Elon Musk has already launched a new company dedicated to linking human brains with computers, The Wall Street Journal's Rolfe Winkler first reported Monday.
Internal sources tell the WSJ that the company, called Neuralink, is developing "neural lace" technology that would allow people to communicate directly with machines without going through a physical interface. Neuralink was registered as a medical research company in California last July.
Neural lace involves implanting electrodes in the brain so people could upload or download their thoughts to or from a computer, according to the WSJ report. The product could allow humans to achieve higher levels of cognitive function.
[...] Musk has expressed his interest in "neural lace" technology before. Musk first described the potential product at Vox Media's Code Conference in 2016, saying it would allow humans to achieve "symbiosis" with machines.
He said the "neural lace" could prevent people from becoming "house cats" to artificial intelligence.
[...] Facebook is also exploring similar technology through its secretive hardware division Building 8. The group is developing non-invasive, brain-computer interface technology that would allow people to communicate with external hardware devices.
Source: Business Insider
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Elon Musk's latest venture aims to bring a product to market within four years, but it could be additional decade before healthy people get "neural lace" brain implants:
Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk said his latest company Neuralink Corp is working to link the human brain with a machine interface by creating micron-sized devices.
Neuralink is aiming to bring to the market a product that helps with certain severe brain injuries due to stroke, cancer lesion etc, in about four years, Musk said in an interview with website Wait But Why.
"If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy," Musk said in the interview published on Thursday. http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
Reuters links to an incredibly long piece with some possibly informative stick figure drawings.
Previously: Elon Musk Launches Company to Link Your Brain to a Computer
A Game You Can Control With Your Mind
When you pull the headset over your eyes and the game begins, you are transported to a tiny room with white walls. Your task is to break out of the room, but you cannot use your hands. There is no joystick or game pad. You must use your thoughts.
You turn toward a ball on the floor, and your brain sends a command to pick it up. With another thought, you send the ball crashing into a mirror, breaking the glass and revealing a few numbers scribbled on a wall. You mentally type those numbers into a large keypad by the door. And you are out.
Designed by Neurable, a small start-up founded by Ramses Alcaide, an electrical engineer and neuroscientist, the game offers what you might call a computer mouse for the mind, a way of selecting items in a virtual world with your thoughts.
Incorporating a headset with virtual reality goggles and sensors that can read your brain waves, this prototype is a few years from the market. And it is limited in what it can do. You cannot select an object with your mind unless you first look in its general direction, narrowing the number of items you may be considering.
But it works. I recently played the game, which has the working title Awakening, when Mr. Alcaide and two Neurable employees passed through San Francisco, and a few hundred others tried it this month at the Siggraph computer graphics conference in Los Angeles.
The prototype is among the earliest fruits of a widespread effort to embrace technology that was once science fiction — and in some ways still is. Driven by recent investments from the United States government and by the herd mentality that so often characterizes the tech world, a number of a start-ups and bigger companies like Facebook are working on ways to mentally control machines. They are also looking for smoother ways to use virtual reality technology.
"Neurotechnology has become cool," said Ed Boyden, a professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at the M.I.T. Media Lab who advises one of those start-ups.
The article also discusses Elon Musk's company Neuralink.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:10AM (2 children)
"Neural Lace" is taken from Banks' Culture SF series; Musk has also named the landing barges after the names of spaceships from the series; what comes next?
Apart from that, seems like a super-long shot to go for it now; research should be interesting, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:41AM
Just a matter of getting the right sensitivity of 'antennas' for neural signals. Between FMRIs and EEG based devices like the EPOC, various software to interpret the signals, and modern machine learning techniques and processing hardware, we could do it today if treated as a 'moonshot' technology.
The bigger question might be: Will it be a net benefit or detriment to our society given existing issues and stratified attempts at 'managing' the general populace, whether via legal, psychological, technological or economic vehicles?
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday March 30 2017, @12:50AM
It reminds me of John Christopher's The Tripods books, in which
Humans are controlled from the age of 14 by implants called "Caps", which suppress curiosity and creativity. Some people, whose minds are broken by the Caps, become vagrants.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tripods [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Bot on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:22AM
First systemd, now meatbags links to our CPU.
When skynet happens, it will be retaliation.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by DmT on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:23AM (2 children)
Would you like some in-brain ads with that? [Please wait. Uploading all brain metadata to the cloud]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @12:24PM (1 child)
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:15PM
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/20/10796916/branded-dreams-by-studio-smack-animated-short-film [theverge.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday March 29 2017, @12:50PM (2 children)
Great. I'm waiting for someone to install malware in the brain on Elon but they promise to unlock his memorizes for a few thousand bitcoins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:19PM (1 child)
His response: "Well, I would pay those bitcoins, but unfortunately I cannot remember the password of my bitcoin wallet because you locked my memory …"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:10PM
Could plausibly happen if your Bitcoins are stored on an insecure computer as well.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday March 29 2017, @01:51PM
From Neal Stephenson's book, Diamond Age
(Score: 2) by hellcat on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:48PM (5 children)
My impression of Elon is that he's the tech bubble's pretty boy. So, investors with millions to burn look to him for inspiration; he partners with them to "head" spacex, tesla, and now neuralink?
Here's a small bit of evidence for those on the fence. Elon likes to tout his hyperloop as revolutionary and his all night inspiration. If he had looked a tad bit harder, he could have found an article written about it in Scientific American...
... in 1909. By Dr. Robert H Goddard. (Goddard's 2003 biography.)
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:12PM (1 child)
He didn't invent the electric car, but Tesla contributed greatly to development and adoption.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:00PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:09PM (2 children)
Something tells me he already knew about the electric cars, the vactrain concept, RAND studies of the vactrain concept in the 70s, and that you are exaggerating the way Musky claims to have "come up" with the idea. Let's check...
https://www.tesla.com/blog/hyperloop [tesla.com]
Emphasis mine. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] says Musk first mentioned it in public in July 2012. The Q&A [youtube.com] is over an hour long though. If you want to find a misplaced line to roast Musky with, maybe locate a transcript somewhere.
http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop [spacex.com]
At least one Musk-controlled webpage uses "revolution" to talk about Hyperloop, but guess what? You have to build it for it to revolutionize transportation. If it begins and ends on paper, it's just a revolutionary idea at best.
You mention investors. Are investors disappointed in Musk's offerings? SpaceX is still privately owned, and he can do whatever he wants with it given his 54%+ share. He seems to own about 22% of Tesla so maybe there is a way to oust Musk from the CEO position. Why don't they do it? Maybe because they are satisfied with what they are getting. If potential investors are wary of Neuralink, then Musk just might have to fund it himself, won't he?
My impression of you is that you have an irrational hatred of Musky (which you have helpfully pointed out in the subject line), which may be as bad as excessive fanboyism of Musky. I don't want to sit around and suck the musky dick all day, but you've made it hard not to with such an ineffectual attack.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by hellcat on Thursday March 30 2017, @02:27PM (1 child)
Love your rebuttal! I would've modded you up twice if they'd let me.
For fun though, I did some reading on what % of Sx he might own. Being private as you noted means we really can't know yet. But this was a good article overall on the valuations:
https://www.fool.com/investing/2014/09/21/how-much-is-spacex-stock-worth.aspx [fool.com]
You also nailed my "attitude;" I wanted to do some musk bashing not because I need to, only because it seems so much of the world is in love with him.
Can he truly be at the helm of 4 (and counting?) companies? Running one is hard enough in any true capacity.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 30 2017, @03:43PM
You look at what GOOG/Alphabet Inc. is doing, there is a bit of a meandering focus.
Google X [wikipedia.org] (drone/balloon Internet, Google Glass, robotics such as Boston Dynamics)
Google Brain/DeepMind [wikipedia.org] (clearly integrates with core products, but has ambitions all over the place)
Waymo [wikipedia.org] (driverless cars)
Google Fiber [wikipedia.org] (likely to be superceded by an MVNO or gigabit wireless)
Google Ventures [wikipedia.org] (an instrument to throw money around)
CapitalG [wikipedia.org] (another instrument to throw money around)
Calico [wikipedia.org] (biotech)
Verily/Google Life Sciences [wikipedia.org] (that's right, Google has not one, but two biotech related divisions)
Brin and Page aren't the CEO of each of the parts, they have delegated a lot of work, but they do have the final say. Their core business is also split up (search, advertising, Android, etc.) Likewise, while Musk may like to sit in 4+ CEO chairs at once, I don't think he is essential to day-to-day operations other than being The Decider. His companies have clear goals, and there is some obvious integration between them. See the merger of Tesla and SolarCity and the battery and solar panel gigafactory projects.
SpaceX's ultimate goal is to get Musk to die on Mars surrounded by his harem of women. Remember, females consume less calories [slate.com] so they are ideal for interplanetary travel. SpaceX can be said to focus on transportation. That is, it doesn't care about stuff like asteroid mining per se, just yet. It has a clear tourism angle, but it's not clear it will try to build "space hotels" like Bigelow Airspace or Virgin Galactic might. It has NASA and private customers on board. It has at least one clear way to reduce to cost of spaceflight: reusable rockets. We may get to see the great era of reusable rockets really kick off several hours from now, when they try to launch a used rocket for the first time. One problem I see with SpaceX is that it is laser-focused on launching chemical rockets. Could the company adapt to use fusion rockets (in space) or EmDrive? Or more down to Earth, will it be able to compete with a working spaceplane, such as Skylon/SABRE?
About the amount Musk owns, Wikipedia says "By 2016, Musk's private trust holds 54% of SpaceX stock, equivalent to 78% of voting shares". Fool link triggers my uMatrix big time.
Tesla is pretty simple, but also the riskiest Musk venture in my opinion. Electric cars and an apparent increasing focus on driverless technology. The cars might be great, but they've always been somewhat expensive, and it relies on consumers to survive amid plenty of solid competitors. Compare to SpaceX, which can make a tidy profit just servicing NASA, as long as it doesn't explode too many rockets. If the price of oil was higher, we would probably see a direct impact on Tesla's sales. Even if Musk was the best CEO in the world, Tesla could fail.
SolarCity is now a subsidiary of Tesla. It's a vertically integrated solar company that sells or finances solar panels to homeowners, as well as building them in the first place (at a gigafactory with Panasonic). This is also the place to mention the Powerwall, a Tesla battery product made at another gigafactory. As hyped up as the "gigafactory" concept is, the first one will apparently be the largest building in the world. The biggest challenge with battery production may be transitioning their giant factory to make a different kind of battery, like the plastic battery [soylentnews.org] with up to double the energy efficiency of current lithium-ion batteries. Other than that, SolarCity seems to be enjoying a market that is growing exponentially. The end of solar subsidies would have an impact on the company, but it is probably too late to squash solar. It can stand on its own now.
Hyperloop is more of a curiosity for Musk. He said he wanted to open source the idea, and he did. Multiple companies are working on the concept [wikipedia.org] and it may be able to reach realization without Musk's involvement. He has talked about putting the technology on Mars (long-term), where the lower atmospheric pressure may be a boon to vactrains.
You be the judge of OpenAI [wikipedia.org]. It's a non-profit run using an endowment. Even if it doesn't have a coherent approach to reaching "friendly AI", it can't fail at the rate that its money is spent, other than its AI researchers losing interest and taking their ball elsewhere.
The Boring Company [wikipedia.org] is at the level of Musk amusing himself. It's similar to Hyperloop in that it may be a reaction to traffic problems in California.
Neuralink. Whatever it does, the importance is going to be on what the researchers can do in the lab, not what Musk will do as The Decider. There's probably a clear way to get funding/profit even if humans don't get brainchipped.
Here's some junk on whether Musky is spreading his special sauce too thin:
http://mashable.com/2015/10/05/jack-dorsey-steve-jobs-elon-musk-twitter-square/ [mashable.com]
https://www.quora.com/How-does-Elon-Musk-find-the-time-to-be-CEO-of-two-extremely-innovative-and-demanding-companies-SpaceX-and-Tesla [quora.com]
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-spacex-tesla-musk-20160902-snap-story.html [latimes.com]
I think that if his subordinates get stuff done right, he will continue to be fairly successful. SpaceX is a place where things should be able to go right, if he can postpone the explosions. Tesla is subject to the whims of consumers and could be hurt by other auto manufacturers introducing cheaper EVs. However, Tesla may end up selling batteries to other auto makers, since the gigafactory is projected to produce most of the world's batteries.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by corey on Wednesday March 29 2017, @09:44PM (2 children)
Do not want.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:19PM (1 child)
1. First they get you to use it on a desktop (computer)
2. Then they get you to carry it in your pocket (mobile phone)
3. Then they get you to wear it (smart watch, google glass)
4. Then they get inside your brain (neural probe)
You can see where this was meant to lead to: Total Control.
All this was decided many decades (perhaps centuries) ago. Musk is only a front-man for this hidden hand controlling world affairs that are designed to lead to our total annihilation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:32PM
If you control the technology, you could turn yourself into a human weapon.