Elon Musk on Neuralink | MOONSHOTS

The development of high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces (BCI) serves as a critical pathway for merging human neocortical function with digital computational capacity. Elon Musk discusses Neuralink’s progress, noting that the first human patient can already control a computer cursor and play video games through a product called Telepathy. While current technology utilizes approximately one thousand electrodes, achieving a "neural lace" capable of preserving memories and brain states—a concept inspired by Iain M. Banks' Culture novels—will require scaling to a million electrodes. This evolution aims to overcome the biological constraints of the human brain, which operates on roughly 10 watts of higher-order power. The transition from initial medical applications for quadriplegic patients to a whole-brain interface represents a long-term engineering trajectory comparable to the scaling seen in electric vehicles and aerospace technology.