Neuralink is a company set up by Elon Musk that apparently exists to investigate the potential for brain implants that might allow their oneday users to control their personal devices with their minds. It might be ready to progress to a clinical trial of its futuristic technology with actual human participants, if its latest job postings are anything to go by.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Elon-Musk-s-Neuralink-project-reportedly-expands-with-signs-of-upcoming-clinical-trials-in-humans.595495.0.html
Bet against Musk at your own risk. This is a man that has done the *impossible* time and again. People said he was crazy to start Tesla. That you cannot compete against the Big Three. We see how that worked out.
As if that wasn't impossible enough, his next venture was even crazier. Privatized space flight. Hahhahahahah. Elon, bro... you can't compete against governments. That's ludicrous. Where do you even start to talk about how insane the concept is....
So when mass media backed by a conservative group of neurologists (who just so happen to have ties to the Utah Array) first came out slamming Musk's vision of a BMI as being completely and entirely a pipe dream, I knew. I laughed on the inside and said to just wait and see.
Neuralink will change humanity. It will change how we interact with our reality and one another. It might (although I'm dubious) allow us to form symbiotic relationships with AGI and ASI. Even if it fails in that regard, it will still usher in an entirely new paradigm for humanity, that of The Matrix.
Elon should really focus on the biggest natural neural link - human vision. It is a pipeline that was shaped by evolution to be the dominant sense and is as information dense as human senses go. If Elon can make use of the vision aspect by projecting integrated augmented reality systems into human vision, like Iron Man suits, then he's got it made. Direct neural connectivity is of course possible, but its pathway is like building a bridge, on the electronics side, things can evolve at the speed of engineering, on the human side, things evolve at the pace of evolution. One of those two is very slow and beyond our control at the moment. That's not to say he won't succeed, but he'll need to invest in human genomic augmentation to speed up evolution of the biological side of the link. Otherwise, it'll be the weakest part of the link.
Also, integration of human intelligence into AI loops is probably the only way to bring about consciousness into AI systems, but this would be difficult to achieve with current human anatomy.