Elon Musk appears to have taken a major step towards making his fantasy of connecting human brains to computers a reality.
According to Wall Street Journal sources, the Tesla founder has set up a company to develop his much-discussed "neural lace" technology.
The newspaper has learnt that the newly-established Neuralink is tasked with providing the means for brain-machine interfacing without a physical connection.
Neuralink was registered as a medical research company in California last July.
Although Tesla have not verified the story, Musk has spoken about such a product before and offered this Twitter teaser...
Long Neuralink piece coming out on @waitbutwhy in about a week. Difficult to dedicate the time, but existential risk is too high not to.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 28, 2017
The neural lace would see electrodes being implanted into the brain so that people can transfer thoughts between themselves and a computer, allowing for higher levels of cognitive function.
Speaking at Vox Media's Code Conference last summer, the tech innovator explained his hopes that the neural lace could actually save us from being enslaved by artificial intelligence.
Musk is concerned that, considering the rate at which the power of AI is increasing, once it becomes more intelligent than humans, it could pose a threat.
The main risk he sees is that the robots would start treating us the way we treat our pets.
Musk said:
"If you assume any rate of advancement in AI, we'll be left behind by a lot...
"I don’t love the idea of being a house cat, but what’s the solution? I think one of the solutions that seems maybe the best is to add an AI layer.
"Something I think is going to be quite important – I don’t know of a company that’s working on it seriously – is a neural lace."
While this seems like a great leap forward, Musk thinks we're already there in fashion.
He opined:
"We’re already a cyborg. You have a digital version of yourself, a partial version of yourself online in the form of your emails, your social media, and all the things that you do.
"You have more power than the president of the United States had 20 years ago. You can answer any question, you can video conference with anyone, anywhere. You can send messages to millions of people instantly. Just do incredible things."
