Elon Musk Wants to Create Human-A.I. Link and "Make Everyone Hyper-Smart"

Elon Musk wants to upgrade your knowledge, and it’s going to stop super-smart machines from taking over the world. The tech entrepreneur explained in an interview aired Sunday night how he plans to create a link between humans and artificial intelligence that would ensure the two can move in lock-step and enhance human capabilities.

Musk told Axios that his plan is to develop an electrode-to-neuron-based brain-computer interface, or what he called “a chip and a bunch of tiny wires.” Musk explained that “the long-term aspiration with neural networks would be to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence, and to achieve a democratization of intelligence such that it is not monopolistically held in a purely digital form by governments and large corporations…how do we ensure that the future constitutes the sum of the will of humanity? If we have billions of people with the high-bandwidth link to the A.I. extension of themselves, it would actually make everyone hyper smart.”

See more: Elon Musk Urges for Human-Machine Brain Link After OpenAI’s ‘Dota’ Win

Neuralink, a secretive firm Musk founded in July 2016, has been working on this issue. The company’s plan as outlined last April is to initially focus on medical solutions like treating epilepsy, demonstrating to the public that the technology has clear societal benefits. Linking humans up with machines is part of the longer-term plan. The company has since remained almost silent, but documents discovered in March showed that CEO Jared Birchall sent a letter to San Francisco’s planning department to enable animal testing at its headquarters.

Musk has warned about the dangers of unchecked A.I. before. In a meeting of the National Governors’ Association last July, Musk warned that the technology could be “a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization,” saying that “until people see, like, robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal.” Musk, who co-founded research firm OpenAI, praised the team winning against humans in a Dota 2 match in August, while also stating that humans “need the neural interface soon.”

Neuralink could have more information to share soon. During Musk’s appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast in September, he said that the firm may have “something interesting to announce in a few months that’s at least an order of magnitude better than anything else, probably better than anyone thinks is possible.”

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