ELON Musk has revealed how he launched his controversial billion-dollar business Neuralink – after basing it on an idea from books by Scottish author Iain Banks.
The Tesla boss, who is one of the world’s richest people, with a net worth of more than £150billion, announced this month how a patient had made a full recovery after being implanted with a brain microchip.
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Musk, 52, came up with the development of brain-computer interfaces — BCIs for short — after being inspired by the Scots author’s Culture series of sci-fi novels.
Banks’s books featured a human/machine technology called Neurolace which is implanted into people and connects all their thoughts to a computer.
Musk said: “It’s kind of like Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires.”
But the inventor — who has publicly warned of the dangers posed by artificial intelligence — also believes having a closer link with technology will protect humans from a Terminator-style Armageddon.
He added: “When I first read Banks it struck me that this idea had a chance of protecting us from artificial intelligence. If we can find good commercial uses to fund Neuralink then in a few decades we will get to our ultimate goal of protecting us from evil AI by tightly coupling our human world to our digital machinery.”
Musk launched his company in 2016 with six top neuroscientists and engineers. They first experimented by implanting chips in the brains of pigs, bringing condemnation from animal rights groups, before announcing their first human trial at the start of this year.
Last week Musk announced that the unidentified patient was able to move a computer cursor with their mind.
Neuralink’s device consists of a coin-sized chip implanted in the skull, connected to ultra-thin wires that interface directly with the brain.
And now after the first successful human trial, Musk also hopes that the brain chips will help people suffering from neurological conditions including motor neurone disease.
In a previous presentation of Neuralink’s groundbreaking tech, alongside a surgical robot which opened the skull, inserted the implant and finished the procedure in around an hour, he said: “You can go to hospital in the morning and leave by afternoon, without a general anaesthetic.”
Musk even predicted a time when people’s precious memories could also be saved then replayed, which would help those suffering from dementia.
He added: “This is obviously sounding increasingly like a Black Mirror episode, but essentially if you have a whole brain interface everything that is encoded in memory could upload.
“You could basically store your memories as a back-up. Ultimately you could potentially download them into a new body or into a robot body. The future is going to be a weird one.”
In the 2023 biography Elon Musk, by American journalist Walter Isaacson, he insists he only came up with the idea for Neuralink after becoming hooked on Fife-born author Banks’s series of sci-fi books, published between 1987 and 2012.
SCI FI FIRSTS
WHEN science fiction became science fact:
3D PRINTERS – STAR TREK: THE magical idea of a gadget that seemingly creates something from nothing was first seen in 1987 in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation. The printer known as the Replicator created meals and everyday objects supposedly by rearranging subatomic particles.
While the 3D printers of today still can’t make you a bowl of mac and cheese – although scientists are working on it – they can do everything from printing lethal weapons to modelling body organs.
HOVER BIKE – STAR WARS: EVERY kid in the 1980s wanted a speeder bike as shown in the epic 1983 Star Wars film Return Of The Jedi.
It took more than 30 years but we finally got there with the unveiling of the helicopter-like invention the hover bike in 2014.
VIDEO CALLS – THE JETSONS: LONG before Covid caused Zoom and Google Meets to become the norm, the idea of everyday video calling was the stuff of make-believe.
But the idea was first mooted in the futuristic cartoon The Jetsons, which was first aired in 1962, and saw the Jetson family regularly communicate with one another on their giant TV screens.
In the novels, interstellar humans coexist with highly sophisticated artificial intelligences known as “Minds” housed in immense starships.
Musk, who also owns X, formerly Twitter, once tweeted how his favourite Banks book from the series is: “Probably Excession but I’d recommend reading The Player Of Games and Surface Detail first. They’re all great.”
The entrepreneur, who also owns space travel firm SpaceX, even named his fleet of drone ships, which recapture his reusable booster rockets, in honour of Banks, who died from cancer in 2013 aged 59.
In 2015 he called his first drone ship Just Read The Instructions and named his next Of Course I Still Love You after the starships from the Banks book The Player Of Games.
That was followed by A Shortfall Of Gravitas in reference to the AI Mind character from the author’s novel Look To Windward.
And for those interested in helping to turn the Scotsman’s books into reality, Neuralink’s website is still recruiting volunteers to have microchips implanted in their brains.
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