Neuralink: the microchip that will connect the human brain to a computer

The connection between the human being and the machine was always a topic subject of the most unbridled science-fiction. Many thing that first or later we will connect to the network straight from our brain, an evolution of the human race. But how much is this hypothetic future close? Neuralink might be the first neural interface, which will allow the human brain to directly communicate with an artificial intelligence.

Neuralink, the company of the first neural interface

The yesterday science-fiction becomes the today science, like always. It is like that that, by taking inspiration from the biggest science-fiction romances and movies of the history, one started to think about the first neural interface.

Neuralink is a californian company, a small medical start up in San Francisco, bought by Elon Musk in the 2017 and brought to the world’s knowledge for its particular mission. The medical company, infact, became the first laboratory to create and test the first neural interface.

The project, as far as it can remember futuristic and terrifying scenarios, as the one of Matrix, it has in reality medical purposes. The microchip implanted into the human brain, infact, will be firstly used to cure neurodegenerative diseases. Nevertheless that, in the future, the implant might become a device able to improve the neural skills of the human beings and to create a direct connection or, even, a real symbiosis, with the artificial intelligence.

The presentation

From the moment of the takeover until just few days ago, the company were working in secret to the project Neuralink. The only information that came out was about the request of a licence for the animal experimentation. Which led us think that the project was on track.

And, infact, not as long ago, Elon Musk present it to an audience of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

The same Musk told that personally took inspiration by the serie Neural Lace, in which to the protagonists were implanted into the neocortex a semi organic grid, by allowing them to interface with the artificial intelligences.

The microchip of Neuralink

Like said by Elon during the presentation, through a hole of 8 millimeters on the skull it is possible to implant the sensors, some small flexible cables of the size of micrometers (a third of a human hair). Which will be injected through a cable of 24 micron.

Through this chip some external computers will be able to receive and to elaborate the informations received by the brain. But the microchip of Neuralink will be able not only to send, but even to receive informations, bypassing the damaged neurons. The operation are really fragile ans they must be controlled by a neurosurgeon.

The device will be able to help the people affected by damages to the brain or to the spinal cord, by allowing them to control straight with the brain bionical prostesis.

But in the future, with further improvements, the chip will be able to give back the sight, the touch and the hearing. The final purpose established by the visionary man is the one to realize super human – artificial intelligences.

Meanwhile the device was brilliantly tested on mice and on a monkey. It was able to control a computer through the brain.

The future of the human brain

“In the long term we could create a fully interface brain machine to obtain a kind of symbiosis with the artificial intelligence”, says the same Musk. Which is really curious, due to the fact that in the last years, right him, warned about the dangers of the AI.

The one used by Neuralink is safe and controlled and it will be fulled tamed, he ensures. But we should be really safe when a human brain will have the calculation speed of a machine?

We will be able, for example, to digit 40 words per minute, with the only thought. But this is only an ephemeral example of the incredible skills that the human being will be able to obtained by connecting himself to a machine.

Meanwhile Elon hopes to obtain the go-ahead for the human experimentations for the next year, for the first patients affected by neurodegenerative diseases.

This post is also available in: Italiano