Elon Musk has a reputation as the world’s greatest doer. He can propose crazy ambitious technological projects—like reusable rockets for Mars exploration and hyperloop tunnels for transcontinental rapid transit—and people just assume he’ll pull it off.
So his latest venture, a new company called Neuralink that will reportedly build brain implants both for medical use and to give healthy people superpowers, has gotten the public excited about a coming era of consumer-friendly neurotech.
Even neuroscientists who work in the field, who know full well how difficult it is to build working brain gear that passes muster with medical regulators, feel a sense of potential. “Elon Musk is a person who’s going to take risks and inject a lot of money, so it will be exciting to see what he gets up to,” says Thomas Oxley, a neural engineer who has been developing a medical brain implant since 2010 (he hopes to start its first clinical trial in 2018).
Neuralink is still mysterious. An article in The Wall Street Journal announced the company’s formation and first hires, while also spouting vague verbiage about “cranial computers” that would serve as “a layer of artificial intelligence inside the brain.”
