Meet Elon Musk’s Next Brainchild, Neuralink — It Will Plug AI Into Your Brain!

Consider it a man-machine brain merger.

After rockets and self-driving, mind-bogglingly fast cars, Elon Musk is all set to hack your brain now!

The Tesla-famed Musk just launched a brain-computer interface venture called Neuralink.

The company, which for now is only in the early stages of even coming into existence, is centered around creating devices that can be implanted in the human brain.

But why would someone want to do that?!

Well, like we said, to hack your brain.
The ultimate purpose of this, they say, is to help human beings merge with software and keep pace with advancements in artificial intelligence. The initiative is supposed to improve a person’s memory and allow for more direct interfacing with computing devices.

While little is known about the company for now, the end goal seems to be to allow humans to seamlessly communicate with technology without the need for an actual, physical interface.

Registered in California, in July last year, the company’s initial focus was to use their proprietary interface to help identify and alert users to the symptoms of chronic conditions — from epilepsy to depression. Now, however, it seems to be on a supposedly greater path.

Well, the news, even though it is certainly big, does not entirely comes as a shocker. Musk has over the time hinted at the existence of his plans to launch a venture of the kind. “Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence”, Musk said to a crowd in Dubai, later adding “it’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output”.

What Musk is striving for with Neuralink, only exists in science fiction today. The readers of Sci-fi would know this as “neural lace” which is shorthand for a brain-computer interface humans could use to improve themselves.

But that, for now, is far from any technology we have.

Yes, there are supposedly “cool” applications of similar technology in the real world today. For example, documentary-maker Rob Spence who replaced one of his own eyes with a video camera in 2008, amputees who use prosthetics that connect to their own nerves and are controlled by electrical signals from the brain, and implants that are helping tetraplegics regain independence through the BrainGate project, things are moving in that direction anyway.

Electrode arrays and other implants have been used to help ameliorate the effects of Parkinson’s, epilepsy and other neurodegenerative diseases, in the realm of medicine, but it is still quite certainly a very controversial process. Given how incredibly dangerous and invasive it is to operate on the human brain, only those who have exhausted every other medical option choose to undergo such surgery as a last resort.

So getting implants in your brain for something of this “whimsical” use is going to be a far-fetched thing by all means.

But this has not stopped the Silicon Valley’s interest in the field. One such firm is Kernel, a startup created by Braintree co-founder Bryan Johnson.
Kernel is also trying to enhance human cognition. It’s growing team of neuroscientists and software engineers are working towards reversing the effects of neurodegenerative diseases and, eventually, making our brains faster and smarter, but of course more wired.

“We know if we put a chip in the brain and release electrical signals, that we can ameliorate symptoms of Parkinson’s”, Johnson said in an interview last year. “This has been done for spinal cord pain, obesity, anorexia… what hasn’t been done is the reading and writing of neural code”.

Johnson says Kernel’s goal is to “work with the brain the same way we work with other complex biological systems like biology and genetics”.

Kernal and Johnson have been quite upfront about the years of medical research that is still ahead of them, though. Now that Musk has founded Neuralink, we are hoping for a similar attitude on his part as well.

With this company, however, Musk is doing what he does best — tapping into an incredibly timely and topical technology that is already being worked on by researchers across the globe, but in his own unique and business-savvy way.

When he embarked on space exploration with SpaceX, it was quite certainly not the first private space company. He took what was already being done, and set out with a plan to create affordable, reusable rockets, before scaling up to Mars missions.

With Neuralink, he seems to be doing the same — cracking the more seemingly realistic and profitable challenge of symptom control, before venturing into total man-machine brain mergers.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.