograms,” and every year the entries stop by February. To her, the word “resolution” belongs to an age when adults held their cravings down by hand.

Pills in 2027, a vanishing phrase by 2060

This is the order in which willpower passes to technology.

• 2027: As pill versions of obesity drugs get cheaper, one in five American adults uses a drug of this class.
• 2030: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves a drug of this class to treat alcohol use disorder for the first time.
• 2034: A brain device that uses AI to read craving signals and stimulates only at that moment is approved for binge eating disorder and addiction.
• 2043: A neuromodulation patch worn behind the ear, no surgery needed, goes on sale, and more than 100 million people in rich countries adjust the size of their cravings with an app.
• 2050: Obesity rates in rich countries fall to half their 2025 levels, and tobacco and liquor companies’ sales shrink to a third of 2025’s.
• 2060: Dictionaries mark the phrase “weak-willed” as nearly obsolete.

The third item in Musk’s answer was “no tasty food near me.” Even the richest man in the world had no way to handle temptation except to keep away from it. His grandchildren’s generation will not keep away from temptation. It will turn the volume down.

Next in the series · The Mars Settlers Musk’s AI Picks Will All Carry the Gene That Can’t Stop: The Explorer Gene
More than 200,000 people applied for a one-way ticket to Mars with no way back. The genes of the pioneers AI selects will set the temperament of Martian humanity.

Sources

1. IBTimes India, “Elon Musk loses 13.6 kg weight; Twitter CEO shares secret behind transformation,” November 2022 (Elon Musk, X post, November 16, 2022). https://www.ibtimes.co.in/elon-musk-loses-13-6-kg-weight-twitter-ceo-shares-secret-behind-transformation-854148
2. KFF, “Poll: 1 in 8 Adults Say They’ve Taken a GLP-1 Drug, Including 4 in 10 of Those with Diabetes and 1 in 4 of Those with Heart Disease,” May 10, 2024. https://www.kff.org/health-costs/press-release/poll-1-in-8-adults-say-theyve-taken-a-glp-1-drug-including-4-in-10-of-those-with-diabetes-and-1-in-4-of-those-with-heart-disease/
3. Christian S. Hendershot et al., “Once-Weekly Semaglutide in Adults With Alcohol Use Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” JAMA Psychiatry 82(4), 395–405, 2025. https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05520775
4. Martin S. Hagger et al., “A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 11(4), 546–573, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616652873
5. Rajat S. Shivacharan et al., “Pilot study of responsive nucleus accumbens deep brain stimulation for loss-of-control eating,” Nature Medicine, August 29, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-01941-w
6. TechCrunch, “Elon Musk demonstrates Neuralink’s tech live using pigs with surgically implanted brain-monitoring devices,” August 28, 2020. https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/28/elon-musk-demonstrates-neuralinks-tech-live-using-pigs-with-surgically-implanted-brain-monitoring-devices