Is Google the Fate of Neuralink?

Will Google Acquire Elon Musk's BCI Startup, Neuralink?

With Google recently helping to fund one of the most promising potential BCI (brain computer interface) companies, it's easy to speculate how Alphabet or Microsoft might end up acquiring it.

Here's what we know: Neuralink has raised $205 million from investors including Google Ventures, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. 

OpenAI has a partnership with Microsoft and will likely be acquired by them one day. Neuralink has now raised $363 million, so Google venture might have been a significant part of that.

Neuralink may or may not become a legit BCI company. It's likely too soon to call it a first mover in BCI. Neuralink engages in the development of high-bandwidth brain-machine interfaces. It was famously started with Elon Musk's involvement.

You can see their website here. Their monkey playing games demo was not exactly awe inspiring, but in 2021 it's early in this race to BCI as the next human interface after mobile phones.

Founded in 2016, Neuralink is trying to develop high-bandwidth brain implants that can communicate with phones and computers. As Elon attacks Apple's app store it's clear which side he is on.

Neurolink claims to be creating the future of brain interfaces: building devices now that will help people with paralysis and inventing new technologies that will expand our abilities, our community, and our world. That sounds a lot like a play on the future of the metaverse and how IoT develops in the 2030s.

Sam Altman is extending his grip on the future with this investment move, he's already very involved in Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI that works actively with Microsoft-acquired GitHub. Imagine how valuable the data would be from BCI, especially if it has a chance of going mainstream in a non-invasive way.

Right now I'd say there's a 20% chance Alphabet will acquire Neuralink and a 15% chance Microsoft would acquire it one day in the future. In the long-term, China is likely to hit BCI R&D a lot harder since it's more up their alley, getting into the heads of consumers, quite literally. Still it's interesting to speculate what happens in some of the last gasps of Silicon Valley royalty and their venture capital games.

The series C round, announced in a blogpost Thursday, was led by Dubai-based Vy Capital.

• Neuralink has spent the last four years building the first high channel count brain machine interface intended for therapeutic use in patients.

• The company is targeting its first devices at quadriplegics — who are unable to interact with many of today’s devices — and it is working toward human trials. Microsoft would be very fond of this "AI for Good" narrative.

•  The funds from the round will be used to take Neuralink’s first product to market and accelerate the research and development of future products.

• The company said its first product, known as the N1 Link, will be “completely invisible” once implanted and transmit data via a wireless connection.

As BigTech gets more into healthcare, something like Neuralink could be an interesting feather in their cap and in stealth mode, Apple is likely to already be working on this kind of technology as the wearables leader of the world.

As Snapchat gains ad revenue momentum they, as well as ByteDance, the quickly rising consumer app giant, would be interested in such a technology for possible intersections with the future of Ed Tech and gaming which they could dominate soon.

Musk, who is CEO of Neuralink as well as Tesla and SpaceX, has previously described Neuralink as a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires that go into your brain. I'm not sure many people would love to have data about their skulls. Fitbit was acquired by Google not too long ago.

Still, Neuralink basically have a chip that will let quadriplegic people control digital devices with their minds. It definitely has a small start on the way to a consumer ready brain-computer interface (BCI). Vy Capital have about 25 related employees, according to their LinkedIn. They were founded in 2013, and invested in Zomato and Reddit, among others.

AI Leads to BCIs

So what's the connection between artificial intelligence and the adoption of BCIs in the 2030s? Neuralink said Thursday that its mission is to “develop brain-machine interfaces that treat various brain related ailments, with the eventual goal of creating a whole brain interface capable of more closely connecting biological and artificial intelligence.

BCIs are the moon-shot of choice for that one device to replace mobile phones sometime in the next 20 years. At the Last Futurist we think BCIs are more promising than VR related immersion. IoT means it's more real world based with the ability of all of these devices to do certain things and act as:

• Ear buds

• Smart speakers

• BCI type instantaneous connections

• Wearables

• AR/VR

• Mobile phones

BCIs at first will just be yet another device that adds convenience, speed and less friction in how we interact with a digitally transformed environment in a smart city. As AI becomes more the intermediary of everything, how we communicate with AI agents becomes more important. The era of thumbs and mobile notifications and intrusive emails is numbered, we just don't know by how many years yet.

Elon Musk believes we have to join with AI to be able to embrace it and survive the AI revolution. What will Beijing believe in a surveillance capitalism where monitoring people will be of the utmost importance with ever new tools to improve upon its Big Data optimization enforcement?

The Transhumanistic Playbook of the 21st Century

The IoT human stack will only improve in the 2020s to the point where we can envision a BCI that's progressively better, where we interact with AI agency more and people less. At times the pandemic almost feels engineered for such a world, where WFM and interacting with people in our community becomes more or less common.

A world where young people are more likely to not get married or have children than ever before. So what of those lost souls who grew up on mobile devices? Won't they want to be even more connected digitally?

The BCI is the ultimate play ground for the future AI that will be developed via quantum computing. Perfect for Alpha and GenZ that have been groomed for such a world by a powerful elite of BigTech corporations.

AI is only going to get smarter and Musk has previously said that Neuralink’s technology could one day allow humans to “go along for the ride.” But increasingly it doesn't just seem random but as some kind of planned event for humanity.

What will China and the Billionaires want us to do? What of human rights and freedoms in such a world dominated by devices and AI instead of people and human error?

People from the 20th century would already consider us cyborgs to some extent if you think about it. People are in effect already “cyborgs” because they have a tertiary “digital layer” thanks to phones, computers and applications, he said during a Clubhouse discussion in February.

The 21st century is like a digital experiment, even as we become more alienated from our physical environments due to climate change. What role will Neuralink play?

Neuralink claims its a biotech company on its LinkedIn website and has over 185 people related to the company. Silicon Valley is still spinning its dream machine, and funding does not seem to be a problem to scale the somewhat dystopian visions. Will we enjoy being human augmented by AI?

“With a direct neural interface, we can improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude,” said Musk. “I’d say probably at least 1,000, or maybe 10,000, or more.” Musk is the salesman of our times and a lot of his rhetoric doesn't seem particularly factual.

Neuralink has spent the last four years building the first high channel count brain machine interface intended for therapeutic use in patients. This means it can leverage itself as Health Tech to build a platform. That's exactly what Alphabet would prefer, as it's incapable of innovating in-house but has loads of cash to burn on such "good" uses for technology.

The BCI is a bit Black Mirror in the sense that a lot can go wrong. Neuralink is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers. While it will be nice to mind-control our own UFOs when the time comes, what will remain of humanity after such a point is reached?

Since the internet was created just 25 years ago, we've lost a part of our humanity already. Won't a BCI just speed up the process? Google has failed with phones and hardware but if it could create an AI platform so close to our brain, it's Ad-empire could have valuable data bypassing many of our defenses or even our conscious awareness. China has tried to do this with facial recognition and ByteDance must have succeeded in cracking the code to some extent.

When recommendation engines have biometric feedback loops they can adapt in real time. A BCI would enable many things like that as well. Real time predicative analytics with facial recognition are possible. All behaviors could essentially be predictive, anticipated and catered to.

Elon Musk would be happy to be uploaded into a mother ship.  Musk claims that Neuralink could allow humans to send concepts to one another using telepathy and exist in a “saved state” after they die that could then be put into a robot or another human. At least it does sound better than text messaging. Imagine infants being born into a matrix with BCIs attached at just a few weeks old. It could be the cure for technological loneliness itself. Sounds like a last future.