Elon Musk’s most futuristic startup, Neuralink is developing a brain chip that will stream music directly to your brain.
Billionaire Musk wins headlines — thanks to his most famous companies, such as Tesla or SpaceX. But while those two focus on aspects that will change our future lives (electric cars and space travel), Neuralink has a goal that directly looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.
According to Elon Musk, his Neuralink project will allow us to create an interface for our head to relay data, including streaming with our brains.
Next month, on August 28, Elon Musk is expected to host a major event demonstrating Neuralink’s progress towards that future. It can be revolutionary, especially since this connection between humans and computers would take place with the installation of chips in the brain.
Neuralink is already developing the machinery and technology necessary to implant these electronic interfaces in the brain. Although a crucial surgery is inevitable — where a hole will be cut in your skull with a laser and device will then hook on to your brain via the hole — maybe this is going to be the next step in human evolution.
A neurosurgical robot designed for chip implantation uses ‘flexible threads’ to connect the chip to the brain. Musk says you wouldn’t even be able to tell that they had the device inserted. You can read the paper here.
To generate anticipation for the Neuralink event, Musk tweeted some of the possibilities of this technology.
Neuralink’s goal is that we can control devices just by thinking about it, which would open the doors to a whole world of possibilities. For example, according to Musk, we could listen to music directly in the brain; the chips would be in charge of ‘translating’ what our mobile phone reproduces into signals recognizable by the brain. Such a system would make all headphones on the market obsolete.
Musk adds that this chip could even serve to control our own body. For example, we could control hormone levels to help us make decisions, to improve our abilities, or to cure anxiety.
He even talks about how the chip could open the door to a ‘symbiosis with Artificial Intelligence’; that is, that AI can live in our body to help us in our day to day activities, in the same way that the character of Marvel Venom and his symbiote.
It sounds almost like pseudoscience, and that’s why Neuralink has a lot of work ahead of convincing its potential clients for the operation.
