Elon Musk has publicly backed Neuralink; a startup attempting to create devices that can merge the human mind with artificial intelligence.
When being the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX gets boring, Elon Musk tends to turn to other ideas. His latest? Backing Neuralink – a little known company attempting to create devices that can bridge gap between the human mind and artificial intelligence.
Musk has previously been an avid pundit for melding artificial intelligence and the human mind; the SpaceX CEO elaborated to a crowd in Dubai that “Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.”
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Further, in an interview at Recode’s Code Conference, Musk stated that “I don’t love the idea of being a house cat, but what’s the solution? I think one of the solutions that seems maybe the best is to add an AI layer. Just as your cortex works symbiotically with your limbic system, your third digital layer could work symbiotically with you.”
Musk’s backing of Neuralink, then, could be one way to achieve a solution in the difficult task of melding an organic and synthetic intelligence.
Research on AI proliferated greatly in 2016, and tech giants such as Microsoft and Google established a Partnership On AI with the view of publishing research papers and exploring the ethical advancement of artificial intelligence. Membership grew to include Apple in early 2017.
Musk took to Twitter last year to state his belief that humanity would need to equip itself with a ‘neural lace’ in order to maintain human supremacy over an artificial intelligence – Neuralink might well be the Tesla CEO’s next frontier to achieve just that.
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What are your thoughts on Musk’s decision to back Neuralink? Would you be happy to co-exist with an AI? Be sure to let us know your opinion in the comments below!
Follow Bryan Smith on Twitter: @bryansmithSA
Source: The Verge
