Having recently secured the title of “world’s richest man” on the back of the huge growth in value of his 20% stake in electric car maker Tesla, Elon Musk is far from sitting back. Over the past several years he’s been busy putting his wealth to work with investments in space exploration company SpaceX and The Boring Company, which is involved in developing hyperloop transportation technology.
But yesterday it was Neuralink, another Musk side project, which was in the headlines after the colourful entrepreneur announced the company is one step closer to developing wireless chips that will allow the human mind to directly control computers.
Neuralink, which was founded in 2017, has already been installing prototype chips in the brains of monkeys. In a speech broadcast via Clubhouse, a social media app popular with the great and good of Silicon Valley, Musk detailed progress:
“We have a monkey with a wireless implant in their skull with tiny wires who can play video games with his mind. You can’t see where the implant is and he’s a happy monkey. We have the nicest monkey facilities in the world. We want them to play Mind Pong with each other.”
Video evidence of the research will, said Musk, be released next month. The last update given by Neuralink came back in April, when Musk showed off a pig named Gertrude who had a fingernail-sized chip implanted in her brain. That allowed Neuralink researchers to track neurological activity from her brain while she ate and sniffed at straw.
Neuralink’s prototype chips are attached to a brain via 1024 electrodes, each thinner than a human hair. That allows them to monitor the activity of as many as 1000 neurons, transmitting their electrical impulses to a computer via a wireless connection.
Musk is convinced these early prototypes will one day be developed into brain-to-machine interfaces that will allow humans to do thinks like typing an email through thought alone. It is also thought that more advanced models of the technology could even eventually be used to help repair brain damage or bypass damaged circuitry caused by injuries.
The initial goal is to develop technology that will enable the severely disabled to work with external technology like computers through thought alone as well as potentially regaining the use of damaged limbs. Or to control artificial limbs subconsciously much as we do our own organic appendages.
Neuralink is not the only organisation working on similar technology. Last year implants designed by Australian company Synchron allowed two men with severe paralysis to operate a virtual computer mouse through their thoughts alone. The chips were implanted without the need for open brain surgery. And last year Facebook acquired CRTL-labs, a start-up working on non-invasive technology to control devices with our brains.
Eventually Musk sees brain-machine interfaces as a root to humanity tackling what he sees as its “biggest existential threat” – being overtaken by AI-controlled machines. He believes super-charging our biological brains by combining them with technology is the only way we will stay ahead of our own creations.