After the recyclable rockets, the trips to Mars, the supertrains and electric cars, the most-talked about 45 year-old entrepreneur in the world has decided to launch and finance Neuralink, a company that aims to enrich the human brain with synthetic ingredients such as “neural laces”.
Let’s begin with an introduction. Neuralink is a start-up focused on devising, developing and marketing a kind of cerebral implant that is able to eliminate any kind of “intermediate” device external to the body. The declared objective is to exploit the calculation potential of a machine controlling everything with a human brain.
Long Neuralink piece coming out on @waitbutwhy in about a week. Difficult to dedicate the time, but existential risk is too high not to.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 28 marzo 2017
Utopia? Not if you think that compared with 10 or 20 years ago we can already consider ourselves to be connected with artificial intelligence systems. Musk “simply” wants to transport that processing power from the palms of our hands to our brains.
The schedule
Musk has already chosen the 8 people that will work on the project from the 1000-plus candidates. There are still lots of vacancies advertised on the Neuralink website, from electrochemist to biomedical engineer. All positions are full-time – Musk underlines on the dedicated website – and based in San Francisco.
The first goal will therefore be that of developing a product to use in the medical sphere:
“We are aiming to bring something to market that helps with certain severe brain injuries (stroke, cancer lesion, congenital) in about four years”
explained Musk, after which they will move onto the development of human interfaces for artificial intelligence.
An extremely ambitious project then with plenty of huge challenges to overcome. We look forward to seeing how it develops.