Elon Musk’s extremely confidential neurological startup company Neuralink has recently put out news that they possess flexible threads that can be used to connect a human’s brain and a computer. At the moment, it is veered towards paraplegics that would be able to use it to control computers with a chip implanted in their brains. However, soon, it could very well change the way we live and think!
At an event in San Francisco, Musk announced that this chip would be attaining a type of symbiosis with artificial intelligence while enhancing one’s own brain as well.
Musk is renowned for his ventures into automobile industries (Tesla), economics (PayPal), and space exploration (SpaceX). But, that could possibly be his most ambitious project ever.
He announced that this project was only developed to counter the supposed ‘existential threat’ that Artificial Intelligence would put before humans. To wholly procure and provide equality between man and machine, that was indeed a necessary step. This could actually also be used to treat brain diseases, among other things. In what’s been perceived as a slip, Musk revealed it’s already been tested on a monkey, in his lab.
Musk’s greatest fear could perhaps be waking up one day and realizing humanity has fallen so far behind machines, that they can be simply seen as pets. That could very well be a reason why he decided to venture into biotechnology. He thinks that there is a near urgent need for an ‘ultra high bandwidth’ which would connect humans to computers, and give them the necessary push required to compete with such vastly mechanized, well, machines.
He sarcastically mentioned at a conference in the year 2016 that he did not quite see himself as a house pet. The best thing to do would probably be bringing in technology which would serve as a buffer between the information gap.
Even if it seems straight out of a science fiction novel, with all the transhumanism and information sharing, Neuralink thinks that it can begin clinical procedures as early as next year. There would currently be a robot implanting the thread into a human brain. The threads would be attached to a chip inside the brain, and the thread would be near invisible to the human eye.
Neuralink hopes someday it’d be as seamless as a laser eye treatment.
It’s the very size of the Neuralink system that makes it exceedingly useful. All previous attempts have been bogged by a pretty big system that could contain only 256 electrodes. The white paper which reported on the Neuralink system states it has an array of tiny and flexible threads that can contain up to 3072 electrodes, over 96 threads.
However, the first thing they would be used for, is help paraplegics access the computer. Though, that would take some time. Max Hodak, the president of Neuralink, has stated that it will take some time for the patients to understand what they need to do, for they’d have to begin learning how to use their electronic ‘arms’ like an infant.
Yet, hopefully, it would be a boon to them.
Image credit: Axpitel
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