Elon Musk has brought many sci-fi story inventions to life in such a short while, from electric cars to reusable rockets. Musk has even started on a Hyperloop transportation system to save travelers a fantastic amount of time between destinations. Still, those accomplishments can’t stand up to his most recent unveiling.
Musk revealed that a company he founded called Neuralink Corporation is developing an implantable brain-machine interface during a presentation on The Good Time Show. So far, the interface has helped a primate communicate with a computer interface giving it the ability to play video games with its mind. Musk Jokingly asks, “Can we have the monkeys play mind Pong with each other?” And for all the animal lovers out there, he also reassured that “The monkey is not an unhappy monkey, and you can’t even see the site where the Neauralink team placed the implant in its skull, with the exception of a Mowak-style haircut.”
While this is a massive victory in Neuroscience, getting monkeys to play video games is not the ultimate goal of Neuralink. The company wants to use this technology to help paralyzed patients easily interact with their everyday technologies like cellphones or electrical devices. This technology could be a huge step for people with quadriplegia, comatose, or even war veterans to live a more fulfilled life.
Musk explains, “People are already cyborg in that you already have a tertiary digital layer.” The first layer being your limbic system that controls your primitive drives and desires. The second layer being the cortex that handles executive functions, and the third layer being our technology (our devices).
Musk continues to explain that the problem we have is the bandwidth between the first two layers is very slow, and by adding the third layer, we only make it slower. Musk believes that if Neuralink is a success, we will eventually do “conceptual telepathy.” So, we would essentially be able to transfer information from one person to another at blazing speeds.
The billionaire goes on to a darker place that almost sounded like a Black Mirror episode. He believes that as this technology advances, we will eventually get to a point where we can upload our thoughts and brain patterns into a robot or even another person’s brain. To me, that sounds a lot more advanced than pong. Musk even compares it to “accessing the most recent saved data.”
Musk says that the progress of the project is going to come in the next month or so. This includes an update on when Neuralink will start human trials. So, If you are excited to play games with your mind or share thoughts with your friends or even get music streamed directly to your brain, you won’t have to wait long.
