In the mind by Elon Musk the thirstiest problems of the world are shockingly, wonderfully simple. Traffic in LA Did You Come Down? Here, take a ride on this underground super-luge. Carbon emissions stink the planet? Fix it with a fleet of electric cars – and while we’re at it, let’s drive them ourselves. Need a backup planet to call home? Mars looks perfectly nice. Musk’s startup Neuralink exposes this way of thinking best of all: Machines with artificial intelligence are bigger than humans. Ergo, computer chips implant in human brains to level the species.
Earlier this week, Musk announced that he was one step closer to this goal – and had plans to prove it during a live webcast on Friday at 3pm Pacific time. Neuralink is far from its ultimate goal of making brain surgery as easy and safe as, say, Lasik. But Musk wrote up Twitter that the company was ready to show a working “V2” of the device that was introduced to the public last summer. He had before sei that the demonstration “will show that neurons are firing in real time. The matrix in the matrix. ”
Neuralink’s device is a small computer chip, intended to be inserted into the brain by a “sewing machine-like” robot on a network of superfine electrode-studded wires. It is meant to record signals in the brain and then translate them into motor controls. Many in the field suggest that they use these neuronal interfaces to control things like a prosthetic limb, or perhaps interact with our gadgets. Musk, in typical Muscatian fashion, has some bolder ideas. He generally described Neuralink’s project as helping “achieve symbiosis with artificial intelligence.”
That’s quite a task, and it’s unclear what Friday’s event will demonstrate. (Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment.) Musk probably sees an opportunity to convince people that the company is taking real steps toward its goals, no matter how ambitious, and that it is beyond its competitors.
“There is a lot of uncertainty in the whole field about whether [Neuralink] will ever be successful, ”says Sid Kouider, a former neuroscientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, who is currently launching his own neurological interface, NextMind. Clinical neuronal interfaces are difficult enough, but Neuralink has raised its sight for sucking the brain power of the everyday person with a highly invasive surgery. That sounds to Kouider like a moon shot. “Or even further, like a Jupiter shot.”
Researchers have been scattering their horse-computer interfaces for decades. The Ministry of Defense got involved in the 1970s, fueled by visions of a superhuman army. Other neuroscientists have attempted to develop devices in a clinical setting. Hair implants show some promise in restoring movement to someone whose spinal connections have been severed, or in controlling the vibrations associated with Parkinson’s.
In recent years, technologists have also taken an interest in neuronal interfaces. If these devices can help people in controlling a prosthetic arm, mind you, then they can also allow people to “think type” without using a keyboard or control their smart home devices without issuing a command. A brain-computer interface could, in theory, unlock a whole new way for people to interact with the digital world.
Musk is not the only one chasing this vision. Bryan Johnson, the founder of Braintree, has been working for years on a similar startup called Kernel. Paradromics has begun working on a medical-neural interface, “building on a scale that is 10 times what Neuralink does,” according to its CEO, Matt Angle. Mark Zuckerberg is also investing in brain computer interfaces. At Facebook’s developer conference in 2017, the company demonstrated a technology that would allow people to “listen with their skin”, and last year Facebook launched the CTRL Labs, which builds a non-invasive neural interface.
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