Elon Musk’s New Company to Merge Human Brains with Machines

Elon Musk, the man behind SpaceX, Tesla Motors, the Boring Company and OpenAI, has announced another visionary tech venture. His new company Neuralink will work on linking human brains with computers, utilizing “neural lace” technology. This invention would let people interact directly with machines, without using a physical interface.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the way neural lace will work is that electrodes would be implanted in the brain which would allow you to send thoughts back and forth with a computer, uploading and downloading them. The benefits of this tech lie in helping humans expand their cognitive functions, including memory.

Musk talked recently about this kind of technology, seeing it as a way for human to interact with machines and superintelligencies. The neural lace will be like an extra layer on our usual human intelligence.

More details about what Neuralink does will be released next week, according to Musks’s tweet:

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) March 28, 2017

The initial applications of Neuralink’s technology could be in treating disorders like epilepsy or serious depression. 

A possible prototype for a neural lace was described in a 2015 paper by a group of chemists and engineers, who looked to employ what they called “mesh electronics” to create a super-thin mesh that would be injected with a needle into the brain. 

What's next? We'll wait for the details. Elon Musk's influence on our modern life and aura certainly continue to grow, especially if he'll deliver on the promises of his various enterprises.