Elon Musk launches Neuralink, a venture to merge the human brain with AI

[John Wang]

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is backing a brain-computer interface venture called Neuralink, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company, which is still in the earliest stages of existence and has no public presence whatsoever, is centered on creating devices that can be implanted in the human brain, with the eventual purpose of helping human beings merge with software and keep pace with advancements in artificial intelligence. These enhancements could improve memory or allow for more direct interfacing with computing devices.

Musk has hinted at the existence of Neuralink a few times over the last six months or so. More recently, Musk told a crowd in Dubai, “Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.” He added that “it's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output." On Twitter, Musk has responded to inquiring fans about his progress on a so-called “neural lace,” which is sci-fi shorthand for a brain-computer interface humans could use to improve themselves.

These types of brain-computer interfaces exist today only in science fiction. In the medical realm, electrode arrays and other implants have been used to help ameliorate the effects of Parkinson’s, epilepsy, and other neurodegenerative diseases. However, very few people on the planet have complex implants placed inside their skulls, while the number of patients with very basic stimulating devices number only in the tens of thousands. This is partly because it is incredibly dangerous and invasive to operate on the human brain, and only those who have exhausted every other medical option choose to undergo such surgery as a last resort.

This has not stopped a surge in Silicon Valley interest from tech industry futurists who are interested in accelerating the advancement of these types of far-off ideas. Kernel, a startup created by Braintree co-founder Bryan Johnson, is also trying to enhance human cognition. With more than $100 million of Johnson’s own money — the entrepreneur sold Braintree to PayPal for around $800 million in 2013 — Kernel and its growing team of neuroscientists and software engineers are working toward reversing the effects of neurodegenerative diseasesand, eventually, making our brains faster and smarter and more wired.

“We know if we put a chip in the brain and release electrical signals, that we can ameliorate symptoms of Parkinson's,” Johnson told The Verge in an interview late last year. (Johnson also confirmed Musk’s involvement with Neuralink.) “This has been done for spinal cord pain, obesity, anorexia… what hasn’t been done is the reading and writing of neural code.” Johnson says Kernel’s goal is to “work with the brain the same way we work with other complex biological systems like biology and genetics.”

Kernel, to its credit, is quite upfront about the years of medical research necessary to better understand the human brain and pioneer new surgery techniques, software methods, and implant devices that could make a consumer brain-computer interface a reality. The Wall Street Journal says Neuralink was founded as a medical research company in California last July, which bolsters the idea that Musk will follow a similar route as Johnson and Kernel.

To be fair, the hurdles involved in developing these devices are immense. Neuroscience researchers say we have very limited understanding about how the neurons in the human brain communicate, and our methods for collecting data on those neurons is rudimentary. Then there’s the idea of people volunteering to have electronics placed inside their heads.


“People are only going to be amenable to the idea [of an implant] if they have a very serious medical condition they might get help with,” Blake Richards, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the University of Toronto, told The Verge in an interview earlier this year. “Most healthy individuals are uncomfortable with the idea of having a doctor crack open their skull.”

 

[BearGrounds]

Being chipped sounds sketchy to me. Perhaps it's because I've watched too much TV, or because I've done too much people watching.

I mean, we could end up with a Luther/Braniac, and that's something nobody wants.

So yea, while there's a really fascinating and idealistic upside to this that sounds nice, the potential evil that can be done with such technology seems something worth being hesitant about at this stage in our spiritual evolution. If you allow yourself to be chipped, whoever has their hands on the controls of said chip's operational functions, controls you. And people cannot be trusted.

 

[The Clinch]

Nah man.

 

[John Wang]

Nah man.

Oh ok

 

[BenRichards]

Reminds me of too many scifi movie plots that didn't have decent outcomes

 

[SammyPops]

what could possibly go wrong.

 

[BisexualMMA]

 

[sub_thug]

I've been waiting for this for what feels like a long time. Musk is definitely the right guy for this project, and this is something where I would drop everything to race out there to be involved. This is the most exciting thing I've heard all month, and I've had a fantastic month full of game-changers. Thanks for sharing, TS!

 

[PolishHeadlock]

@MusterX

 

[MusterX]

@MusterX

Yea don't get me going this early in the morning, I'm trying to get ready for work. This is the next phase of the Transhumanism movement and it looks like technology makes this stuff a foregone conclusion. There are a growing number of really smart people who are convinced that within 50-100 years, humans as we know them now will be forever altered because we are going to merge with technology in various ways.

This will then create a divide between upper and lower class because obviously upper class people will have kids with better neural implants and at some point people who are not "altered" will not be able to compete with people who are so you are never getting the job over someone with the power of a supercomputer implanted in their head.

This is Musk's plan to help humanity become the Borg.

 

[JungleKungFu]

Sounds like some something straight out of a Phillip Dick novel. Good thing I've got my ankle length trench coat, and wide brimmed hat on standby.

 

[MusterX]

@MusterX

Science has been planning this shit for a long time. Check this out.

In 1969 the operant conditioning studies of Fetz and colleagues, at the Regional Primate Research Center and Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, showed for the first time that monkeys could learn to control the deflection of a biofeedback meter arm with neural activity.[11] Similar work in the 1970s established that monkeys could quickly learn to voluntarily control the firing rates of individual and multiple neurons in the primary motor cortex if they were rewarded for generating appropriate patterns of neural activity.[12]

Monkey controlling a robotic arm with his brain.

If a monkey can control a robotic arm with his brain then you can imagine what a human could do. These sorts of ideas have been floated around since before most of the people on this message board were alive. Now our technology has progressed to the point where someone like Elon Musk is going to take it next level. Quite frankly its scary in some ways.

 

[SSgt Dickweed]

Tony Stark should NOT create Ultron




..again.

 

[MusterX]

Musk will have to overcome some serious problems. There are invasive, non-invasive, and less-invasive ideas for BCI's (Brain computer interface.) The invasive ones implant a chip directly into the brains grey matter and they prodice the best signals and feedback but scar tissue can build up and block the signal due to the bodies rejection of a foreign body. Non-invasive is sort of like a hat that sits on your head but that isn't what Musk wants to do. Less invasive ideas are to implant the chip inside the head and attach it to the skull rather than the brain.

Some of you may be wondering, "hey, but will I be able to plug into the Matrix?"

Basically, everything is on the table now. Our technology is going to hit critical mass at the rate its going.

Here is a dummy unit illustrating a "Braingate Interface."

 

[MusterX]

I've been waiting for this for what feels like a long time. Musk is definitely the right guy for this project, and this is something where I would drop everything to race out there to be involved. This is the most exciting thing I've heard all month, and I've had a fantastic month full of game-changers. Thanks for sharing, TS!

The entire progression of our technology feels like we are gaining powers too great for our own good. Similar to the ramifications of building nuclear bombs. It feels like you have been waiting on this for a long time because you have. We have been toying wit the idea of combining living organisms with machines for a long time, at least since the late 1960's. Fast forward to 1997 and Caltech creates the first Neurochip using 16 neurons.

The work is different than what Musk is doing but it shows you how nuts we are getting. Lets go back 14 years to 2003, check this out.

In 2003 a team led by Theodore Berger, at the University of Southern California, started work on a neurochip designed to function as an artificial or prosthetic hippocampus. The neurochip was designed to function in rat brains and was intended as a prototype for the eventual development of higher-brain prosthesis. The hippocampus was chosen because it is thought to be the most ordered and structured part of the brain and is the most studied area. Its function is to encode experiences for storage as long-term memories elsewhere in the brain.[105]


In 2004 Thomas DeMarse at the University of Florida used a culture of 25,000 neurons taken from a rat's brain to fly a F-22 fighter jet aircraft simulator.[106] After collection, the cortical neurons were cultured in a petri dish and rapidly began to reconnect themselves to form a living neural network. The cells were arranged over a grid of 60 electrodes and used to control the pitch and yaw functions of the simulator. The study's focus was on understanding how the human brain performs and learns computational tasks at a cellular level.

So if we could do that 15 years ago, what might the major corporations be working on right now behind closed doors? DARPA is probably over the top in the direction of robotics and super soldiers.

 

[sub_thug]

The entire progression of our technology feels like we are gaining powers too great for our own good. Similar to the ramifications of building nuclear bombs. It feels like you have been waiting on this for a long time because you have. We have been toying wit the idea of combining living organisms with machines for a long time, at least since the late 1960's. Fast forward to 1997 and Caltech creates the first Neurochip using 16 neurons.

The work is different than what Musk is doing but it shows you how nuts we are getting. Lets go back 14 years to 2003, check this out.

In 2003 a team led by Theodore Berger, at the University of Southern California, started work on a neurochip designed to function as an artificial or prosthetic hippocampus. The neurochip was designed to function in rat brains and was intended as a prototype for the eventual development of higher-brain prosthesis. The hippocampus was chosen because it is thought to be the most ordered and structured part of the brain and is the most studied area. Its function is to encode experiences for storage as long-term memories elsewhere in the brain.[105]


In 2004 Thomas DeMarse at the University of Florida used a culture of 25,000 neurons taken from a rat's brain to fly a F-22 fighter jet aircraft simulator.[106] After collection, the cortical neurons were cultured in a petri dish and rapidly began to reconnect themselves to form a living neural network. The cells were arranged over a grid of 60 electrodes and used to control the pitch and yaw functions of the simulator. The study's focus was on understanding how the human brain performs and learns computational tasks at a cellular level.

So if we could do that 15 years ago, what might the major corporations be working on right now behind closed doors? DARPA is probably over the top in the direction of robotics and super soldiers.

I remain optimistic about the possibilities for good. I can see humanity attaining wisdom, intelligence, understanding, and connection in ways that are not possible to us now. I try not to let the horror stories of science fiction writers be the boogeymen that prevent us from doing things that are ultimately good for the future of humanity. I am hoping that in the future, we can exchange ideas, experiences, and knowledge between people at an incredible rate, creating bonds between humanity that ultimately dissuade us from conflict. We rarely fight our friends, and if we can understand one another at a deeper level, we may be more inclined to work together and instead of against one another. And if we look back over time, our wars are actually getting smaller and less frequent. In Iraq, we lost roughly 4,400 American lives. In WWII, we lost over 407,000 American lives. In the days of the Greeks and Romans, it is believed that roughly 30-50% of all combatants involved in the battles were killed (https://www.quora.com/How-has-mortality-rate-per-battle-changed-throughout-history). We are getting deadlier, but we are also slowly learning restraint.

As for DARPA, there's a lot more mystique than anything there. However, they have given the world one of its better creations: Google Maps! Started as a CIA mapping project, it was sold to Google as a means of funding future DARPA development projects. And in the end, many of us benefit from having full GPS capabilities on our cell phones so that we can find whatever we like. Technology is ultimately a good thing.

 

[John Wang]

Guys

 

[HereticBD]

It begins...

 

[no fat chicks]

Will this make it so anyone can become an expert in anything?

 

[milliniar]

I'm going to become a data courier like Johnny mnemonic