Elon Musk (Tesla and SpaceX CEO) is backing Neuralink, a new brain-computer interface venture, at least if we can trust The Wall Street Journal. The initiative (still in its early stages) has no public presence yet and focuses on developing devices that can be implanted into the human brain.
The idea is to help human beings merge with intelligent software and advance through artificial intelligence. These technological enhancements could improve our memory or allow for direct interfacing with many computing devices.
Over the last year, Musk has hinted several times at the existence of the Neuralink initiative. Recently, he said at a public event in Dubai that, over time, we are likely to see a closer merger of digital and biological intelligence.
Brain-computer interface
On X (formerly Twitter), Musk already responded to curious fans of the initiative about the program’s progress and referred to a “neural lace,” a sci-fi shorthand expression for a brain-computer interface that humans could use for personal improvement.
Today, this type of brain-computer interface exists only in science fiction, but in the medical world, implants such as electrode arrays have already proven useful and successful in ameliorating the effects of epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and more neurodegenerative diseases.
Stimulatory devices
The fact of the matter is, however, that only very few people have complex implants under their skulls, and just a few thousand patients have basic stimulatory devices implanted. Partly, this is because it is incredibly invasive and dangerous to perform human brain surgery, and only patients who have exhausted all other medical options choose this surgical option as a sort of last resort.
This, however, has not stopped a surge of interest from Silicon Valley tech-industry futurists who are eager to accelerate the advancement of this sort of far-off ideas.
Kernel
A startup from Braintree co-founder Bryan Johnson, Kernel, is also in the race for enhancing human cognition. With over $100 million of Johnson’s personal money (he sold Braintree to PayPal for some $800 million) Kernel and its impressive team of engineers and neuroscientists are developing systems to reverse the effects of neurodegenerative diseases. They are also looking for ways to make our brains pore wired, faster, and smarter.
Brian Johnson said, we know that if we place a chip in the human brain and release electrical signals, we will be able to ameliorate the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. This has already been done for obesity, anorexia, and spinal cord pain. What has not been done, however, is the writing and reading of neural code. It is Kernel’s goal, said Johnson, to work with the human brain in the same way as we work with other biological systems, such as genetics and biology.