FUTURES
WE EXPLORE THE TRENDS AND TECHNOLOGIES THAT ARE SET TO SHAPE THE FUTURE
A cure for paralysis and blindness that could one day allow humans to level up their own cognition – and all you have to do is trust the tech’s most tempestuous CEO to plonk an implant into your brain.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink has ambitions as lofty as SpaceX’s dream of a mission to Mars and Tesla’s fantasy of driverless cars. Founded in 2016, Neuralink is building an implantable brain-computer interface (BCI) that would allow computers to read neural signals. That could, in theory, help anyone suffering paralysis, blindness, dementia or other brain diseases, but Musk also sees the technology as valuable to boost human capabilities. “It’s like replacing a piece of your skull with a smartwatch, for lack of a better analogy,” he said at a recruitment demonstration known as “Show and Tell” in November.
Neuralink showed attendees a video of monkeys that spelt out the words “welcome to show and tell”. The previous year’s demo involved a monkey playing a Pong-style game by thinking about moving the controller, while the year before a pig was shown with an embedded implant.
Musk claims the technology will be ready to implant into a human brain within six months, and that he intends to have one
