Elon Musk Announces Plan To 'Merge' Human Brains With Artificial Intelligence

Elon Musk announced Tuesday night that the ultimate goal of Neuralink, his brain-machine interface company, is to allow humans to "achieve symbiosis with artificial intelligence," and that by "merging with AI," humans can keep up with this one. Musk plans to begin testing on humans in an early version of Neuralink to treat brain injuries next year.

"Ultimately, we can make a complete machine-brain interface," Musk said in a live broadcast announcement. "This is going to sound pretty weird. Ultimately, we can achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence. It is not mandatory, but it is something you can choose if you wish. It will be really important at the level of civilization. Even in a benign AI scenario, we will be left behind. With a high-bandwidth machine-brain interface, we can keep up and have the option of merging with AI. "

Musk has become famous for his lunar projects, his great promises, his temper on Twitter and his various plans for society. Neuralink has operated largely in secret since it was announced in 2017, although public documents obtained by Gizmodo show that it has been funding research studies for primates at universities in California. Tuesday was the company's launch party.

The company's short and medium term goals are to create a chip that can be implanted in the brain to treat a variety of brain injuries and diseases, such as paralysis, Alzheimer's and dementia. Musk said that progress will be slow and that the company will not suddenly reveal a chip that takes over people's brains. Musk said he intends to obtain FDA approval for implants.

"Unless we have some kind of brain-machine interface that can solve brain ailments of all kinds, be it an accident or congenital, any type of spinal disorder, we can solve it with a chip," he said. “It's something that most people still don't understand. All this will happen slowly. It is not as if Neuralink suddenly had a neural cord and began to take control of people's brains. It will take a long time and people will see it coming. "

All this, of course, is in the early stages, and Musk's claims must be taken with much skepticism, both from a socio-political point of view and from a scientific and engineering perspective. Musk has become good at launching rockets and manufacturing electric cars, but progress in his alternate projects (the hyperloop, Boring Company, the miniature submarine he wanted to build to save Thai children trapped in a cave) has been slow and often not requested. For example, The Boring Company has "invented" a tunnel that allows cars to travel through it in a single row, which resembles an underground train. For this disappointing demonstration, Musk has received contracts worth tens of millions of dollars..

IMAGE: NEURALINK

It is not clear how much time or effort Musk is dedicating to Neuralink, how feasible the project is, if someone really wants it, and what will happen to people who cannot pay or do not want to merge with AI. That said, the brain-machine interfaces are promising for the treatment of people with brain injuries and diseases, and in that sense, it is a serious area of ​​research that could help many people.

In any case, Musk opened with frank recognition that the main purpose of the presentation was recruitment, and as such, the information provided relied heavily on the technical details that would be of interest to neuroscientists and engineers in the fields related to the mission of Neuralink. Much of the presentation's execution time was spent explaining the complexities of how neuronal communication works, how the company is designing chips to interpret brain activity and how specific parts of the brain would give the team the necessary data to allow the Brain communicates properly with a computer system.

Beyond the technical details, the team provided concrete information about what it is doing, including some details about how it looks and how the first device they intend to implant in people's brains works. In essence, the device consists of a large number of "wires" (incredibly thin wires with a handful of electrodes at one end) that are inserted into the brain in places where they can capture the electrical signals of individual neurons. It is a system on a chip that receives and interprets all the data of the wires, and a "capsule" that is used behind the ear that then transmits the data via Bluetooth to a phone or other device that runs the software that takes advantage of the neural data

In its current form, each chip contains 1,024 electrodes, which in itself is good as it allows approximately 10 times better data acquisition than is possible with current medical devices, such as those used to treat Parkinson's by Deep brain stimulation , the team explained. Due to the small size of the chip, only 4 mm by 5 mm, the team believes that it can implant up to 10 of these chips in a single brain, but plans to start with only four chips in its human tests.

For the first clinical trials in humans, which Musk says will be underway by the end of 2020, Neuralink will try to use his device to allow quadriplegics to control a computer. This will involve inserting the aforementioned threads into the primary motor cortex, which, as the name implies, controls the motor functions of the body; According to the Neuralink team, this will allow the paralyzed patient to think about moving his hand to move the mouse, even if they can't physically do it, and that the interface device interprets brain activity to move the mouse properly.

Of course, due to the lack of information beyond the word of the founders of Neuralink, it is difficult to calculate exactly how realistic the company's objectives are.