Neuralink’s Wishlist

I recently did a post on devices that could be helpful for Yoga practitioners. I went back to check Neuralink’s updates and this update video that came last month blew my mind!

Neuralink is creating a chip that can be implanted into the brain, so that it can read the neural spikes through electrodes (1024 as of now) and also write(send electrical signals). Version 0.9 is out and it has been implanted into pigs already. They were able to map the snout area, predict joint positions from collected brain spike activity. Not sure when they will get approvals for human trials. But the problems they plan to address in the first round are spinal injuries, paralysis etc in the initial phases.

Towards the end, the entire team was asked a very interesting question, what would they want Neuralink to achieve in the long term. The answers were diverse, informative and optimistic!

1. Recreating Visual Images for blind people. Give people super human vision
2. Telepathy — our thoughts/concepts are incredibly compressed by the time they become words, speech is even more horrible in terms of data rate. Can Neuralink enable richer communication than what we have today ?
3. Mental Artistry — We can close our eyes and think of beautiful dollyesque scenes, but creating that using a software or drawing will be incredibly time taking. With Neuralink, may be it’s possible to give a different meaning to art and artists!
4. Moving from interfacing with neurons in brain to the entire nervous system.
5. Removing fear, anxiety , depression etc
6. Limit human suffering to a tiny fraction of what it is today.
7. Figuring out how we(human species) co-exist with advanced AI systems (Elon Musk said this)
8. Understanding the nature of consciousness , one of the last , big, great mysteries of science.
9. Being able to record and replay your memories

My favourites are Mental Artistry, Replaying Memories, Non-linguistic telepathy and understanding nature of consciousness from curiosity point of view. But in terms of solving problems — limit human suffering , beat the threat of advanced AI systems.

I’ve seen some Tedx talks and demonstrations here and there about these brain devices, but it never felt like that’s going to be deployed at scale any time soon. It’s just science fair. But now because Elon Musk is involved, it feels like things are culminating towards a solid product.

When you think of people who changed the world. Elon Musk’s name will be written down in the history. May be there would be another Amazon without Jeff Bezos, another Microsoft without Bill Gates but it’s tough to imagine SpaceX and Neuralink without Elon Musk. Another Paypal and Tesla are definitely possible, but SpaceX and Neuralink are changing the world because of Elon for sure!