Jump Into the Vortex
Rarely do I devote most of a day or a week toward the excitement of an unveiling.
The last vivid memory I have is the Tesla ($TSLA) Model 3 finally being publicly presented on 31 March 2016.
That Thursday evening, Elon Musk spoke to an invite-only crowd and let it be known that the electric car market was getting its game-changer.
In over 3 years and 3 months, Tesla has made skeptics and short-sellers worried about a tectonic shift in transportation that’s long been overdue:
- Tesla was the electric-vehicle sales leader in the US by a wide margin during the first half of 2019, according to estimates from the electric-vehicle website InsideEVs.
- It sold around 83,875 vehicles in the US between January and June, InsideEVs estimated, over 10 times the number of vehicles sold by General Motors, which came in second in the rankings.
- Tesla’s best-selling vehicle, the Model 3 electric luxury sedan, outsold every other vehicle by staggering degree, at least 750%, according to InsideEVs.
Tonight, another Elon Musk funded company, Neuralink, will have a live stream event for the public.
Per Neuralink’s Twitter bio, it is “developing high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and machines.”
That type of mission is a massive undertaking for any company, even one with Elon Musk as CEO and co-founder:
But the Neuralink website is not cluttered with stock photos or Fortune 500 jargon.
Rather, it is a job board requesting “exceptional engineers and scientists”:
I’m excited for tonight, even if my lack of a neuroscience degree leaves me confused at several points.
Tim Urban from the Wait But Why blog wrote an amazing piece on the prospects of the company two years ago, which I love to share:
“When I wrote about Tesla and SpaceX, I learned that you can only fully wrap your head around certain companies by zooming both way, way in and way, way out. In, on the technical challenges facing the engineers, out on the existential challenges facing our species. In on a snapshot of the world right now, out on the big story of how we got to this moment and what our far future could look like.
Not only is Elon’s new venture — Neuralink — the same type of deal, but six weeks after first learning about the company, I’m convinced that it somehow manages to eclipse Tesla and SpaceX in both the boldness of its engineering undertaking and the grandeur of its mission. The other two companies aim to redefine what future humans will do — Neuralink wants to redefine what future humans will be.
The mind-bending bigness of Neuralink’s mission, combined with the labyrinth of impossible complexity that is the human brain, made this the hardest set of concepts yet to fully wrap my head around — but it also made it the most exhilarating when, with enough time spent zoomed on both ends, it all finally clicked. I feel like I took a time machine to the future, and I’m here to tell you that it’s even weirder than we expect.
But before I can bring you in the time machine to show you what I found, we need to get in our zoom machine — because as I learned the hard way, Elon’s wizard hat plans cannot be properly understood until your head’s in the right place.
So wipe your brain clean of what it thinks it knows about itself and its future, put on soft clothes, and let’s jump into the vortex.”
Tim may be the only one more excited than me today on what might be possible with Neuralink’s advancements.
Given that he’s gotten an early inside scoop, trust his judgment over mine:
There are pessimists, of course.
Or, better put, there are concerns, big concerns, at what deep learning might be able to do with all the information we fed it one day, voluntarily or not:
“Some scientists are concerned about focusing too much on the sheer number of electrodes that can be stuffed into a brain. In 2017, DARPA handed out $65 million to build a ‘brain modem’ that could connect with a million neurons, but José-Alain Sahel, who is working on brain implants to restore vision at the University of Pittsburgh, told me he’s suggested that the agency deemphasize the numerical goal. ‘A million electrodes is hard to achieve and might not even be good for the brain,’ says Sahel. ‘What’s important for treatments is whether the signal is meaningful.’
One factor behind the drive for a dense web of connections is the hope that if the brain can be measured at a larger scale, then the buzzing of thousands, or millions, of neurons could be fed into a deep-learning program — like those in development by OpenAI, another Musk venture. Just as such systems have learned to dominate at games like Go and the poker game Texas Hold’em, perhaps with enough data they can decode the language of the brain, too.
‘The philosophical bet is that recording from enough neurons will allow us to figure out what the brain is doing and have this wild brain-machine interface,’ says Wentz.
Today we may find out exactly how wild.”
As the Talking Heads sang in “Wild, Wild Life”:
Peace of mind
It’s a piece of cake
Thought control
You get on board any time you like
