Elon Musk’s Quest to Control Computers With Our Thoughts
Foundering
Bloomberg
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 29 October 2019
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Over the summer, Elon Musk unveiled the details of his secretive startup Neuralink. Its goal, he said, is to place electrodes in our brains so we can control a computer with our thoughts. Its experiments have so far been limited to rodents and monkeys, but Neuralink builds on strides already made in medicine, where doctors have successfully placed implants into human brains to treat a variety of illnesses. This week on Decrypted, Bloomberg Technology’s Sarah McBride visits the primate lab that’s been carrying out Neuralink’s research, and meets the doctors and the patients at the forefront of this emerging field.
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| 0:00.0 | Join us in New York on November 29th for the Bloomberg Canadian Finance Conference, |
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| 0:26.0 | Register at Bloomberg Live.com slash Canadian Finance slash radio. |
| 0:30.0 | Over the last few years, Elon Musk has been a very busy guy, getting electric cars to the masses, |
| 0:36.0 | making reusable rockets, digging these super high-speed transportation tunnels, |
| 0:40.0 | and, you know, getting in trouble with government regulators. |
| 0:43.0 | But he's also been funding a very secretive startup called Neuralink and in July he |
| 0:49.2 | promised to finally unveil what this project was up to So he got on stage in San Francisco. |
| 0:54.6 | Hello everybody. There must announce that Neurolink's team has been inserting these |
| 1:01.0 | tiny electrodes into the brains of rats to record their brain activity. |
| 1:05.2 | He said the near-term applications are medical. |
| 1:08.2 | Everyone, if you survive cancer and hot disease, the odds are that you will have some brain-related disorder. |
| 1:15.7 | So it would be like Alzheimer's or dementia. |
| 1:19.5 | We can solve that with a chip. |
| 1:28.9 | Musk wasn't shy about what he hopes this technology will one day achieve. |
| 1:36.1 | Yeah, this is going to sound pretty weird, but we can effectively achieve a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence. |
| 1:38.2 | So this is not a mandatory thing. |
| 1:40.6 | This is a thing that you can choose to have if you want and we can effectively have the option of merging with AI. |
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