Neuralink

What is Elon Musk’s new company?

On the 28th of March, the Wall Street Journal announced that technological visionary Elon Musk was investing into a brain-computer interface/platform called ‘Neuralink’.  The company will be the Tesla founders new project but it has not been formally announced yet. The company was filed as a medical research frim last year as per the Wall Street Journal’s report. The billionaire entrepreneur said via Twitter that he will publish a clarification piece on Neuralink in a week’s time.  The company will be dedicated to developing a neural lace.

What is a ‘neural lace’ and how will this affect the medical world?

• Elon Musk’s new company will dedicate themselves to two main projects gathered from these initial reports.
• The first connects to Musk’s interest in the future of humanity in relation to technological advancements such as Artificial intelligence. He hopes to develop the first implant that allows humans to communicate and connect to machines.
• This implant into the brain is the ‘neural lace’ connecting all possible technology directly to the brains motor and physical functions. The chip could aid humans in accessing more information and increase connectivity with artificial intelligence of the future.
• What the company will seek to develop first however is a medical electrode interface. This will focus on how certain diseases could be treated by sending electrodes to the desired parts of the brain. This could help cure diseases that are considered hereditary etc.

What is Musk hoping to do?

• Musk has voiced his fears over the future of Artificial intelligence and that it could be detrimental to humanity itself. He wants to involve humanity in the process.
• This could be done by changing the structure of the brain through various implants and increasing connectivity to technology available. This will downplay the need for strong Artificial intelligence. He used the analogy of being trapped as a pet by the tools we create recently in the Vox Media conference, 2016.
• Musk set the company OpenAI in 2015, it was to develop “digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole.” But Musk seems to have discarded this plan to ‘add an AI layer’ to humanity instead. The ‘Neural lace’ and targeting receptors in the brain through implants seem to be his main goals in the face of an artificial intelligence/robot driven world.

Assessment

Elon Musk has now firmly established himself as a forerunner of technology but his newest project has raised eyebrows over his vision in the field. The neural lace worries a lot of technologically conservatives who might not want to be connected so heavily with the systems they use. The defining trend he sees is man moving closer to technology but our assessment is that implanting such a device into man might be a step too far.