Elon Musk Wants to Implant an AI Interface in Your Brain

Elon Musk has had another bright idea. Nobody can accuse Mr. Musk of a lack of intellectual diversity in his pursuits, which have ranged from glitzy solar roof tiles to cartoonishly fast cars, colonizing other planets, and domestic energy infrastructure. He’s someone who thinks in the future tense. And he clearly believes that AI is the future.

- Jessica Hall

As AI advances, humans will have to find a comfortable coexistence with machines that learn or risk winding up as “house cats” to intelligence beyond ours. Toward that goal, and with a happy side effect of therapeutic benefits for certain brain disorders, Elon Musk has been funding a company called Neuralink that wants to implant an AI interface in your brain.

The company is currently working with syringe injectable, flexible, sub-micron-thickness substrates (note the regular grid in the ribbon pictured below) that can function as a component of implantable electronics. The mesh is so gossamer-soft that it doesn’t irritate the brain’s impossibly delicate cellular matrix, and its electrical properties mean that only the target part of the brain receives the electrical stimulus. With recent developments in flexible electronics and bio-inert materials, implantable brain-computer interfaces are coming closer and closer to reality every day.