Elon Musk has announced that his San Francisco-based neural interface start-up Neuralink, which aligns the billionaire’s vision of merging technology with the world of healthcare, will reveal a major update that would take place on Friday, August 28.
Musk’s start-up envisions making implantable brain microchips that will help treat serious brain diseases in the short-term, with the eventual goal of enabling superhuman intelligence.
“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” Musk tweeted a few days ago, referring to his greater ambitions to develop ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces that would allow humanity to to achieve symbiosis with artificial intelligence (AI).
It should be noted that a significant update that came from Neuralink approximately a year ago was when Musk and various senior staffers at the company gave a 90-minute presentation of Neuralink’s research and its plans to help patients control a computer. During the event, Musk revealed that Neuralink had tested its technology on monkeys, and it enabled one “to control a computer with its brain.”
The start-up envisions using a surgical robot to embed thin electrode threads – about one quarter the width of a human hair – into a person’s brain that connect to a tiny processor, which can then be connected to an external CPU over Bluetooth. In a chat with Joe Rogan back in May, Musk claimed that “we may be able to implant a neural link in less than a year in a person I think.”
Over time Neuralink sees the chip-implanting process becoming as simple as laser-eye surgery.
“Wait until you see the next version versus what was presented last year. It’s awesome.” Musk stated on Twitter in March of this year.
Context suggests the Aug. 28 event could be a major one.
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