Elon Musk has said that his company Neuralink can use neural implants to make you play video games better than pros, within a couple of years.
Speaking on an episode of Lex Fridman’s podcast, Musk shared a series of opinions on the technology.
Musk’s words on Neuralink
“We feel pretty confident that maybe within the next year or two, someone with a Neuralink implant will be able to outperform a pro gamer,” Musk says. “Because the reaction time would be faster.”
Musk insists that one of the main goals is to somehow increase the “output velocity” of humans, that is, the speed at which our brains send signals to the chip, and believes there is potential to reach “three, six, and maybe even more orders of magnitude.” He agrees with Fridman’s prediction that “hundreds of millions” of people will have Neuralinks within “the next two decades.”
Musk then says that one of the other uses of Neuralink is the ability to upload your memories so you don’t lose them. When asked if this will change the human experience, Musk says that “yeah, we would be something different. Some sort of futuristic cyborg… it’s not that far away, but in 10-15 years, this kind of thing (will happen).”
He then talks about the medical uses of Neuralink: “If neurons are damaged in the spinal cord or in the neck, as was the case with our first two patients, the first thing to do is to fix the fundamental damage to the neurons in the spinal cord, in the neck, or in the brain itself,” Musk explains. “So our second product is called Blindsight, which is to enable people who are completely blind, who have lost both eyes or their optic nerve, or who simply cannot see at all, to be able to see by directly triggering neurons in the visual cortex.”
Musk then speculated that Neuralink could one day “solve” schizophrenia and that Blindsight could later be used to enhance normal human vision (“I think you could get to resolution beyond that of human eyes… you could see ultraviolet, infrared, have eagle eyesight, whatever you want”).
“If you have thousands of people using it for years and the risk is minimal, then maybe at that point you can say, ‘OK, let’s go for human-scale augmentation,’” Musk says. “So let’s not just go for people who can communicate as fast as normal humans. Let’s go for people who are quadriplegics, or who have lost the connection between their brain and their body completely, who can communicate faster than normal humans. While we’re at it, why not? Let’s give people superpowers.”
We leave you with our review of season 4 of The Boys.
