‘The future’s going to be weird’ says startup’s founder Elon
Video In a late Friday evening reveal, Elon Musk updated the world on his Neuralink brain-to-computer interface startup, with the help of three little piggies. Specifically, his team revealed it has implanted a mind-reading gadget in a live pig’s brain. The porcine test subjects were: a control animal; one who has had the implant in place for a couple of months; and another who had one removed and looked healthy, presumably to reassure people who want to eventually wire a Neuralink gadget into their gray matter that the process is reversible. As Gertrude, the pig with the coin-sized implant, walked around, ate things, broke wind, and did other things pigs do, what was said to be her brain activity appeared on a screen, revealing real-time neural network activity observed by Neuralink’s embedded tech. Musk said the implants have been performing well, and his eventual goal was to build human implants that would enable the sharing of memories, telepathic summoning of Tesla cars, hands-free gaming, and so on. Essentially, the plan is: you think a command, it’s detected as electrical signals by the Neuralink electronics fitted in your brain, and then wirelessly passed to a computer or some other device to interpret and obey.
