Billionaire Elon Musk said that humans equipped with his company's Neuralink brain chip will nail 360-degree noscopes better than the pros within two years, according to an episode of Lex Fridman's podcast (full text) in which Musk He continued with more wild claims.

Musk says his idea about human "data rates" came to him while thinking about AI safety and possible barriers to positive human-AI integration. "The low data rate of humans, especially our slow output rate, would diminish the link between humans and computers," Mask said, adding a rather incredulous coda: "You see this plant or whatever, hey, I really want that plant to be happy, but that doesn't say much Let's say it doesn't."

The human brain is the pinnacle of evolution, the computer that no Silicon Valley company can match. We have little understanding of its complexity and capabilities. To compare it to a plant is... I can't.

Nevertheless, Mask claims that the major goal is to somehow increase the human "output rate," or the speed at which the brain sends signals to the chip, and estimates that it could be "three, six, or more orders of magnitude." For the record, Musk agrees with Fridman's suggestion that "hundreds of millions" of people will have neural links within "the next few decades."

Some of what Musk says sounds like mental torture to me. Musk thinks, "Let's say that uploading one's own memories would make it impossible to lose them." Asked if this would change the human experience, Mask said, "Yes. Some kind of futuristic cyborg ...... That's not super far off, but 10-15 years, something like that."

While Mask talks about efficiency, we move on to a minor topic at Neuralink: in May, Neuralink published an update on Noland Arbaugh, the first patient to have a chip implanted: "I'm a quadriplegic, and in a game that my friends can't possibly beat me I'm a quadriplegic and I'm beating my friends at a game I'm not supposed to win."

"We're pretty confident that probably within the next year or two, people with neural link implants will be able to outperform professional gamers," says Mask in connection with a previous chat about faster brains. 'Because their reaction time will be faster.'

Amidst all the cyber promises, it is worth recalling that Neuralink undoubtedly has great medical potential and benefit for certain people. The company's current focus is on the medical side, specifically what it can do for damaged neurons with a view to curing certain conditions that cannot be treated by current medicine. [When you have damaged neurons in the spinal cord or neck, as in our first two patients, obviously the first job is to resolve the underlying neuronal damage in the spinal cord, neck, or brain itself," says Mask. Our second product is called 'Blind Sight,' which allows people who are completely blind, who have lost both eyes or the optic nerve, or who cannot see at all, to see by directly triggering neurons in the visual cortex."

Mask can't help but digress a bit here, speculating that Neuralink might one day "solve" schizophrenia and Blindsight might later be used to enhance normal human vision ("I think it will give us higher resolution than the human eye... It will be able to see ultraviolet, infrared, eagle vision, you name it"). There is no doubt that this technology has the potential to make a significant contribution to medicine, but what Mask is really getting into is science fiction stuff, reducing the risk of the technology to a level that cyberpunks see as possible.

"If you have thousands of people using it for years and the risk is minimal, you can probably think at that point, 'Okay, let's go for augmentation,'" Musk says.

"We're not just aiming to provide the same communication data rate as a normal human being. We are trying to provide quadriplegics, or people who have completely lost the connection between their brain and their body, with communication data rates that exceed those of a normal human being. While we're there, why don't we give people superpowers?"

Neural Link is just one of Musk's technological interests, and the billionaire is also deeply involved in the AI wars and is currently embroiled in a massive lawsuit against OpenAI. Not only that, but the rise of SpaceX, Starlink, Teslabot, and, of course, the constant yearning for the platform he paid $45 billion to get. Imagine this. One day, Neuralink might speed up Musk's brain and produce six times as many awful memes a day.

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