Elon Musk’s Quest to Control Computers With Our Thoughts

was up to. So he got on stage in San Francisco. Hello, everybody there, must announce that Neuralinks team has been inserting these tiny electrodes into the brains of rats to record their brain activity. He said, the near term applications are medical. Everyone. If they if you survive cancer and hot disease, odds are that you will have some brain related disorder, so I'll be like Alzheimer's or demand trip. Uh, we can solve that with a trip. Musk wasn't shy about what

he hopes this technology will one day achieve. Yeah, those cana sound pretty weird, but um, we can effectively achieve a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence. So this is not a mandatory thing. This is the thing that you can choose to have if you want, and we can effectively have the option of merging with AI. This is extremely important. Ultimately we can do a full brain machine

interface brain machine interface. This is what people are calling this technology away for us to control a computer with our thoughts, a form of telepathy that's actually real and it sounds crazy, like something straight out of science fiction, but it's actually already had real success in medicine in

real life, even before Elon Musk came around. Today, in the show Bloomberg, reporter Sarah McBride takes us through this emerging and kind of terrifying field, introducing us to the doctors already putting implants into human brains, and a patient hoping to cure her seizures with this technology. Well, we one day walk around as the cyborgs and Elon Musk's dreams. I'm a ito. You're listening to Decrypted stay with us, Hey, Sarah,

how's it going. I'm good. How are you? I think our listeners will recognize you from our episode last season about the brains of birds. You've become a resident near science expert. Yikes. That was a fun episode. It was it was so you. You started digging into this pretty much as soon as Elon Musk unveiled the details of Neuralink. Do you want to kick us off with a broad overview of this field of brain machine interfaces. Yeah, I

really had no idea how wides that it was. But there are lots of companies working on this, lots of academics, and I started learning very quickly that perhaps the biggest debate in the industry is invasive or non invasive. So do you want to put electrodes deep into the brain, which involves signing through your skull, or just on the

outside once I'm more dangerous than the other. Yes. For example, Facebook has a big program working on brain machine interfaces, and they've picked kind of the safer route just understandably, yes, just on the outside of your skull, but not Elon Musk. They made a big presentation in July and Elon Musk was talking about what they've been able to do, and he was talking about how they've implanted electrodes in rodent brains and they can read signals from those rodent brains now.

And then it turns out that neuralink has also been working with monkeys, which we weren't supposed to know. That Ellen must kind of slipped up a little bit at his presentation and as he right, yeah, I mean, but we have made you know, monkey has been able to control the computer with his brain. Just yeah, why I didn't realize running that result today, But there goes the lony is going to come out of the bag. So I think he just got very excited and wanted people

to know that. So he even surprised his own CEO of Neuralalink, a guy called Max Kodak, by mentioning that on stage at his big presentation. So tell me about these monkeys. So I hopped on a train to Davis, which runs a giant national primate Center. Melissa lets blew In, who runs media relations for the university, came and met me, drove me out to the primate center, introduced me to Jennifer Short, who had colony management for the primate center, and the two of them showed me around. We drove

all over in a golf card. I saw thousands and thousands of monkeys. It was really fun. Seem more furious than the other one. Sure, So we have corrals for the monkeys. They're about half an acre and there are twenty four of them that are out here and in them we have anywhere from about eight monkeys, and they these are breeding groups of monkeys, so they are mating and then having babies. So would that be similar to

families of monkeys. Yes, these are families of monkeys. And see the monkey bars, the monkey bars, they're blade um, that's so cute. So this is a little baby coming to look. Get us through the fence. Now see he walked right up and he's like he's standing. Yeah. Yeah, So he's drink. He's drinking. He's drinking out of a water fountain up an So these are the monkeys that

Elon Musk is experimenting on. Well not exactly. It turns out that the ones that get experimented on by neuralink get kind of secreted away into these buildings where nobody just driving around and a golf cart can see them. So I think it's more accurate to say this is the pool of monkeys from which one day a neuralink experiment monkey might be selected. The reason I heard about the center in the first place is because you work with neuralink, So what can you tell me about what

you're doing with neural link here? Well as with many of our ongoing projects, um the research is proprietary and ongoing research. We really can't talk about because they're in the process of doing the research and it still needs to be looked at and to be you know, really

vigorously reviewed before anybody says anything about the research. So this was Melissa again from you See Davis, and I tried so hard to get them to say anything about what Neuralalink was doing, and the closest I got was when I asked, so, are they working on really cool projects? And they said yes and left it there. So what did you do next? Well, I knew there were some people who have left neural Link, and I thought maybe I could find out a little bit more about what's

going on. So I noticed that this guy, Vikash Gilja had worked at Neuralink and is now a professor at you See San Diego. So I actually went down to San Diego. Did you ever meet Elon? Yeah, they met him quite a few times, and we'll was that like, is he just very interested and everybody sward, Yeah, definitely.

He signed all kinds of NDA's. He can't talk too precisely about what's going on at neural length, but he can talk about the state of play in brain machine interfaces and what he's doing and what the big breakthroughs in the field have been. So what do you tell you? So vication I talked a lot about the difference between invasive and non invasive technologies, and he came up with

this great metaphor. He compared it to a cocktail party, and he said, non invasive is when you walk into a cocktail party and you just kind of put one microphone in the door of the room, so you hear everything that's going on. You know, everyone's having a great time. You hear the glasses clinking and the food being passed around, but you really only have those broad strokes, um say,

if you have a room full of people. It's the different between having a few microphones on the ceiling versus having um my lapel microphones on on everyone's collars so that you can hear each person speaking. The precise level of detail you can get with all those different mics and different spots of the party is exactly the same as different electrodes deep inside different parts of the brain. So what neural link is doing is the individual mics

on every single person's collar. Yes, exactly. And then thanks to vikash I met one of the doctors he works with, a brain surgeon called Sharona ben Him. She is a very impressive woman. She does tons of brain surgeries. She calculated, kind of off the cuff, about sixty a year, which is more than one a week putting these implants into human putting electrodes into people's brains. Yeah, so she got

really interested in this specialty. In medical school, she has this aha moment where she knew she wanted to become this type of surgeon. She and her professor were operating on a patient with Parkinson's inserting an electrode into his brain, and that's when she knew. The patient was awake and

the tremor was very really profound. Um, and we implanted the electrode and this the second we turned it on, like magic, the tremor just went away and the patient, you know, went from not being able to hold a cup to just like very coordinated, streamline fashion moving herd And uh, that's what I was sold that. So when I thought that that was one of the coolest things I've ever seen. That's incredible, that this is what the

technology can do. Yeah, it really is. But I had to keep reminding myself that because she's so matter of fact and down to earth, and I had to keep telling myself, she's inserting electrodes into patients brains and it's actually a real art and we need to get the electrode really like perfectly in the right spot, you know, in the nucleus and exact right orientation. So it's actually quite a surgical challenge. That means she can't be off by more than two millimeters. I know, it is crazy.

We'll be right back. So Dr ben Him was kind enough to connect me to a couple of her patients, and one of them was this young woman, Lydia. My name is Lydia Budney. I have elefsy and it started when I was a freshman in high school. So at this point it's been about twenty years. She says, she's tried so hard to find rhyme or reason to them. Does it depend on how much she slapped or what she's eaten? And she just can't find a pattern, So

she just never knows when a seizure might strike. Usually when I have them, I'll be going about my normal untain doing everything, and then for me, it's I usually wake up on the floor, I fall I hit things, and it's like all they can do is try and keep me in a safe position where I'm not kicking a lot of things or hitting a lot of things. But it's like they can't do anything to actually keep

you from having them. She met me just days before her thirty four birthday, and she'd already had one surgery using electrodes to identify where in the brain her epileptic seizures were coming from. And the bad news she got after that surgery, which was earlier this year, was everywhere there were all different kinds of parts of her brain

making seizures. Apparently, I am a tricky case because technically I have generalized epilepsy because my seizures do not all start from the same spot, like the irregular activity happens kind of all over. So the irregular activity comes all over, but the worst seizures come from just one part of

her brain. So for her, the best strategy was to get permanent electrodes targeting just that one part, and once they get inserted into her brain, those electrodes can tell when she's about to have a seizure and hopefully zappa pulse right into that part of her brain to stop the seizure. Wow, that's amazing. What was she scared? I didn't even think about it. It was like hands down, like, I mean, do what you need to. Um. You know, because, like I said, the seizures have become more freak it,

UM don't seem to be really controllable completely with my medicine. UM. It just got to the point where I was like, the seizures scared me more than anything that could be done in the hospital. She seemed really brave to me, but she had this great attitude. I'm going to turn thirty four and I already have a computer in my head. I'm going to be part robot, you know. It's kind of my joke, you know, thirty four root Like, it's an awesome time. So, Sarah, I think you said that

you talked to Lydia just before her second surgery. How's she doing now? Well, I've been texting with her and it sounds like she's doing great. That second surgery lasted just six hours, which would be long for any other type of surgery, but for brain surgery, that's a lot less than I expected to It went well, Yeah, it went really well, and she's already back home. In fact, she just went back to work, so she's already a bionic woman, as she dreamed. But yeah, so do we

know if her seizures have already stopped. Well, it's a longer process. So they've got all the gear in her brain now that can stop the seizures. They just have to monitor her for a couple of months and then they know exactly how to turn off those seizures. So she's in the part of the process which will last about two months, where they monitor her brain and then they can turn on the part of the technology that hopefully will stop the seizures just in time for the holidays.

It's incredible. If the world of medicine has already come this far without Elon Musk, what is Nurling hoping to do. They're just hoping to take it much farther, so beyond the realm of medicine and into the realm of what could be considered by some people cosmetic brain enhancement, So things that aren't medically necessary but could enhance your quality of life, like having an excellent memory, or being able to calculate things very quickly, or being able to download

a language overnight. Things like that. Did the people you talk to have a sense of how soon that was going to be ready. Probably fifteen or twenty years. That's not that long of a time. Wow, But maybe not glitch free, like maybe elements of it, Like take that learn a language example. Maybe the first thing would be you'd be able to download vocabulary or you'd be able to overnight learn some portion of that language. It might not be click in fifteen years you can learn French overnight.

It might be in little stages. You know, the researchers you talked to are doing this for a very specific purpose of treating people with debilitating illnesses. Do they have any concerns about bringing this out to the broader public? Yeah? I mean the caution. I had a long conversation about ethics and could this worsen inequality? You could see a day where rich people can pay for all kinds of enhancements that will make it possible to learn things more

easily and more thoroughly, and poor people won't. So what does Sharonna think about all this? Well, she was really focused on what is and isn't possible and how many misconceptions there are about the brain. Do you think people's expectations are getting out of whack with reality. I mean, you told me it'll be a long time before we have anything. Ellen nice makes things happen, So it's interesting. Um, you know, I don't know what people's expectations are. I

think there's there's expectations and there's fears. Um. But um, there's so many interesting unfounded you know, concepts about the brain to begin with that, who knows? And she said she told me she'd been watching some TV program where they talked about how only ten of the brain was used, and I told her that before. Is that true? No, that's I mean, I don't know what that's based on. Ill we use all of our brain? Because I've heard we only use a small part of it. I didn't

know we use all of our brain? Um. But do we have rum in our brain to download language? Probably? Really? Yeah? If um you could have some kind of cosmetic brain something done to augment your brain? What when you pick a I don't know, I don't really I don't think i'd be really excited about something like that. Really yea even memory? Um No, I can't say that I would really uh sire any augmentation? Um, guys that Um, I'm

really happy with the way my brain works. Yeah, I mean there's enough noise in all our heads already and she didn't want to add to it. Well, she's a brilliant neurosurgence. She probably doesn't need it. Would you ever want that? I would absolutely? Yeah, if it were safe. Um, I would do it a a heartbeat if my wife lets me. How about you. I'm super cautious, so when I got lazick, I only got it in when eye, just in case. So probably no, I don't think I'm

a good candidate, you know, Sarah. For all of Elon Musk's faults, everything he does is just so wildly ambitious. And I think the newest thing that he's trying to do our brains talking to computers, that's got to be the most outlandish one. It has to be the one that has the most potential to change the way that we live. It kind of changes what it means to be human itself. You could say that he talks about

the philosophy. He says that in the future, when AI will be so predominant, we don't have to have this kind of enhancement, but things will go much about or for us if we do just to live in a world with so much AI when the robots takeover. Yeah, he's talked in the past about how we need to fuse our brains with machines to survive in a world

like that. He said that potentially we could just be housecats to our robot overlords, and the house cat would be a good outcome, but the brain implants will help us complete help us avoid that house cat fate. Yes, so, I don't know. He's not always the most philosophical. He asked at that presentation in July, well, what if our minds are just brains into vat and then he said, yes, that's what they are, brains in that romantic right. And what is it to be human? I mean, what is

it to be anything? Our understanding of everything changes with every decade that goes by as we learn more and more science. So I'm not sure that we know what it is to be human now, and I'm not sure that these brain machine interfaces will help us in that regard, but they'll still change it whatever it is. Sarah, thanks for coming on the show today, Oh thanks for having me. Decrypted is hosted by me Akito. Sean Ween is our

executive producer. So for Foreheads and Ethan Brooks mix the show today and Francesca Levy is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see next week. Put a Council, trans of secuted and subtrasted as conclusial councils, Bustin Council, sal coupsal MCLs, BRONC, Business