ELON MUSK HAS DESIGNS ON YOUR BRAIN
The entrepreneur’s next frontier is human thinking, which he thinks can be improved. By
Elon Musk doesn’t do things by halves. The maverick entrepreneur is trying to transform driving, space travel and tunnelling — and now the founder of Tesla and SpaceX wants to hack your brain, too. His most ambitious and least talked-about project is Neuralink, a futuristic plan to enhance our natural thinking, planning and communicating abilities by linking our brains up to computers.
The company has been secretive until now about how it plans to actually do this, but we’re about to find out what progress has been made, with a San Francisco event showcasing its work livestreamed this week.
This is what we know:
A ’wizard hat’ for the brain
Why do we need a brain-computer interface? Musk thinks humanity faces a bleak future. Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming powerful and sophisticated, capable of faster decisions and better communication than humans. The best-case scenario, as he put it in an interview at the 2016 Code Conference, is that we all become pets, “house cats” for our super-smart robot overlords. The worstcase scenarios have been well-explored, but probably include that they see no need for us at all, or commit us to drudge work.
While our brains are highly sophisticated, powerful machines, our communication abilities are very limited. We have the capacity to quickly process complex information, thoughts and feelings, but, in Musk’s words, it’s our “input-output” holding us back. We can’t say or write things quickly enough, or express them with enough nuance.
The answer, he says, is to enhance our brains, hooking them up to internal computers — a “wizard hat for the brain”.
’We’re already a cyborg’
Modern technology has undoubtedly made us considerably more powerful than we used to be. “You basically have superpowers with your computer and your phone. You have more power than the president of the US had 20 years ago,” said Musk.
But imagine if, instead of sitting down in front of your computer or getting out your smartphone to communicate something to someone else, you could do it automatically, via your brain, by simply willing it to happen.
Machines are already integrated with humans in ways that are wellestablished and normal. Deaf people have cochlear implants to help them hear, and paraplegic patients are able to operate tablet computers and robotic arms using their thoughts. Disabled patients would also be the first to benefit from Neuralink’s technology. “The first use of the technology will be to repair brain injuries as a result of stroke or cutting out a cancer lesion, where somebody’s fundamentally lost a certain cognitive element,” Musk said. “It can help with people who, as they get older, have memory problems and can’t remember the names of their kids, through memory enhancement, which could allow them to function well to a much later time in life.”
Open skull, insert computer
The main problem is how to get the technology to a place where it can interact with someone’s brain, without having to crack open their skull.
The main theory surrounds “neural lace”, a thin mesh that can be injected into the skull.
Scientists have already used the technology on mice, with some success. We don’t yet know whether Neuralink itself has also done this, though there have been reports that it attempted to open an animal testing lab in San Francisco last year, where it already has an office employing a crack team of top neuroscientists.
Will it work?
Some investors think so. In May, filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Neuralink had raised $39m (R545m) of a planned $51m funding round.
But not everyone is on board. Among the sceptics is Noam Chomsky, an eminent scientist and philosopher, who thinks the technology’s potential to help people with disabilities is realistic, but the longer-term, more ambitious goals will be trickier, because detecting thoughts is too hard. “The technology essentially tells us nothing in this area. It just is nowhere near advanced enough,” he said in 2017.
Others have said that while Musk’s ideas seem feasible, his characteristically short deadlines look too ambitious. Two years ago, he said he wanted to link human brains to computers within four years to help people with brain injuries, and that the technology could be used in healthy people in eight to 10 years.