Elon Musk wants to create a brain-machine interface that helps humans “achieve a kind of symbiosis with artificial intelligence.”
Neuralink — Musk’s secretive company that’s developing a brain-machine interface — gave a presentation Tuesday that outlined its first steps toward this building this technology, which it’s been working on for the past two years. The main reveal? Flexible “threads” that record neuron activity, and a machine that inserts these threads into the brain.
The goal is to build an interface that enables someone’s brain to control a smartphone or computer, and to make this process as safe and routine as Lasik surgery. Currently, Neuralink has only experimented on animals. In these experiments, the company used a surgical robot to embed into a rat brain a tiny probe with about 3,100 electrodes on some 100 flexible wires or “threads” — each of which is significantly smaller than a human hair.
