Elon Musk wants YOU to build a brain-computer interface

Elon Musk isn’t content with electric cars, shooting people into orbit, populating Mars and building underground tunnels to solve traffic problems. Musk, a founder of both the electric car company Tesla Motors and the private space-exploration firm SpaceX, has become an outspoken doomsayer about the threat artificial intelligence might one day pose to the human race. Neuralink wants to build on those existing medical treatments as well as one day work on surgeries that could improve cognitive functioning, according to a Wall Street Journal article on the company’s launch. “I am confident that long term it would be possible to restore someone’s full-body motion,” said Musk, who’s also famously said that he wants to “die on Mars, just not on impact.” Neuralink is not the only company working on artificial intelligence for the brain. Facebook bought CTRL-labs, a startup developing non-invasive neural interfaces, in 2019 and folded it into Facebook’s Reality Labs, whose goal is to “fundamentally transform the way we interact with devices.” That might be an easier sell than the Neuralink device, which would require recipients to agree to have the device implanted in their brain, possibly by a robot surgeon.