Nobody has ever heard of Neuralink before. The Artificial Intelligence venture which has practically no public presence, still in its infancy, but it was registered as a “medical research company” in California last July. According to the Wall Street Journal, Musk has been actively involved in setting up his Neuralink Corp. The company is expected to work on the “neural lace” technology, an idea Musk spoke of at the Code Conference 2016.
Becoming cyborgs, instead of 'house cats'
At the Code Conference 2016, Musk came up with a calculation: there was a billion-in-one chance that we were actually living in our base reality, instead of a Matrix-style computer simulation.
For humans to avoid becoming the pets of AI, who could be 1,000,000 times smarter than us, Musk said that there was a way. A “neural lace,” injected through the jugular vein, would turn us into cyborgs.
Neuralink would be focusing on creating devices that can be implanted in the human brain to connect our minds with AI. This new symbiosis between humans and computers, according to Musk, is a way for humans to keep up with our AI counterparts. According to the Verge, Musk told the audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai, during the Tesla launch in the United Arab Emirates, that we would probably see “a closer merge of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.”
The men-computers bond
Elon Musk’s involvement in AI has accelerated his popularity as a technologist.
He is the CEO of SpaceX, an aerospace company that manufactures and launches rockets and spacecraft. His other company, Tesla, is on track to creating another design of self-driving electric cars. He is also one of the backers of Open AI, a group that develops AI in an open framework. With the support of other technologists, billions of dollars of private funding are going into the research company.
It is not yet public what Neuralink will contribute to the big picture, but people are speculating health devices that work on the basis of the “neural lace” technology; perhaps something implanted in the body to upload or download memories.
