Neuralink, one of Elon Musk's ventures had a press conference the other day. In it, they outlined their current stage of development and their vision for the future. Science fiction is becoming reality.
As a little background though, the driving force behind this isn't really to help the sick and disabled. Remember a few years ago when a bunch of tech giants were warning against AI and what it would do to our future? They were protesting pretty loudly. The fear, if you were out of the loop, is that we will invent AI to our detriment. They were afraid that AI would be the last human invention. It sounds like nutter business, but they had some really good points.
Elon Musk was one of those people afraid of our possible future. He decided to take another route though. Instead of continuing to attempt explaining the potential problem, he did what he does best. He acquired and funded a company. This one was making a brain-computer interface. His vision is that instead of being comparative cattle, we could stand on even ground with AI. Instead of AI and humans being separate entities, this would give us the chance to absorb AI into our evolutionary advancement.
So, Neuralink was born. His plan is to start with something simple, like moving a prosthetic. The finish line though is more like the "Matrix". The hope is to download and access information on a massive scale. The way he sees things right now, we have that ability but it is slowed by the interface. We walk around with infinite access to knowledge and date, but have a very slow transfer rate.
That's because our control system is analogue. It goes from our brain, to our hands, to our phone/pc, and back through our eyes/ears where our brain can absorb the information. His dream is to cut out the "middle man". This would essentially vastly increase the bandwidth between our brains and our devices, allowing data transfer to occur at a much more efficient pace.
Sadly, as amazing as this sounds, the reality is much more likely to be full dive porn and corporate advertisement scrolling across your vision.
TLDR: Full Dive VR in a couple decades? Elon Musk is unwittingly creating a better future for porn.
As a little background though, the driving force behind this isn't really to help the sick and disabled. Remember a few years ago when a bunch of tech giants were warning against AI and what it would do to our future? They were protesting pretty loudly. The fear, if you were out of the loop, is that we will invent AI to our detriment. They were afraid that AI would be the last human invention. It sounds like nutter business, but they had some really good points.
Elon Musk was one of those people afraid of our possible future. He decided to take another route though. Instead of continuing to attempt explaining the potential problem, he did what he does best. He acquired and funded a company. This one was making a brain-computer interface. His vision is that instead of being comparative cattle, we could stand on even ground with AI. Instead of AI and humans being separate entities, this would give us the chance to absorb AI into our evolutionary advancement.
So, Neuralink was born. His plan is to start with something simple, like moving a prosthetic. The finish line though is more like the "Matrix". The hope is to download and access information on a massive scale. The way he sees things right now, we have that ability but it is slowed by the interface. We walk around with infinite access to knowledge and date, but have a very slow transfer rate.
That's because our control system is analogue. It goes from our brain, to our hands, to our phone/pc, and back through our eyes/ears where our brain can absorb the information. His dream is to cut out the "middle man". This would essentially vastly increase the bandwidth between our brains and our devices, allowing data transfer to occur at a much more efficient pace.
Sadly, as amazing as this sounds, the reality is much more likely to be full dive porn and corporate advertisement scrolling across your vision.
TLDR: Full Dive VR in a couple decades? Elon Musk is unwittingly creating a better future for porn.