The founder of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk, has shared new details about another one of his projects, a brain-computer interface called Neuralink, confirming on Twitter that at some point in the future, it will allow people to "listen" to music without actually using their ears.
The feature was announced by Musk while promoting his yet-to-be-released product's other capabilities, such as its potential ability to fix brain/spine injuries and work in conjunction with artificial intelligence.
At the same time, the tech entrepreneur said that the company still needs to fix a multitude of "hard problems", such as signal processing, sealing, and inductive charging, urging professionals in the field to join Neuralink's team.
Musk's promotion of Neuralink's features didn't pass by netizens unnoticed, who have recently been bombarded with a plethora of conspiracy theories, especially related to the coronavirus pandemic and how it could for some reason possibly be used by billionaire Bill Gates to "chip" everyone on the planet under the guise of administering a vaccine against the disease, which has already claimed the lives of over 600,000 people. Some social media users noted that chips inside people's heads sounds like the typical start of a "dystopian future movie" that doesn't have a happy ending.
Others, however, dismissed such grim views of the future, arguing that great innovations and inventions have always met with much distrust.
Many twitterians were fixed on the idea of music being directly transmitted to the brain, discussing its possible implications – from the ability to listen to it as loud as one pleases without consequences, to the possibility of transmitting emotions along with the sound.
Musk's idea also raised some tough questions among netizens…
… as well as prompted light-hearted puns.
Around two weeks ago, the Tesla founder teased with more information about Neuralink's capabilities, confirming that the technology could potentially cure people of addiction and depression by altering the brain's chemistry with signals.