2024 was the year when Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain chip company, finally moved from theory into reality, announcing its first successful medical implants in patients.
This on its own is a remarkable achievement and not one to be taken lightly though, with Musk in his cheerleading role, the promises of what comes next may make a few of us non-augmented folk roll their eyes.
The promise-happy billionaire has not only declared that Neuralink is going to be full steam ahead, but that patients will be outperforming pro gamers within two years: And that's not even his wildest claim.
Musk reckons Neuralink is going to have to speed up human brains so that AI doesn't get «bored.» Musk says our «low data rate» is too slow, you see, and this is a barrier to positive human-AI convergence. «Our slow output rate would diminish the link between humans and computers,» says Musk, adding a helpful comparison to plants: «Let's say you look at this plant or whatever, and hey, I’d really like to make that plant happy, but it’s not saying a lot.» To be clear: The human brain is a computer that no Silicon Valley firm is even close to outperforming.
But that's not going to stop our boy, who reckons Neuralink can increase our brain's output rate (how fast our brain is sending signals to the chip) by «three, maybe six, maybe more orders of magnitude.» Some of these scenarios sound like hell. «Let's say you can upload your memories, so you wouldn't lose memories,» says Musk, adding that this would fundamentally change the experience of being human: «yeah we would be something different.