The future, Elon Musk says, is going to be weird.
Most people probably think the present is weird enough, but how much weirder could it get?
What if a quarter-sized chip in your head could connect wirelessly with a computer and fix memory loss, blindness, traumatic brain injury or spinal cord injuries?
What if you could save your memories and then play them back right into the brain?
What if people could save their memories and download them into a robot? Okay, that has been the subject of dozens of science fiction movies. But Musk is serious about this.
In August, Elon Musk demonstrated his second iteration of Neuralink, a brain-computer interface that uses chip the size of a quarter that can be implanted into the brain.
Right now, it doesn't do much.
Neuralink is currently being tested on pigs. Computers can read information about the pig sniffing or walking, for example. That is called 'read only' technology. The key technology would be read and write technology that would instruct the pig to walk.
"If you can sense what people want to do with their limbs, you can do a second implant where the spinal injury occurred and create a neural shunt," Musk said in an August demonstration. "I'm confident in the long term it'll be possible to restore somebody's full body motion."
Musk asserted last year that a monkey had been able to control a computer with his brain, according to CNet. No such demonstration was provided in August.
Reactions to the demonstration were mixed.
