Madden Mischief

What’s Next on Elon Musk’s Fertile Mind After Testing Telepathy Brain Implant Device on Second Patient?

TELEme something.  Is Elon Musk on the right path or should we call 911?  Silicon Valley’s Business Journal reports Musk’s company Neuralink Corp has successfully implanted its telepathy neural device into a second human test patient.

“I don’t want to jinx it, but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second implant,” Musk told MIT research scientist Lex Fridman on his podcast.

“There’s a lot of signal, a lot of electrodes. It’s working very well,” Musk said. 

The study, expected to take years, will test the company’s telepathy neural implant on eight more patients this year, he added. The brain-computer interface company conducted its first human trial in January and is looking to do more.

But don’t look at me, Elon.  I’m not volunteering. I happen to like being an independent thinker, even though sometimes driving wherever the hell I’m going I’m moving faster than I’m thinking.  Maybe with Musk’s mind, I could just imagine my way there.

Dojo

So, I think I’ll just store this bit of news in my brain alongside what Musk has been saying about Tesla’s AI supermarket, Dojo.  Will we soon even be able to   telepathically drive our cars?  We think turn right and our car does what we think?

As the company prepares to release its robo-taxi in October, Musk emphasized Dojo as a key component in Tesla’s AI strategy.

Dojo is Tesla’s custom-built supercomputer that trains the Full Self-Driving (FSD) neural networks that will play a vital cerebral role in Tesla’s mission to achieve fully autonomous vehicles when it launches robotaxis.  Now maybe down the road we’ll have telepathic drivers, robodrivers.  And when parked become robopeople?

Currently, FSD is in about 2 million Tesla cars but still needs unfortunately a sometimes-accident-prone human driver. Tesla wants to change that with Dojo. Unlike other companies using sensors like lidar and radar, Tesla relies only on cameras to gather visual data.

This data is then processed by neural networks, mimicking human perception for driving decisions and who knows, maybe someday will be implanted in our brains.  Musk seems driven to replace erring humanity with flawless technology.

Of Mice and Men

No, not a John Steinbeck novella, but a real happening, super computers mimicking human brain functions.  While the supercomputer processes video data to identify and classify objects, now a breakthrough study suggests magnetic fields could manipulate our brains. 

Scientists just did a double take after what they did to mice. In a series of tests, scientists were able to control a mouse’s feeding, sociability, and parental behavior by manipulating certain regions of the lateral hypothalamus.

So, could we be next?  Could our behavior be managed by scientists controlling what we do?

This is said to be the world’s first technology to freely control specific brain regions using magnetic fields.  This is worrisome to me personally as some say I have a magnetic personality so those fields might have field day controlling me.

While Musk has a loyal legion of admirers, he has some adamant detractors. 

One is former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich who recently posted that Musk disseminated a faked version of Kamala Harris’s first campaign video with an altered voice track sounding like Harris and saying she doesn’t “know the first thing about running the country” and is the “ultimate diversity hire.” Musk tagged the video “amazing,” which might explain why it got over 135 million views.

Reich advocates that regulators around the world must stand up to the rise in hate speech and disinformation on X and put Musk out of business.

While I like most of Reich’s writings, I don’t go along with this as I respect Musk’s brain and once wrote an outline for a TV series titled Xtra Terresla with a character based on Musk in a starring role, building self-driving electric cars in the heart of oil and gas country Texas where cowboys want to string him up.

Still, I’m going to keep my brain clear of implants and generate publicity the good old-fashioned way by texting or emailing pitches to media and occasionally making a phone call. 

That is, if I can still remember what a phone call is. Tom Madden is an author known by some as the SPIN MAN, the title of the first of his six books, with his latest Planetary Lifeguard giving his spin on coping with climate change. He is also CEO of TransMedia Group, a public relations firm headquartered on the Florida coast where he lives adventurously in hurricane alley with his Brazilian wife Rita.  When he’s not spinning, he’s writing a weekly blog at MaddenMischief.com.