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Elon Musk is not content with electric cars, shooting people into orbit, populating Mars and building underground tunnels to solve traffic problems. It also wants to get into your brain.
His startup, Neuralink, wants to one day implant computer chips inside the human brain. The goal is to develop implants that can treat neural disorders, and that may one day be powerful enough to put humanity on a more balanced footing with possible future superintelligent computers.
Not that I’m close to that yet.
In a video demonstration on Saturday (NZT) explicitly aimed at recruiting new employees, Musk showed a prototype of the device. About the size of a large coin, it is designed to be implanted into a person’s skull.
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John Raoux / AP
Elon Musk’s new startup Neuralink wants to one day implant computer chips inside people’s brains.
The ultra-thin wires hanging from the device would go directly to the brain. An earlier version of the device would have been placed behind one ear like a hearing aid.
But the startup is far from a commercial product, which would involve complex human trials and FDA approval, among many other things. Friday’s demonstration featured three pigs. One, named Gertrude, had a Neuralink implant.
Musk, founder of both the electric car company Tesla Motors and the private space exploration company SpaceX, has become an outspoken doomsayer about the threat artificial intelligence could one day pose to the human race.
Youtube / Neuralink
About the size of a large coin, it is designed to be implanted into a person’s skull.
The continued growth in the cognitive capabilities of artificial intelligence, he and like-minded critics suggest, could lead to machines that can think and outperform humans with whom they might have little in common. The proposed solution? Connect computers to our brains so we can keep up to date.
Musk urged programmers, engineers, and especially experienced people to have “shipped” (that is, actually created) a product to apply. “You don’t need to have brain experience,” he said, adding that this is something that can be learned on the job.
Connecting a brain directly to electronics is not new. Doctors implant electrodes in the brain to provide stimulation for the treatment of conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and chronic pain.
In experiments, implanted sensors have allowed paralyzed people to use brain signals to operate computers and move robotic arms. In 2016, researchers reported that a man regained some movement in his own hand with a brain implant.
Youtube / Neuralink
The ultra-thin wires hanging from the device would go directly to the brain.
But Musk’s proposal goes further. Neuralink wants to leverage those existing medical treatments, as well as work one day on surgeries that could improve cognitive functioning, according to a Wall street journal article about the launch of the company.
While there are endless and wacky applications for brain-computer interfaces (games, or as someone on Twitter asked Musk, invoking his Tesla), Neuralink wants to first use the device with people who have severe spinal cord injuries to help them. speak, write and move. using your brain waves.
“I am sure that in the long term it will be possible to restore movement to someone’s entire body,” said Musk, who is also famous for saying he wants to “die on Mars, but not from the impact.”
Neuralink is not the only company working on artificial intelligence for the brain. Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who sold his previous payments company Braintree to PayPal for $ 800 million, founded Kernel, a company that works on “advanced neural interfaces” to treat disease and extend cognition, in 2016.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also interested in the space. Facebook bought CTRL-labs, a startup that develops non-invasive neural interfaces, in 2019 and incorporated it into Facebook’s Reality Labs, which aim to “fundamentally transform the way we interact with devices.”
That could be an easier sale than the Neuralink device, which would require recipients to agree to have the device implanted in their brain, possibly by a robotic surgeon. Neuralink did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.
