Apparently, Elon Musk still has so much time on his hands between SpaceX and Tesla. The billionaire and businessman announced that he wanted to merge the human brain with a computer in his new venture called "Neuralink".
Is Elon Musk a genius? This is what most people ask after his new artificial intelligence project was announced. For Musk, it is integral to develop a human-and-machine link in order to survive in this age. Yes, he is talking about cyborgs and augmented intelligence.
Last March 27, reports proliferated that Musk already had co-founded Neuralink. The medical research company aims to build a brain-computer interface, according to Quartz. The relatively young company was only registered last July. It was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
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The company is said to be scouting the best engineers for the job. With Musk's backing [and funding] it won't be surprising to see a new technology rise in the next few years. Researchers believe that a smoother interface between the human brain and artificial intelligence in necessary and more beneficial compared to using the senses to transmit data to the brain.
Musk plans to bring to life a technology developed by science-fiction writer Iain M. Banks called "neural lace". A series written about it says that the neural lace will allow thoughts to directly be translated into computer commands. Musk's wanted to improve cognitive capabilities of the human brain using tiny electrodes. Tesla CEO believes that the tiny electrodes will give the human brain capabilities similar to artificial intelligence.
"Creating a neural lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines," Tesla and SpaceX CEO said in a Tweet.
Although this new venture is different from his works on Tesla and SpaceX, his interest with artificial intelligence is not new.
"Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence," Musk said in a conference. "It's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output."
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