Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly said society needs to be more concerned about the development of autonomous weapons as it “threatens to become the third revolution in warfare”. “If you’re not concerned about AI safety, you should be, vastly more risk than North Korea.” Musk recently tweeted. The high tech billionaire even sent a new letter co-signed by 115 other experts to the United Nations calling for laws to ban the creation and use of killer robots during conflicts. And it also so happens that one of Musk’s startup projects now is to create a brain-to-machine interface (project name Neuralink) that would allow the human mind to keep up with progressively developing artificial intelligence.
Musk’s Neuralink startup was registered as a ‘medical research’ company last July, and has raised $26.96 million of a technically still-open funding round that could grow to $100 million, according to a new SEC filing. Musk just took to Twitter though to say the startup is no longer trying to raise more cash for now, as it appears he plans on funding the company mostly by himself. Musk, 46, will be hands on and hands full as the CEO of Neuralink, while still leading Tesla, SpaceX, and his tunnel-digging startup, The Boring Company. Musk said at the last electric-car maker’s annual shareholder meeting that 90-plus percent of his time will be devoted to SpaceX and Tesla.
While not much detail is known of the San Francisco-based startup Neuralink, they have indicated they are working to link the human brain with a machine interface. The speculated micron-sized device interface could require surgical implants to the brain. Musk has described the benefits of creating a “neural lace” device that’s capable of supercharging the human brain. Musk has stated that a goal of Neuralink will be to launch a product that will help people who suffer from serious brain injuries as a result of disorders such as stroke and cancer in just four years. With the longer term goal that in eight to ten years, the device will be available for humans to engage in “consensual telepathy,” he told Wait But Why. ‘There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing,’ Musk said. He has also said that such a technology would help humans battle the existential threat of artificially intelligent supercomputers. Seemingly a super-brain keeps a step ahead of supercomputer approach?
