Elon Musk’s Neuralink Plans To Unveil “Real Time Neuron Demonstration” This Week

All we can say is if this Neuralink “reveal” is anywhere as realistic as Tesla’s solar roof tiles – or anywhere as disruptive as putting a Tesla on skates and pushing it through a tunnel under goofy neon lights – we’re glad we’re not signed up as test subjects. 

But regardless, Neuralink presses on. The brain-machine interface company that Musk has claimed will be able to cure everything from Alzheimers to compulsive shopping has scheduled an event for later this week to “update the public on its progress” since last year’s presentation.

“Will show neurons firing in real-time on August 28th. The matrix in the matrix,” Musk had tweeted at the end of July.

“Wait until you see the next version vs what was presented last year. It’s *awesome*,” Musk wrote in February. “The profound impact of high bandwidth, high precision neural interfaces is underappreciated. Neuralink may have this in a human as soon as this year. Just needs to be unequivocally better than Utah Array, which is already in some humans & has severe drawbacks.”

Uh, right. Smells like a capital raise could be close, if you ask us.

Neuralink plans on using its own surgical robot for inserting electrodes into the brain to make the leap. So far, the design has been tested on 19 different animals with “around an 87% success rate”. That doesn’t seem too promising, if you ask us – but we’re not brain surgeons.

Come to think of it, neither is Musk. 

Regardless, the company’s long term goal is “obtaining human symbiosis with artificial intelligence (AI)”, according to Teslarati. To do that, the company needs to connect electrodes throughout the brain. From there, data is collected from brain signals and analyzed by Neuralink’s software. 

Musk has said in the past that installation of Neuralink chips could “restore limb function, improve human movement, resolve issues with eyesight and hearing, and help with diseases like Parkinson’s.”

Human trials could be on the schedule for 2020, according to the company. And yet, we still don’t have full self driving.