No one can say that Elon Musk isn't ambitious. The Tesla founder and CEO also owns Space Exploration Technologies Corp, commonly known as SpaceX. He's also a visionary and doesn't hesitate to put his stamp on everything from renewable energy to high-speed mass transit.
But it seems that colonizing Mars is not enough.
Now Elon Musk thinks that by implanting tiny electrodes in the brain he could keep consciousness alive even if the body has died.
In essence, Elon Musk is reportedly paving the way for people to one day upload their thoughts, memories, and collective experiences to a computer via Neural Network technology. Neural technology, and specifically Neural Lace, is still new, but Musk's ultimate goal is to better interface humans and machines in features like our voice, touch, and orientation control.
People learned to play with an iPhone keyboard pretty quickly, but imagine if we had a direct connection to the device's CPU. That's Musk's vision, in a nutshell, for how people in the future will interact with their devices.
According to Elon Musk, the change should happen soon so that humans do not become inferior beings to AI.
While Elon Musk has not yet made any official announcement, he has already begun teasing the company.
First with tweets (like this and this), and then with new hires at Neuralink Corp., which sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie. The Wall Street Journal confirmed the company’s existence through one of its founding members, Max Hodak. Hodak previously founded Transcriptic, a startup that provides robotic lab services.
Neuralink made its first hires with: Vanessa Tolosa, an engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and an expert in flexible electrodes, Phillip Sabes, a professor at the University of California and an expert on how the brain controls movement, and Timothy Gardner, a professor at Boston University, who gained fame when he applied electrodes to birds and studied the way they sing.
Ultimately, Neuralink wants to change the way we interact with devices by connecting our minds to the machines we use most: cars, mobile devices, or even smart objects in our smart homes. For now, though, people close to the company say its first products will likely be advanced implants designed to treat brain conditions like epilepsy or depression.
