Inside Elon Musk's New Company Neuralink Which Aims To Fight Brain Conditions And Help Humanity Survive in the Age of AI (waitbutwhy.com)

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has confirmed plans for his newest company, called Neuralink Corp, revealing he will be the chief executive of a startup that aims to merge computers with brains so humans could one day engage in "consensual telepathy." In an interview with explainer website Wait But Why (36,000-word), Musk said Neuralink aims to implant tiny brain electrodes that first would be used to fight brain conditions but later help humanity avoid subjugation at the hands of intelligent machines. From the report: "There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing," Musk said. "That's what language is, your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer. If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person." Musk says he expects the project to take eight to 10 years before being usable by people with no disability. He anticipates tons of regulatory challenges in his way.

Comments

Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism!

[GameboyRMH]

That's when it's killbot time. The natural end-state of unrestrained capitalism is the killbot-powered genocide of at least 99% of the human population. It will make communism's death toll look like a rounding error. I, for one, would like to avoid this.

Not exactly a neural lace

[Robyrt]

The parts of the brain that most of us would like to be technologically enhanced - memory, facial recognition, mental math - are very poorly understood. Even if we had a device allowing us to fire neurons on command, we have no idea how to write a program that helps with these problems.

Musk is smart to focus on medical applications, where even an implant that functions poorly is much better than the alternative. It's a lot easier to make a pacemaker than to perform a heart transplant, and the same holds true for the brain.

Re:If you're nice, it's consensual telepathy ...

[bill_mcgonigle]

... but if you're not, they'll turn it into involuntary telepathy.

Elon has three main obstacles:
1) understand the brain
2) figure out how to engineer an enhancement system
3) perfect computer security

I don't know who else is more up to those challenges, but boy are they huge challenges (electric cars and rockets do seem like warm-up practice).

Without 3) I'm not interested. With 3) we advance as a society way more than just the neural lace will provide.

Regardless, the endeavor should yield significant progress in all three areas, so even if this Holy Grail isn't achieved, the effort will be worthwhile nonetheless.