Monday, June 5, 2017

Noam Chomsky Says Elon Musk's Neuralink Project Won't Really Work

By Dyani Sabin

At the end of April, Elon Musk announced that his new brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, will first focus on helping people with brain injuries, before moving to allow you to communicate with your thoughts.
This week, Inverse spoke with Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT, about Neuralink and the state of research on thoughts and language. While Chomsky thinks that using brain interfaces to help patients regain motor functions is a reasonable goal, he is seriously skeptical about the long term goals of Neuralink. Our knowledge about how we think is so limited, he says, that communicating with just your thoughts is far from being possible.

“What they’re probably doing is things like what I described, finding ways to detect by maybe electrical signals from the brain whether you’re planning to lift your arm. That’s within the domain of feasibility, and I know there is research going on about that,” Chomsky tells Inverse. “Trying to find out what I’m thinking, let’s say, there’s no way of developing technology because we don’t understand how to proceed.”

Read the rest here.

1 comment:

  1. Elon Musk Business Model:

    1)Develop the most futuristic idea that connects to some existing technology
    2)Make a super awesome pitch with claims that cannot be verified and always beg the question
    3)Get wacky but well connected leftists super excited about said project
    4)Get subsidies
    5)Get more subsidies
    6)Repeat


    ReplyDelete