Visionary Elon Musk To Develop Brain Implants Designed To Merge Humans And Machines


Elon Musk is an ambitious man.

He is the founder and chief executive of Tesla while simultaneously also running the Space Exploration Technologies Corp, known as SpaceX. He’s also a visionary who wants to place his stamp on everything from renewable energy, high-speed public transportation, to colonizing Mars.

Uploading human thoughts:

Now Musk want to lay the groundwork for humans to one day upload their thoughts, memories, and collective experiences to a computer through “neural lace” technology by implanting tiny brain electrodes that could lead to consciousness that doesn’t die with its human body.

Musk’s end goal is a superior interface between humans and machines than our current voice, or touch-oriented control.

Imagine if humans had a direct link to a CPU. This is how Musk envisions how humans of the future will interact with their devices. And the change has to happen sooner rather than later so humans don’t become inferior to AI, at a conference last June Musk said “If you assume any rate of advancement in [artificial intelligence], we will be left behind by a lot.”

The company’s first steps:

Musk hasn’t made an official announcement yet but he’s been teasing the news for months, with tweets ad well as hiring for an incognito company called Neuralink Corp. The existence of the company was verified by The Wall Street Journal through one of its founding members, Max Hodak who had previously founded Transcriptic, a startup providing robotic lab services.

Neuralink first hires are: Vanessa Tolosa, an engineer at the Larence Livermore National Laboratory and expert in flexible electrodes; Phillip Sabes, professor at the University of California and an expert on how the brain controls movement; and Timothy Gardner, a professor at Boston University who rose to fame after implementing electrodes in birds and studying how they sang.

Neuralink’s goal is to change how humans interact with devices by linking our brains to the machines we interact with most often: cars, mobile devices, and even smart items in our smart home.

However, people in the know claim that the company’s first products will probably be advanced implants designed to treat brain disorders like epilepsy or depression, which is not a bad start.