SpaceX and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, revealed, last month, to The Wall Street Journal, that he was working on a new company, Neuralink. This new project plans to merge artificial intelligence and cerebral stimulation techniques aiming to improve brain capacities. Musk’s new adventure draws a huge change in the way we communicate and convey our ideas, that we could probably compare it to the impact that the development of language had to our society.
To share ideas with others our brains compacts them so we can express them verbally through the language we speak; which means that parts of the idea get lost on their way out. But, according to Musk, on Wait But Why, he wants to create cerebral interfaces to engage direct conceptual communication, suppressing the need to compress ideas to be shared somebody else through words. Long story short, no more hard times trying to explain ourselves, we can just share the thought just as we have it in our minds.
On a cloud
Neuralink technology also plans to allow us to keep up with the progress of artificial intelligence, and their way is basically to integrate one in our conscience. This 2.0 mind that’s being proposed would require a bandwidth so large that it could need a cloud solution to save information. This means that we would be able to save experiences in this cloud and share it with however we want.
It also opens a vast range of possible interactions: we could share the feelings and sensations we are experiencing, or we could communicate and control with our minds our house, car and other intelligent technology we have near. And could make our cognitive levels updatable, like apps. Or it could introduce a new level of businesses to entertainment industries and revolutionize the way we learn.
Cyber zombies to hack your brain?
On the other hand, this may open the door to many new and even unimaginable danger. If nowadays there are tons of privacy violation through devices connected to the clouds, imagine what brilliant people -with a technology advance like this one on their hands- could do. It is beyond terrifying to think someone could literally hack in our brains and get any information we have. This, mixed with the fact that we would become sort of robot-humans, could cause a lot of rejection from many people.
Although, Musk still have a lot of time on his hands to figure it out and sell the idea to the world (8 to 10 years before it can be tested on people, according to himself). Until then, the company will focus on developing cures and ways to help people with epilepsy, major depressions, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. Which is also a great cause to support.
Photo credit: Marco Ragaini
Source: Rolfe Winkler (WSJ) / Tim Urban (Wait But Why)
