Next big tech? Musk’s Neuralink implant prototype to create brain-computer interface
Elon Musk isn’t quite happy with electric cars, shooting people into orbit, populating Mars and building underground tunnels to fix traffic problems. He also wants to get within your brain.
His startup, Neuralink, really wants to 1 day implant computer chips inside the human brain. The goal is to develop implants that may treat neural disorders - and that may 1 day be powerful enough to place humanity on a more even footing with possible future superintelligent computers.
Not that it’s anywhere close to that yet.
In a video demonstration Friday explicitly targeted at recruiting new employees, Musk showed off a prototype of these devices. About the size of a sizable coin, it’s designed to be implanted in a person’s skull. Ultra-thin wires hanging from the device would go straight into the brain. A youthful version of these devices would have been put behind an ear just like a hearing aid.
However the startup is definately not a having commercial product, which would involve complex human trials and FDA approval among a great many other things. Friday’s demonstration featured three pigs. One, named Gertrude, had a Neuralink implant.
Musk, a founder of both the electric car company Tesla Motors and the private space-exploration firm SpaceX, is becoming an outspoken doomsayer about the threat artificial intelligence might 1 day pose to the people. Continued growth in AI cognitive capabilities, he and like-minded critics suggest, could bring about machines that can outthink and outmanoeuvre humans with whom they could have little in common. The proposed solution? Link computers to your brains so we are able to keep up.
Musk urged coders, engineers and especially persons with experience having “shipped” (that's, actually created) a product to use. “You don’t have to have brain experience,” he said, adding that is something that could be learned face to face.
Hooking a brain up right to electronics isn't new. Doctors implant electrodes in brains to deliver stimulation for treating such conditions as Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and chronic pain. In experiments, implanted sensors have let paralysed people use brain signals to use computers and move robotic arms. In 2016, researchers reported a man regained some movement in his own hand with a brain implant.
But Musk’s proposal goes beyond this. Neuralink really wants to build on those existing procedures as well as 1 day focus on surgeries that could improve cognitive functioning, according to a Wall Street Journal article on the company’s launch.
While there are endless, outlandish applications to brain-computer interfaces - gaming, or as someone on Twitter asked Musk, summoning your Tesla - Neuralink really wants to first utilize the device with people who've severe spinal cord problems for help them talk, type and move using their brain waves.
“I am confident that long-term it could be possible to revive someone’s full-body motion,” said Musk, who’s also famously said that he really wants to “die on Mars, not on impact.”
Neuralink isn't the only company working on artificial intelligence for the mind. Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who sold his previous payments startup Braintree to PayPal for $800 million, started Kernel, a company focusing on “advanced neural interfaces” to take care of disease and extend cognition, in 2016. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also interested in the space. Facebook bought CTRL-labs, a startup developing non-invasive neural interfaces, in 2019 and folded it into Facebook’s Reality Labs, whose goal is to “fundamentally transform just how we connect to devices.”
That might be an easier sell than the Neuralink device, which would require recipients to consent to have these devices implanted within their brain, possibly by a robot surgeon. Neuralink didn't react to requests for touch upon Friday.
