My AirPods Pro look pretty futuristic, but if Tesla CEO Elon Musk has his way, the future of listening to music won't even have earbuds. Yes, the tech titan's claiming that his implant-based listening device will just send a signal directly to your brain.
And no, as wild as that sounds, he didn't say this while enjoying a special treat on Joe Rogan's podcast. Well, we don't know about the first part of that possibility, as Musk tweeted out the thought about his internally streamed music, answering a question online.
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The conversation began with Musk tweeting that he was looking for bright minds who have "solved hard problems with phones / wearables (sealing, signal processing, inductive charging, power mgmt, etc)." Then, he answered Twitter user @a_howard8 (who appears to be a University of North Carolina Asheville computer science student), who asked "If we implement neuralink - can we listen to music directly from our chips? Great feature," with a simple "Yes."
Neuralink, which Musk founded in 2016, says it's "developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers," and implantable computers have long been one of its fascinations. Musk has gone so far as to say Neuralink's implants will "merge" humans with AI.
As for when this will all happen? In July 16, 2019, a Neuralink Launch Event marked 2020 as the year when the company will have its first in-human clinical study. There are no signs of any forward momentum on this taking place. But the year is only half over (though we'd not be surprised if restrictions related to COVID-19 pushed this back to 2021).
Musk tweeted that we should expect a Neuralink update on August 28. You can watch the entire original Neuralink presentation below:
For now, until Neuralink passes all the regulations and testing needed, I'm more than OK with my AirPods Pro.
