Elon Musk isn’t the kind of guy who is happy to work on just one idea at any given time, and he has a number of projects seeking to break new ground in a variety of fields.

There’s SpaceX, currently dabbling in a rocket called ‘Starship’, and everyone is familiar with what Tesla gets up to.

You may not have heard of Neuralink, though, which is a neural tech company Musk co-founded in 2016. It had flown mostly under the radar until July, when the company gave a public presentation.

This from Business Insider:

The big reveal was a tiny microchip that could, theoretically, be implanted behind a person’s ear with tiny threads containing electrodes fanning out into the brain.

The concept isn’t new…However, Elon Musk doesn’t want to stick with what is already possible. He said, in classic Muskian style, that apart from treating neural conditions such as Parkinson’s, he hopes that Neuralink could one day facilitate a “symbiosis” between humans and AI.

He also excitedly announced that the company had successfully got a monkey to “control a computer with its brain,” and that Neuralink hopes to start human testing “before the end of next year.”

I’m never too fond of the words “human testing”, but are Musk and his team just overstating what they will be able to do, or can they deliver the goods?

If you ask Andrew Hires, an assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of California, it’s a bit of both.

In the Neuralink presentation back in July, Hires said that Neuralink did illustrate three areas in which they may actually improve on the tech that already exists:

1. Floppy wires could move with the brain without causing damage

The wires on Neuralink’s proposed device uses Hires thinks could advance the field because of just how floppy they are. “The fact that they’re using these flexible wires is a significant innovation, particularly if they’re trying to get it into consumers,” said Hires.

Each wire is slightly slimmer than a human hair and carries electrodes which are both able to detect brain activity and – theoretically – stimulate it…

Floppy wires like the ones Neuralink described could potentially be a better solution for any device that’s going to spend a long period embedded in someone’s brain because they’re less likely to inflame or damage the tissue.

At this early stage, it’s not yet known whether or not the floppy wires are robust enough to last more than a few years.

2. A sewing machine instead of a surgeon

One big problem with floppy wires is they can be difficult to thread into the brain, and for this Neuralink has invented something entirely new. The probes would be inserted into the brain by a device not dissimilar to a sewing machine, which would use a stiff needle to poke the threads into place about 1 millimeter into the outer surface of the brain, or the cortex.

Hires said the idea of this sewing machine is “brand new” and a significant innovation. He has had to perform insertions of similar devices into the brains of mice by hand. “Doing this stuff by hand, these are very fine things… it’s very hard to have a steady enough hand to do these things manually,” he said.

On this front, Hires is particularly impressed, pointing to a feature called online motion correction, which counters the fact that the brain and its blood vessels naturally “jiggle around”.

3. A super-powered chip which translates brain activity

“There’s a problem with getting electrical signals out of the brain, and that is that they’re very small. And the farther they have to travel down a thin wire the more they’re going to get distorted by noise, because there’s always some electrical noise going on in the world around us. You want to be able to amplify and digitize the signal as close to the source as possible,” Hires said.

“From what they disclosed in their whitepaper, that chip looks beyond the state of the art… That’s going to enable you to record from more places with higher precision,” he said. “It’s sort of like upgrading your TV to go from standard definition to high definition,” he added.

Another neuroscientist, Dr. Rylie Green, agrees that the potential tech improvements mentioned above are a step in the right direction, adding that seeing all three being worked on together in one device is particularly impressive.

Before you start worrying that this is the beginning of the human race eventually succumbing to our robot overlords, it should be noted that one of the primary uses for Neurolink’s new tech would be to allow those with robotic limbs to actually “feel” touch:

“The first application you can imagine is better mental control for a robotic arm for someone who’s paralyzed,” said Hires. Green concurred with this, adding it could be used by patients with locked-in syndrome to give them “fine control” over robotic limbs.

Although neural control of robotic limbs has been around since 2012, Neuralink’s technology could enable the next big step – touch feedback, sometimes called haptic feedback. Theoretically, this could be possible if Neuralink’s chips recorded which areas of the brain are stimulated when we touch and interact with the world, and then the electrodes could use this information to stimulate the brains of people using robotic prostheses to simulate this sensation.

Long term, Musk did talk about facilitating the augmentation of human consciousness with artificial intelligence. Although the neuroscientists questioned didn’t entirely rule that out, they were more sceptical of the chances of success on that front.

Maybe, until we better understand the implications that kind of technology would bring with it, that’s a good thing.

[source:businsider]