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

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.

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

[Ihlosi]

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

Have a nice day.

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.

Re:

[blackomegax]

You misspelled conservatism. I will admit the neoliberal left are...mentally deranged.. We need to correct everybody to an acceptable communist viewpoint. While we're at it, we can eliminate greedy impulses and corruption and actually have true functional communism!

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

You fool. Like so many others before you, you clearly haven't learned a damned thing from history. You put the power to alter people's minds en masse into the hands of a government? They'll turn their citizenry into mindless zombies who do what they're told to do, when they're told to it, unquestioningly, even if it means they die. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the ability to alter people's minds represents absolute power over a population. I'm not even getting into what out-and-ou

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[blackomegax]

Have you *SEEN* human nature lately? Shit needs correcting, fast. Doesn't matter who does it. Government bodies are just collections of people, once they're corrected, said body will operate in a way even you agree with.

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[Rick Schumann]

You apparently aren't listening: No one should have the power to rewrite people's minds. EVER. NO GOOD WILL COME OF IT. EVER.

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.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Capitalists don't kill off their customer base - at a minimum they would have no profits. Are you thinking of the Progressive movement and their eugenicists and "human cancer" types? Are they building AI's to grow their food? They tend not to understand e

Re:

[GameboyRMH]

I am thinking of capitalists and not your strawman progressives.

They're not killing off customers because people who the economy doesn't need work from can't pay for goods. If the 1% are doing nearly all of the producing (through ownership of robotic factories) and consuming (because they're the only ones who have discretionary income), and the 99% is just surviving on welfare and fuming at the 1% for hoarding everything, what do you think is going to happen? The 1%ers who produce things for mass consumptio

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[tehcyder]

And who builds those robotic factories? Or the roads to and from those factories? Or the power-lines or power-plants used to power those factories?

Other robots, presumably.

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[WrongMonkey]

Let's suppose kill-bots were to kill off 99% of the global population right now. That still leaves 70 million people alive. That's more than population of the UK; more than sufficient to have a self-sufficient internal economy among the surviving capitalists.

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[bill_mcgonigle]

the productivity of an individual is amplified so high that there is no need to hire 9 out of 10 people.

I remember the 1870's* when the Industrial Revolution was to mean "the end of employment" and the USPTO was thinking of shutting down because "everything had already been invented that needed to be". This will never be true until Man has no unfulfilled desires.

History doesn't repeat itself, but boy does it echo loudly.

* I don't remember it, but I read history so I don't have to be ignorant of it.

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[tehcyder]

I remember the 1870's* when the Industrial Revolution was to mean "the end of employment"

Only if you were a Utopian Socialist. Meanwhile, the actual capitalists just used it to multiply their profits.

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[bill_mcgonigle]

The cure (drum beat) ... is an advanced form of ultraliberal socialism in a post-scarcity society.

'Ultraliberal socialism' is an oxymoron.

'Liberal' implies individual freedom. 'Socialism' implies subjugation of the individual to the collective. They're opposites.

From Venezuela to China, from the USSR to Burma, and even now in Cuba, societies advance towards post-scarcity when they're highly liberal (in the real sense of the word) and individuals can organically save for and invest in the capital goods tha

Re:

[ivrogne]

'Socialism' implies subjugation of the individual to the collective.

No, that's communism. Socialism means everyone is well taken care of. The rich still get richer, but the poor get less poor. It is harder to get it to work because it requires balancing everyone's interests, but it works, and leads to societies which are better by most metrics.

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[mean pun]

There may be some slight disadvantages to writing with your left hand, but geeez, don't exaggerate.

If we can't handle 36K word articles...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> article on Wait But Why is 36,000-word long

If we can't handle 36K word articles...then I welcome our AI overlords. Learn how to skim, people.

The biggest unknown to date?

[wjcofkc]

So the goals of the technology have been outlined. However, I don't think the totality of how this will be used can be guessed at outside of a flying leap. I suspect the outcome will be stranger than it's stated goals. Here is my flying leap, brains for hire:

Imagine shifts running around the clock where all you do is come in and be rendered unconscious so your brain can be linked with thousands of others to perform massive computational tasks. After being revived you go about your business until your next shift.

Philosophical problem: Can you be sure you ever actually woke up, or are you still sitting there in a dream that your are awake while your brain is still crunching numbers?

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.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Musk would be even smarter if he actually finished a project before starting another one. Most of what he does amounts to nothing.

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[Thelasko]

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.

Musk is very good at taking seemingly impossible goals and breaking them down into more achievable ones. Medical implants for the disabled are likely a stepping stone for brain enhancement on healthy individuals.

Another example of this method:
1. Invest in a high performance, low volume, electric vehicle. Profit.
2. Invest in a high end, luxury, electric vehicle. Profit [fool.com]
3. Invest in a high volume electric vehicle. End goal.

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[istartedi]

We may not have a good interface directly into the brain for memory, math, and facial recog; but that seems like a problem would could solve. After all, what are our eyes and a phone but a kind of klunky prosthetic for a deficient brain?

What we really don't understand is how this impacts our state of being. If I have a cybernetic implant that allows me to preserve the memory of my family, I'm still alive, right? Simply having access to knowledge of my life doesn't steal my consciousness. Otherwise, fami

'Subjugation at the hands of machines', LOL

[Rick Schumann]

I used to think Elon Musk was the real-life Tony Stark; now I think he's closer to the real-life Nichola Tesla, but in Tesla's final years, when his mental faculties were clearly deteriorating. Elon Musk clearly needs to stop reading so many cautionary science fiction stories, stop watching so much television, and stay out of movie theatres, at least until he can learn to distinguish fantasy from reality again -- assuming that is he's ever known the difference in the first place. We're not going to be 'subj

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[NicknameUnavailable]

Tesla didn't deteriorate in his later life, that's just the official narrative to conceal how he actually died (as part of a Navy teleportation experiment gone wrong commonly known as the Philadelphia Experiment.)

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[Rick Schumann]

You forgot to end your comment with '</sarcasm>', or 'LOL', or 'xDDDDD', or whatever it is you kids use these days to denote you're kidding around. ;-)

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[NicknameUnavailable]

Wasn't.

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[Rick Schumann]

Oh, well, okay then. For future reference, you should probably close such comments like this: </tin_foil_hat>

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[NicknameUnavailable]

It's not.

So Elon Musk is the creator of the Borg?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always figured humans were more likely to become the Borg than the Federation. Now we know how it begins.

Tl;DR:

[NicknameUnavailable]

It is meant to function much like the brain implant the main character of Farscape got which worked against his interests to extract information, only much much more clunky.

DOS attack

[Bengie]

Someone smarter than someone else could flood the other person's brain. Doesn't even need to be overall intelligence, just in whatever part is creating the thoughts. What if I'm thinking about an n-dimensional problem where n is much greater than 3, and I try to transmit this idea to someone else? This is excluding my A.D.D.. Sometimes I think so fast I almost blackout. Many concurrent thoughts traversing many different paths, trying to solve a difficult problem.

I recognize that the rate and quality of id

Language

[Geodesy99]

"... what language is, your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer." No, language isn't that. See mandatory South Park https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] from "Marklars are wise and true", Starvin' Marvin episode.

Speech

[manu0601]

They may discover that going through the speech channel forces the mind to refine throughs. What is a raw through that has not been verbalized?

Re:

[Areyoukiddingme]

What is a raw through that has not been verbalized?

Emotion. Or "I need to pee." One of the two.