TESLA TO LINK BRAIN WITH MACHINE
Product helps with certain severe brain injuries due to stroke, cancer lesion
BENGALURU (India)
TESLA Inc founder and chief executive officer 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 aims to bring to the market a product that helps with certain severe brain injuries due to stroke or cancer lesion in about four years, Musk said in an interview with website, Wait But Why.
“If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy,” Musk said in the interview published on Thursday.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning would create computers so sophisticated and godlike that humans would 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 then 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 do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person.”
The technology could take 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 worked 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, and Musk plans on funding the company mostly by himself. Reuters firms largely based in Berlin and self-financed, engineering firms dotted around the country.
It raised US$11.4 million (RM50 million) last year from Zennstrom-led venture firm Atomico Partners and e42, the investment arm of entrepreneur Frank Thelen, a juror on the German of investment reality TV show, Lion’s Den.
Other potential rivals included crowd-funded eVolo, a firm based near Mannheim that has said it expects to receive special regulatory approval for its two-seat “multicopter” with 18 rotors to be used as flying taxis in pilot projects by next year.
Terrafugia, based outside the United States city of Boston and founded a decade ago by MIT graduates, aims to build a massmarket flying car, while US-Israeli firm, Joby Aviation, said it was working on a four-seater drone.
Google, Tesla and Uber had reportedly shown interest in the new technology. Reuters