Elon Musk, the South African born multibillionaire, is famous for his many ambitious ventures. He created Tesla, the electric car company, to shift the car industry away from the internal combustion engine. SpaceX, his rocket company, aims to make humans a multiplanetary species by colonising Mars. Even his most boring company, aptly named the Boring Company, aims to reduce the costs of tunnelling to make it more economically viable to create extensive tunnel networks under cities and thereby reduce traffic.
For most people, such ventures would be little more than fantasy, but his success thus far has been extraordinary. Tesla is currently the most valuable car company in the world, while Space X has just put astronauts on the international space station and even the Boring company has been awarded sizable contracts!
However, all these companies don’t come close to his most extreme venture, Neuralink, in terms of ambition.
To explain why, let me give you a little background on this lesser-known Musk company. Neuralink is attempting to create an affordable, mass-produced, and installed Brain Machine Interface (BMI). In other words, he wants to install a computer chip on your brain that would allow you to directly communicate with a computer.
He’s not only developing the technology for the interface but also aims to reduce costs to the point where you could have one of these installed for just a couple of thousand dollars. In order to achieve this, he is also pursuing the development of a robotic surgeon which would automate the installation.
The initial application of this technology would primarily be for people with significant brain or spinal issues. The device could allow someone with little to no control of their body (imagine the recently deceased scientist Stephen Hawking) to communicate much more easily or even operate machinery such as a mechanical arm, affording them far greater independence.
As amazing as this sounds, it’s just the start of the possibilities. There is no technical reason why control of a mechanical arm would not eventually turn into control of a full body suit, allowing for full mobility. But even this doesn’t go far enough for Musk. He has talked about the potential for telepathy, memory storage and even brain downloads.
By this point you are probably thinking, okay so he’s built a few nice cars and put a few people in space, but this is too much. I was thinking the same, until I took a closer look at the topic and I have to say it’s a lot more realistic than you might believe.
Firstly, the science is not that extreme. There is currently an FDA approved device with about 10 electrodes available. This means that if your doctor approved it, and you had the funds, you could get it done right now. There is a 100-electrode device which is currently in the human testing phase. This means that there are people who already have them fused to their brains.
Musk’s device is aiming for 1000 to 10,000 electrodes or, as he refers to them, “threads”. Going from 100 to 1000 or even 10,000 is not a huge leap when it comes to electronics. Just look at how quickly computers and cellphones have improved. In addition, because he is using many more electrodes, the threads need to be much smaller, which actually makes them safer.
Just last Saturday Neuralink gave a demonstration of its progress and, in usual Musk fashion, it was both slightly chaotic and incredibly impressive. The company has already started animal testing, installing the device in a number of pigs. The demonstration showed animals which had active chips in their brains, as well as animals which had chips that had been installed and then removed. One of the pigs, Gertrude, had a device recording brain signals linked to her snout. As Gertrude’s snout touched various items, an array of dots and noises indicated when her neurons were firing.
But, while showmanship is one thing, the company more importantly announced it’s been granted FDA approval to move to the next step, which means we could have a human installation as soon as the end of this year!
Irrespective of what you think about digital telepathy or brain downloads, this technology is enough to prove the next decade is going to be incredibly interesting. Who knows, one day we may look back at the chip implanted in Gertrude, the same way we look at the Wright brothers first flight of the Kitty Hawk.
For investors looking to get access to this type of technology, Neuralink has yet to go public, but Elon Musk is not the only player in this space. There are a number of other companies, including one funded by Mark Zuckerburg, that are pursuing differing approaches to a BMI. As an investor, you should be asking yourself which companies today, will be the Amazon, Facebook or Google of tomorrow.
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Main Image: Observer
