Elon Musk states a great deal of apparently fantastical things. For example: The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO appears to think that people will become able to live permanently, by downloading their brains into robotics.
“I think it is possible,” Musk, 50, just recently informedInsider “Yes, we could download the things that we believe make ourselves so unique. Now, of course, if you’re not in that body anymore, that is definitely going to be a difference, but as far as preserving our memories, our personality, I think we could do that.”
By Musk’s account, such innovation will be a steady advancement from today’s kinds of computer system memory. “Our memories are stored in our phones and computers with pictures and video,” he stated. “Computers and phones amplify our ability to communicate, enabling us to do things that would have been considered magical … We’ve already amplified our human brains massively with computers.”
The principle of extending human life by downloading awareness into artificial bodies has actually been a component of science-fiction for years, with the 1964 sci-fi book “Dune” describing such beings as “cymeks.” Some professionals today think that “mind uploading” innovation could, in truth, be possible one day– however the timeline is extremely uncertain.
In a 2019 Wall Street Journal essay, Michael S.A. Graziano, a psychology and neuroscience teacher at Princeton University, composed that mind submitting would need 2 pieces of innovation: a synthetic brain, and a scan of an individual’s brain that might “measure exactly how its neurons are connected to each other, to be able to copy that pattern in the artificial brain.”
Creating the synthetic brain, Graziano kept in mind, would be fairly uncomplicated. “But to upload a human brain, we probably want a scanner that doesn’t kill the subject, and we would need it to scan about a hundred million times as many details,” he composed. “That technology doesn’t yet exist. The most wildly optimistic predictions place mind uploading within a few decades, but I would not be surprised if it took centuries.”
One of Musk’s present start-up endeavors, Neuralink, is working to establish “brain-machine interfaces” that– in Musk’s own words– might one day enable individuals to “store your memories as a backup, and restore the memories.” But speaking with Insider, Musk highlighted that his business’s present objectives are a lot more instantly useful.
“Neuralink in the short term is just about solving brain injuries, spinal injuries and that kind of thing,” he stated. “So for many years, Neuralink’s products will just be helpful to someone who has lost the use of their arms or legs or has just a traumatic brain injury of some kind.”
Notably, Musk himself does not appear to wish to live permanently– nor does he back the concept for anybody else. “I don’t think we should try to have people live for a really long time,” he stated. “That would cause asphyxiation of society because the truth is, most people don’t change their mind. They just die. So if they don’t die, we will be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn’t advance.”
If mind uploading does end up being possible within the fairly future, there’s some speculation in the Musk home regarding who had actually wish to attempt it: In a current interview with Vanity Fair, Musk’s co-parent and ex-partner Grimes recognized Amazon and Blue Origin creator Jeff Bezos as somebody who “is gonna be a cymek.”
Bezos, 58, has actually not openly revealed any interest in such innovation, though he does have a performance history of buying durability and anti-aging research study. He did not instantly react to CNBC Make It’s ask for remark.
Sign up now: Get smarter about your cash and profession with our weekly newsletter
Don’t miss out on:
Mark Zuckerberg: Most future tasks will be more ‘creative’ than ‘traditional labor or service’
Here’s just how much power Elon Musk in fact has at Twitter now– and what he may finish with it
