Neuralink – Humankind Meets Machine

August 29, 2020 By Mike McKeown

Neuralink is another of Elon Musk’s companies, along with Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, StarLink and The Boring Company. At the end of August, they held a Summer 2020 progress meeting where Elon any many of the Neuralink team demonstrated what they have done so far and talked about the future.

Watch the video – if you don’t want to watch the whole 1.15 hours then watch the first few minutes for an overview and the last 5 minutes hearing them talk about what the future holds.

Neuralink have an implant that can both read and write to the brain and nervous system, they have recently received FDA approval to start early human trials. Ultimately it will be a product people can have installed by a Neuralink robot. I found this interesting, inspiring, and a little scary for both the near-term benefits and long-term humankind transformation potential.

In the near-term Neuralink should enable people with spinal injuries to walk again. Further out it could:

  • Help neurological conditions such as depression and brain disease
  • Enable the blind and deaf to see and hear again
  • Interface computers directly with the brain – For example; Augmented Reality without glasses, find information and use tools by just thinking
  • Enable telepathy – people with Neuralink’s could “talk” without speaking

In the long-term Neuralink and what follows could take over from “natural selection” evolution and turn humans into a self-evolving species – At some point in future we will reach what is called the “singularity” – the point at which computer AI becomes as intelligent as humans. Given the speed of computer progress AI will quickly become more intelligent that humans. There are two main possibilities when this happens:

  1. Humanity becomes a “lower” species with the AI we have created far exceeding us as a new “species”
  2. Humanity and AI become connected by Neuralink and we evolve as one, as nature has done over millions of years, but at a MUCH faster rate. This is the future Musk sees and the one I feel is where we are headed and much preferable to 1)