Elon Musk reveals big plans with Neuralink

Be it a tweet about taking the company private or smoking weed on a radio show, Elon Musk has been in news for all the wrong reasons recently and he is in news again but this time for what he is best admired as a modern day visionary. As per reports the Tesla and SpaceX founder is working on a 'superhuman' product that will connect your brain to a computer.

We all know Musk along with eight others founded a company called Neuralink two years ago. The company has been developing implantable brain–computer interfaces, better known as BCIs. While in the short-term the company’s aim is to use the technology to treat brain diseases, Musk’s eventual goal is human enhancement, which he believes will make us more intelligent and powerful than even AI. According to hints he gave a week ago, Neuralink may soon be close to announcing a product unlike anything we have seen: A brain computer interface.

Appearing on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast last week, Musk stated that he’ll soon be announcing a new product – Neuralink – which will connect your brain to a computer, thus making you superhuman.

When asked about Neuralink, Musk said

"I think we’ll have something interesting to announce in a few months that’s better than anyone thinks is possible. Best case scenario, we effectively merge with AI.

It will enable anyone who wants to have superhuman cognition. Anyone who wants. How much smarter are you with a phone or computer or without? You’re vastly smarter, actually.

You can answer any question pretty much instantly. You can remember flawlessly. Your phone can remember videos [and] pictures perfectly. Your phone is already an extension of you. You’re already a cyborg.

Most people don’t realise you’re already a cyborg. It’s just that the data rate, it’s slow, very slow. It’s like a tiny straw of information flow between your biological self and your digital self. We need to make that tiny straw like a giant river, a huge, high-bandwidth interface."

If we visualize what Musk said, it feels like a scene straight from a Hollywood movie. However, many of the creations, from a decade ago, that were thought to belong solely in the world of science-fiction, have become a reality now. Musk argues that through our over-dependence on smartphones, we have already taken the first step towards our cyborg future. Neuralink is an attempt to just accelerate the process by leaps and bounds.

That's not all, Elon Musk was also quoted saying on CNBC. "If your biological self dies, you can upload into a new unit. Literally, with our Neuralink technology".

Read the full news on CNBC.

About Author

Sandesh Deshpande is currently working as a System Administrator for Packt Publishing. He is highly interested in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.