If he treated his workers better and didn't go nuts occasionally, Elon Musk would be the greatest visionary alive right now. That's my take! Huge thanks to Wired for this insane article (it's a must read):: ELON MUSK DOESN’T think his newest endeavor, revealed Tuesday night after two years of relative secrecy, will end all human suffering. Just a lot of it. Eventually. At a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences, hastily announced via Twitter and beginning a half hour late, Musk presented the first product from his company Neuralink. It’s a tiny computer chip attached to ultrafine, electrode-studded wires, stitched into living brains by a clever robot. And depending on which part of the two-hour presentation you caught, it’s either a state-of-the-art tool for understanding the brain, a clinical advance for people with neurological disorders, or the next step in human evolution.

The chip is custom-built to receive and process the electrical action potentials—“spikes”—that signal activity in the interconnected neurons that make up the brain. The wires embed into brain tissue and receive those spikes. And the robotic sewing machine places those wires with enviable precision, a “neural lace” straight out of science fiction that dodges the delicate blood vessels spreading across the brain’s surface like ivy.

If Neuralink’s technologies work as Musk and his team intend, they’ll be able to pick up signals from across a person’s brain—first from the motor cortex that controls movement but eventually throughout your think-meat—and turn them into machine-readable code that a computer can understand. It might use them to control a computer or a prosthesis, to someday even feed information back to help the blind see, or to create entire virtual Matrixes inside your mind. “All this will occur I think quite slowly,” Musk said from the stage. “It’s not as if Neuralink will suddenly have this incredible neural lace and take over people’s brains. It will take a long time.” But after tests, and FDA approval, and more advances, this tech could be the thing that lets people commune with the ultrasmart artificial intelligences Musk is convinced are on the way. “Even in a benign AI scenario we will be left behind,” he said. “With a high-bandwidth brain-machine interface, we can actually go along for the ride. We can have the option of merging with AI.”

This is all pretty on-brand for Musk. As the guy who runs the electric-car company Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX, Musk has gotten very good at—in trouble, even, for—taking impressive technological achievements and, well, maybe not hyping them, but let’s say skipping all the way to the end of their speculative narrative arcs. It’s not enough to have superslick electric cars; no, they’re also going to drive themselves. That rocket isn’t just going to ferry cargo to a space station; no, it’s going to take people to Mars. How exciting!

Since The Wall Street Journal revealed Neuralink’s existence two years ago, the tech and neuroscience worlds have buzzed about what Musk’s team of brain-machine interface experts was up to. Other companies, including Kernel and Facebook, announced they, too, were working on the technology, which has so far been used only in research and rare clinical settings. Darpa, the US government’s advanced-science division, has been funding brain-computer interface work since the 1970s, and the agency has been part of the government-wide Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (yes, the acronym is also “Brain”) since 2013.

So it’s hard to know exactly how to calibrate Musk’s claims for a device that he plans to eventually stick into healthy people’s brains. “We hope to have this aspirationally in a human patient by the end of next year,” Musk said. The first volunteers, he hopes, will be people with quadriplegia, willing to have four chips implanted, three in the motor cortex of the brain (roughly running from above the ear to the top of the head) and on providing closed-loop feedback to the somatosensory cortex. That’s even though, according to an article distributed at the presentation—and not peer-reviewed—the Neuralink technology is so far only in the heads of 19 rats, and even then with only 87 percent of the electrodes successfully inserted. The FDA is going to want more than that before it approves human use.