Elon Musk is a man who wants to do a myriad of things: he wants autonomous electric cars cruising down streets in the near future, he wants to send people to Mars and our Moon, and he wants to build a substitute to trains that travels blazingly fast. Now, he has another item in his to-do list: to link up your human brain with artificial intelligence.
How? With the help of a new company Musk is founding, of course, called Neuralink. The new venture will search for ways in which AI can be integrated into our brains by virtue of tiny, implanted electrodes.
Elon Musk Creates Neuralink, A Company That Will Link Brains With AI
The company is still in its very early stages and has not, unsurprisingly, accrued any significant media coverage or public presence whatsoever until now. The aim is to create devices that can be embedded inside actual human brains, as The Verge reports, with the eventual upshot of aiding human beings to fuse with software and maintain parallel status with advancements in AI. These advances reportedly could improve human memory or allow for less middlemen when interacting with computer interfaces.
Elon Musk And His Neural Lace
Neuralink is no stranger to most, as Musk did hint at its existence a few times over the last six months or so. Speaking during a summit in Dubai last month, Musk told the audience that "over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence." He also stated that the connection itself is mostly about the bandwidth and the speed between the human brain and digital version of which. Also, Musk is not laconic to inquiries over twitter about his "neural lace," which is fancy talk for a brain-to-computer interface humans can leverage to amp themselves.
Max Hodak, a company insider at Neuralink, confirmed the news to The Wall Street Journal on March 27, saying that "embryonic" best describes the current state of the startup.
Musk has also previously spoke publicly about the idea of linking AI into our own brains lest robots fully outpunch humans in aspects such as labor, manpower, and more, especially given the fact that automation is slowly penetrating industries at large. Without a way for humans to be merged with emerging AI technology, humans could run the risk of playing second fiddle to AI.
Top Professionals Hired By Neuralink
Musk's Neuralink is registered in California as a medical research company and has reportedly brought top-rank academics in the field of neuroscience, including Dr. Vanessa Tolosa, a flexible electrodes and nano technology expert; Philip Sabes, a University of California, San Francisco professor; and Timothy Gardner, a professor from Boston University whose expertise falls on the neural pathways in the brains of songbirds.
Like Musk's other companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX, Neuralink plans to come up with a working prototype to illustrate that such an undertaking is viable and safe before moving on to more pressing and challenging matters at hand: actually figuring out how to link human brains with AI.
If Musk and the team at Neuralink see any success in its efforts, the line between reality and science fiction will blur again.
Thoughts about Musk's Neuralink? What do you think about upgrading human brains with AI? Feel free to sound off in the comments section below!
