It is not far off now to envision a future where a human with a chip-enhanced brain can defeat a professional video gamer.
In an episode of Lex Friedman Podcast In an article published Friday, Musk pointed to his startup Neuralink, which implanted a chip in someone’s brain earlier this year.
“We are very confident that in the next year or two, someone with a Neuralink implant will be able to outperform a professional gamer because their reaction time will be faster,” he said.
In March, Neuralink announced that the first person to have a chip implanted in their brain was a quadriplegic who gained the ability to play video games using his mind.
Looking further into the future, Musk said Friday that Neuralink’s long-term goal is to improve the coexistence of artificial intelligence and humans by increasing a person’s ability to communicate at a high level of voice.
Without such an improvement, he explained, AI would get “bored” waiting for people to communicate at a few bits per second while AI can do it at terabytes per second, adding, “It’s like talking to a tree.”
But he stressed that Neuralink’s first mission is to treat damaged neurons in the spinal cord, neck or brain, like the company’s first patients.
“We’re just starting with the basics here, the simple things, relatively speaking, are solving neuronal damage,” Musk said.
But once the risks of Neuralink’s brain implant are proven to be low, after thousands of people have used it for years, the company could perhaps aim to “increase” the number of people who do not have neurological problems, he added.
In fact, Neuralink is already planning to enhance the capabilities of people with neuronal damage, giving them a “connectivity data rate” beyond what humans normally have.
“While we’re at it, why not give people superpowers,” Musk said.
Similarly, Neuralink may work to improve human vision, eventually building on its Blindsight product to restore sight. He explained that the product may initially provide low-resolution images, but over time the resolution could be higher than what humans have today, with the product even enabling vision in different parts of the spectrum such as ultraviolet or infrared.
In February, Musk claimed progress in treating Neuralink’s first patient, and last month he said his startup had plans to implant the chip in a second patient. On Friday, Friedman told The Verge that the second implant had been completed and that “so far, so good.”
Neuralink representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Neuralink’s N1 brain-computer interface is about the size of a quarter of a dime and is designed to record and transmit neural activity with the help of more than 1,000 electrodes spread across dozens of different threads, each thinner than a human hair.