Neuralink is a US neurotech company, which Elon Musk co-founded in 2016 and publicly reported in 2017. The company is developing brain machine interfaces planted on the human brain. Recently, Musk teased that an awesome update is coming to its mind-reading tech.
Neuralink's Awesome Update
Elon Musk shared the good news about his neural interface start-up Neuralink on his social media account Twitter. While commenting on the findings of the company ARK, Musk said that the impact of high precision neural interfaces along with high bandwidth, is underappreciated. The tech genius further said that Neuralink might have this in humans as early as this year.
Apart from this, Musk also said that what's coming to Neuralink is awesome compared to what was revealed about it in the past year. He further said that the presentation might happen in the summer of 2020. However, Musk clarified that "first, we need to make it super safe & easy to use, then determine greatest utility vs. risk. From initially working to volume production & implantation is a long road."
What We Know About Neuralink So Far
Neuralink is one Musk's much quieter initiative, but could dramatically transform the lives of medical patients by allowing their brains to interact with computers. In Jul. 2019, the company held a major presentation of Neuralink's works. Musk, at that time, noticed how current brain-computer interfaces appeared bulky with low bandwidth.
Neuralink detailed the N1 chip, which comes with 1,024 electrodes. The four chips connected to an inductive coil near the ear connects to the Bluetooth link, which is powered by a battery. Patients can interact with the interface using a computer or a smartphone. Musk also said that Neuralink could protect humanity from a potential super-smart artificial intelligence.
During the event, the team said that Neuralink could reach its first patients soon, which it hopes to happen this year. The first set of patients are those suffering from quadriplegia caused by C1-C4 spinal cord injury. On his tweet last Sunday, Musk said that Neuralink is on track and might be able to meet its deadline soon.
Elon Musk ultimately would like to achieve far bigger things for Neuralink. It includes integrating artificial intelligence and human intelligence and allowing both to work symbiotically. Simply put, Elon Musk wants to one day upgrade our brains and turn humans into enhanced ones. But, it may take some time before all this could happen.
