The thing with Elon Musk, is that he is not one to sit still. The visionary entrepreneur had two big breaks in his life, when he created and sold companies for $20 million and $180 million respectively. He could have put the money in bank of course, and have lived out on a private Island of his own. However, in both the cases, he decided to embark on yet another venture even more exciting than the last. And that is what gave us companies like Tesla and SpaceX. Well, ladies and gentleman, a Wall Street Journal article has introduced us to Neuralink, Musk’s latest venture.
Yup. The new venture is as exciting as any of the others Musk has been embarking upon of late. And that includes SpaceX and The Boring Company. Musk had actually been talking about this idea for quite some while. And by now, we should know that when Musk talks about an idea, he is probably setting up a company for it. A few months ago, Musk quite passionately spoke about how a neural lace would allow us to move beyond the boundaries set up by input methods like keyboard, mouse etc. The issue with these traditional methods is that they are quite limited in the bandwidth of interaction they offer.
Our brains are very, very powerful. However, stuff like keyboards and mouse merely serve to limit their capabilities. A neural lace on the other hand, would connect directly with the brain of the user and allow him/her to communicate directly with the said computers. Towards the same, Musk has set up the brand new venture, Neuralink. Initially, the company will be working upon exploring how brain interfaces might serve to alleviate the symptoms of dangerous medical conditions.We are talking about diseases like epilepsy and severe depressive disorder here. Neuralink will thus build upon therapies that already require direct interaction with the brain (via electrodes) to treat these diseases.
Again, the long term goal has not changed. It is not a medical company, or one that is merely developing cures for brain relates diseases. In typical Elon Musk fashion, the company is starting out with a moderate, achievable goal. It will slowly scale its way up until it realizes its goal of a direct cortical interface that allow direct interaction between human brain (which after all is a computer) and computers. Meanwhile, the Tesla CEO now has 4 companies he is directly involved with, all of them taking humanity further into the future.
