Not settled with sending people to Mars and pledging to solve Australia’s energy crisis, ambitious entrepreneur and Tesla founder Elon Musk now wants to hook humans’ brains up to computers.
Musk, along with a number of other tech-savvy entrepreneurs, is heading up a new startup called Neuralink. Despite being in its early stages, The Guardian reports the company is listed as a “medical research” company and is focused on connecting brains to computers via “neural lace”. Musk will reportedly be funding the company himself.
Neural lace is a series of tiny electrodes implanted in users’ brains to provide computer connectivity.
Musk has previously predicted that in a future dominated by artificial intelligence, a “merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence” will be necessary, and humans are at risk of becoming “house cats” if steps aren’t taken.
“Creating a neural lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines,” Musk said in a tweet.
Launching another venture is a big ask for someone as busy as Musk, and the entrepreneur himself has admitted he might have a lot on his plate.
“Long Neuralink piece coming out on @waitbutwhy in about a week. Difficult to dedicate the time, but existential risk is too high not to,” Musk tweeted.
However Musk seems committed to the tech, telling the Code Conference last June the development was “quite important”, and he’d take up the mantle of developing it if no one else would.
“Somebody’s got to do it,” Musk said last year. “If somebody doesn’t do it, then I think I should do it.”
Musk’s company SpaceX recently confirmed it would be sending two “private citizens” with to the moon in 2018 — an early step in Musk’s plan to save Earth’s residents from eventual extinction.
“I really think there are two fundamental paths [for humans]: One path is we stay on Earth forever, and some eventual extinction event wipes us out,” Musk said, reports Wired.
“I don’t want to say that’s when this will occur. This is a huge amount of risk, will cost a lot, and there’s a good chance we won’t succeed. But we’re going to try and do our best.”
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Dominic Powell is a journalist at SmartCompany and a tech and music geek. When he’s not writing, you can find him reading or browsing record shops.
