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posted by on Wednesday March 29 2017, @09:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-could-go-wrong? dept.

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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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:10AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:10AM (#485798)

    "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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:41AM (#485807)

    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

    by butthurt (6141) on Thursday March 30 2017, @12:50AM (#486274) Journal

    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]