In July 2019, Elon Musk publicly launched a company called Neuralink that is focused on developing high-bandwidth brain interface technology, without much media fanfare outside the scientific community. He discussed it again this week at the urging of Joe Rogan in the second podcast that Elon has had with Rogan in the past two years.
The conversation quickly became fascinating as the prospect of enabling a paraplegic to be able to use their limbs again, or a blind person with non-functioning optic nerves could once again see, was debated. Indeed, Neuralink’s initial purpose is to understand and treat brain

disorders and utilize the selective positioning of microscopic electrodes near individual neurons to record and interact with the synaptic pathways within the brain. This will “turn on” capabilities that were not functioning at all, or as they normally should, and the possibilities are literally endless.
With all of this promise and potential, Elon emphasizes that it will be a slow, iterative process, yet they hope to have the first human clinical trail in the next year. He has assembled an impressive team of neuroscientists, as well as neurosurgeons, from prestigious research institutions and universities, along with experts in the materials and polymers required to manufacture and scale these tiny devices. The devices themselves will be implanted with a surgical robot that's managed by a neurosurgeon into a hole in the skull, with a under-the-scalp connection to a "pod" that is behind the ear, which contains a replaceable battery and allows software upgrades without the need to surgically remove the implant.
Neuralink has three primary goals:
· Increase by orders of magnitude the number of neurons you can read from and write to in safe, long-lasting ways
· At each stage, produce devices that serve critical unmet medical needs of patients
· Make it as simple and automated as LASIK
There is a history of similar devices, going back to 1957 with the cochlear implant. The gold standard in the field is the Utah array, which in 2017 achieved the feat of allowing a text message transmission directly from the mind of Dennis Degray to a friend's mobile phone. Musk let it slip in the 2019 launch event that Neuralink has already progressed to the point where a monkey can control a computer using a prototype implant.

Beyond these, Musk also muses about enhancing brain function in the realm of super intelligence, a purpose-built symbiotic relationship between humans and technology. In years past, he sounded the alarm on the dangers of artificial intelligence, but lately he

seems to have adopted the mantra of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”. He argues we are already transitioning to cyborgs in the sense that we have become dependent on smartphones and the instant “super intelligence” they provide. When we leave our smartphone at home, there is now a similar response we feel that is akin to missing limb syndrome.
Musk reasserts this ideal in the Rogan podcast that in the next decade or so, these Neuralink-designed brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) will be capable of enhancing human intelligence. He says it could end up at version 10, but it will eventually happen. In many ways, I hope he is right, but on the other hand, there are a lot of social and economic considerations to think through.
For example, how will BMI technology be made available? Does it become a tool of the powerful and affluent to become even more so? Or will economies of scale drive down the costs to the level of today’s smartphones? At any rate, it is fascinating to think of humans

finally developing a capable interface to the brain that allows us to manipulate and control our very own minds like no other time in our history, healing ourselves, and unlocking untapped intelligence and mental capabilities as a literal, ultimate merger of man and machine. The old Six Million Dollar Man show would have never envisioned how far we’ve come since the 1970’s - not only bionic limbs but a bionic brain? Lee Majors would have to be proud.
Another encouraging constraint that Musk mentioned is companies that are licensed to utilize their chips and technology have to do so responsibly – no array of Google Ads popping up in our minds to influence our buying behavior! There are rival startups though, such as Paradromics, that may have a different set of goals, ambitions, and business model.
In any event, artificial intelligence is becoming ever more pervasive in our lives, from first-gen AI such as Siri to Alexa, to self-driving cars, to chat-bots that carry on a conversation indistinguishable from humans. The logical next step is to consumption the relationship, connecting that technology directly to our brains with a high-bandwidth interface.
Let’s all hope this brings out the good side of humanity, making the world a better place, allowing us to intelligently expand out into the galaxy and beyond, and doesn’t end like a bad sci-fi movie.
For additional information, here are informative articles and resources and a link to the July 2019 Launch Event:
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