The Citizen (Gauteng)

Elon Musk’s brainy idea set to help the disabled

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– Tesla Inc founder and chief executive Elon Musk said his latest company, Neuralink Corp, is working to link the human brain with a machine interface by creating micron-sized devices.

Neuralink is aiming to bring to the market a product that helps with certain severe brain injuries due to stroke, cancer lesion etc, in about four years, Musk said in an interview with website Wait But

Washington

Why.

“If I were to communicat­e a concept to you, you would essentiall­y engage in consensual telepathy,” Musk said on Thursday.

Artificial intelligen­ce and machine learning will create computers so sophistica­ted and godlike that humans will need to implant “neural laces” in their brains to keep up, Musk said in a tech conference last year.

“There are a bunch of concepts in your head that your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing,” Musk said in the latest interview. “If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompress­ed direct conceptual communicat­ion with another person.”

The technology could take about eight to 10 years to become usable by people with no disability, which would depend heavily on regulatory approval timing and how well the devices work on people with disabiliti­es, Musk was quoted as saying.

In March, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk had launched a company through which computers could merge with human brains. Neuralink was registered in California as a “medical research” company last July. He plans on funding the company mostly himself. – Reuters

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