Ilon Musk creates Neuralink company to develop neural interfaces

Photo: Jonas Fredwall Karlsson

The founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, Ilon Musk, is recruiting employees for his new company, Neuralink, which will develop a neural interface, a technology that allows you to read information from the human brain and record it on digital media, reports Reuters.

It is assumed that in order to create such a technology, Neuralink will develop multiple brain implants that will read electronic signals and interpret them into information that we understand.
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Mask has not yet submitted his project to the public and did not comment on the activities of his new company.

In July of last year, Neuralink was registered in California, the purpose of which, according to the documents, is medical research. Now the company has begun recruiting. So, several leading scientists in the field of brain research have already been hired. They include Vanessa Tholos, an engineer and a specialist in flexible electrodes from the Livermore National Laboratory of Lawrence, Philip Sabes, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco who studies brain control of human movements, and Timothy Gardner, a professor at Boston University who is known for his operations on implantation of electrodes into the brain reels to study birds singing.

The Neuralink domain is already taken , but the site has a stub with the company logo and the address of the human resources department at jobs@neuralink.com.

Last year, at the StartmeupHK 2016 conference, Musk talked about the need to create a neural interface technology that would connect a human brain and a computer. As conceived by a businessman, this would allow interacting with the machine directly, without delays and problems with the throughput of devices such as a mouse, keyboard and other peripherals.

Research in the field of creation and implantation of brain implants has been conducted for a long time, but has a more prosaic goal. First of all, they are used to treat epilepsy and other diseases caused by improper work of the brain.

Similar projects already exist in the USA. Thus, the startup KerNEL is working on the creation of commercial brain implants to stimulate the brain and improve memory. It was founded by Brian Johnson, in the past, as well as Musk, the owner of part of PayPal, which he sold for $ 800 million in 2013.

At the same time, KerNEL has set itself less futuristic goals: the founder of a startup recognizes that the target audience for his implants will be the elderly and those suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Johnson's words about his project are somewhat reminiscent of Mask's romantic statements about space exploration. “The human mind is locked in the body and this leads to brain degradation,” said the entrepreneur.

If Mask decides to personally control the company for creating neural interfaces, an interesting situation will arise. A businessman already has many futuristic projects that are far from complete. Among them are Tesla electric cars with full autopilot system, spaceX rockets and ships, Mars colonization, the Hyperloop high-speed train project and the underground tunnel system, the PowerWall industrial and household energy storage and storage systems, coupled with the Solar Roof, drilling of The Boring Company tunnels, global access to the Internet for 4 thousand satellites, reduction in the cost of launching cargo into Earth orbit due to reuse of missile parts and others.

Already, this list far exceeds the capabilities of even such an eminent businessman as Musk. If Neuralink is added to it and, perhaps, something else, then we can hardly wait for the logical conclusion and creation of at least half of the planned one.