Skip to main content

Elon Musk's mind-reading technology


The dreams of those who want to connect their brains to computers could be about to take another step towards reality, as Elon Musk took to Twitter to tease an "awesome" update around his neural interface start-up Neuralink.

Commenting on the findings of analysis firm ARK, which ranked deep learning as the number one "big idea of 2020", Musk Tweeted that the impact of high-bandwidth combined with high-precision neural interfaces is "underappreciated".

"Neuralink may have this in a human as soon as this year," he added. And then in another Tweet, the Tesla CEO said rather mysteriously: "Wait until you see the next version vs what was presented last year. It's *awesome*."

In a presentation a few months ago, Musk effectively pitched the first findings of Neuralink, which he believes down the line will lead to a perfect mesh of humans and artificial intelligence. The three year-old company is working on developing an implantable brain-computer interface (BCI), effectively a way of connecting the human brain to computer devices.

The research team at Neuralink rightly pointed out in a white paper that there are currently two ways to record the activity happening behind our skulls: either non-invasive means, which stay clear of actually entering the brain, but as a result are less accurate; or invasive electrodes, which creep near the cortex but are limited in the scope of the signals they can track.

Musk's plan is to combine the best of both. To do so, Neuralink has developed threads ten times thinner than human hair, which can be implanted inside the brain to wirelessly monitor neuron activity. A surgical robot, also made by Neuralink, is put in charge of implanting the microscopic threads into brain matter.


Each thread can carry 32 electrodes, and the researchers have demonstrated that the robot can rapidly implement 96 threads. That's 3,072 electrodes in one brain – "one thousand times more than the best systems out there", said Musk as he showed off the project.

The only caveat is that the technology hasn't been tested on real humans yet. Musk said during his last presentation that a monkey had already used Neuralink's BCI to control a computer with his brain; and the entrepreneur is "aspirationally" hoping to have the interface fitted to a human patient by the end of 2020.

In his tweets, Musk acknowledged the obstacles still lying in the way of the technology: "First, we need to make it super safe and easy to use, then determine greatest utility vs risk," he said. "From initially working to volume production and implantation is a long road."

If Neuralink's BCI was to become a reality for humans, Musk believes that the technology could have huge implications for researching, monitoring and potentially treating neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's or dementia.

An artificial implant could re-establish a connection where neural cabling has died, and let people with brain injuries recover from physical capabilities that have been lost as the result of a stroke, for example.

"It will ultimately be used to make up for entire lost sections of the brain," said Musk in his Twitter thread. "Don't want to get too excited, but the potential is truly transformational for restoring brain and motor functions. There is no other way to do it in my opinion."

Ultimately, what Musk wants to achieve with Neuralink is even bigger: to integrate human and artificial intelligence and have them work in symbiosis. In other words, the Tesla CEO wants to upgrade all of our brains and turn us into enhanced humans – with equal and democratic access to smartness.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Team Work - Meaning and Tips for better Team Work

A single brain is not always capable of making key decisions on its own. To come up with an efficient solution, an individual requires the help and advice of others. A team is established when individuals get together on a common platform with the common goal of completing a task. To guarantee optimum compatibility, team members should ideally come from similar backgrounds and have a single aim. To provide their best, the team members must complement each other and function as a single unit in tight cooperation. "There is no I in Team Work," as the saying goes, and each member must put the needs of his team first. Personal interests must take a second seat. Any team's performance is directly proportionate to the relationship between its members and their combined efforts. What is the definition of teamwork? Teamwork is defined as the sum of each team member's efforts toward the fulfilment of the team's goal. In other words, any team's backbone is its ability t

Scientists discover a new theory / The fundamental property of light – 150 years after Maxwell

Light plays a vital role in our everyday lives and technologies based on light are all around us. So we might expect that our understanding of light is pretty settled. But scientists have just uncovered a new fundamental property of light that gives new insight into the 150-year-old classical theory of electromagnetism and which could lead to applications manipulating light at the nanoscale. It is unusual for a pure-theory physics paper to make it into the journal Science. So when one does, it’s worth a closer look. In the new study, researchers bring together one of physics' most venerable set of equations – those of James Clerk’s Maxwell’s famous theory of light – with one of the hot topics in modern solid-state physics: the quantum spin Hall effect and topological insulators . To understand what the fuss is about, let’s first consider the behaviour of electrons in the quantum spin Hall effect. Electrons possess an intrinsic spin as if they were tiny spinning-tops,

19 Types Of Content Writing Services For Your Business

  It’s hard to know which type of content writing service is the best for your business.  There are so many  different types of content writing services  out there that it’s easy to get confused. You end up wondering if you’re choosing the right one for you. In this post, we’ll get rid of this confusion, once and for all. I’m going to list out the different kinds of writing services you could use.  By the end of this article, you’ll know whether you need a copywriter, a content writer, or a social media marketer and how they can help you achieve your business goals. This post is also useful for writers who want to hone their writing skills in a specific area. Let’s dive in and learn what types of content writing services exist and when you should use them. (Bonus – if you want to  hire the top 1%  of writers, go to the bottom to learn how). Types of Content Writing Services As we go through the list of content writing services, you will find that many of them overlap. That’s perfectly