Neuralink 2021
Ok, but how soon do we get telepathic communication?
On February 1st, Elon Musk joined a Clubhouse interview (yea that app I talked about in a previous post)and talked about the progress his Neuralink company has been making.
For the uninitiated, Neuralink is Musk’s answer to many of life’s currently unsolved problems. As he’s said:
Essentially, Neuralink is a tiny device with tiny wires that can hook up to an animal’s (or eventually a human’s) brain to speed up the rate at which information comes from the brain to somewhere else, or vice versa. Musk recently demonstrated this on a pig back in August 2020, and now he’s moved onto a monkey.
This monkey, who Musk has assured is quite happy, is being trialed to see if he’ll be able to play video games only using his brain. Musk said in his interview on Clubhouse that he thinks having monkeys playing “mind pong” with one another would be “pretty cool.”
Implications
The real implication of Neuralink, at least for humans in the short term, is going to be fixing spinal and other move-hindering injuries or disabilities. The goal is to have individuals that suffer from these problems be able to use a phone or a computer just by thinking.
In the long term, however, Musk has said that he wants human’s to be able to interface with AI, and to communicate with one another. This sort of reduction in buffer time between our brains and any task is incredibly interesting to me. If you think about it, and as Musk has pointed out over the years, we are already cyborgs. Our phones are connected to our hands constantly, and the only thing stopping us from being able to use them instantly is the buffer of our brain to our arm, and the information on the phone to our eyes and to our brains. Musk is leveraging his ability to understand both AI and the human brain to essentially delete that buffer.
What’s the point?
The amount that that will change is crazy to think about. Imagine if you never had to learn another language to communicate with someone, your brain just had a chip that could automatically translate what you hear before you even have the chance to process it.
This AI-powered, cyborg-type future is something that’s getting increasingly more realistic. I’m certainly interested in the subject, and will continue to follow it to see what happens next.