The rise of A.I. and over-powering humans will prove to be a catastrophic situation. Elon Musk is attempting to combat the rise of A.I. with the launch of his latest venture, brain-computer interface company Neuralink.  Detailed information about Neuralink on Wait But Why. (Highly Recommended to Read!)

Musk seems to want to achieve a communications leap equivalent in impact to when humans came up with language – this proved an incredibly efficient way to convey thoughts socially at the time, but what Neuralink aims to do is increase that efficiency by multiple factors of magnitude. Person-to-person, Musk’s vision would enable direct “uncompressed” communication of concepts between people, instead of having to effectively “compress” your original thought by translating it into language and then having the other party “decompress” the package you send them linguistically, which is always a lossy process.

Another thing in favor of Musk’s proposal is that symbiosis between brains and computers isn’t fiction. Remember that person who types with brain signals? Or the paralyzed people who move robot arms? These systems work better when the computer completes people’s thoughts. The subject only needs to type “bulls …” and the computer does the rest. Similarly, a robotic arm has its own smarts. It knows how to move; you just have to tell it to. So even partial signals coming out of the brain can be transformed into more complete ones. Musk’s idea is that our brains could integrate with an AI in ways that we wouldn’t even notice: imagine a sort of thought-completion tool.

So it’s not crazy to believe there could be some very interesting brain-computer interfaces in the future. But that future is not as close at hand as Musk would have you believe. One reason is that opening a person’s skull is not a trivial procedure. Another is that technology for safely recording from more than a hundred neurons at once—neural dust, neural lace, optical arrays that thread through your blood vessels—remains mostly at the blueprint stage.

( via Wired, TechCrunch )