(LifeSiteNews) – Speaking at Y Combinator’s AI Startup School, Elon Musk described Neuralink not only as a tool for restoring lost function in disabled patients, but as a path to dramatically augment human cognition.

In conversation with Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, Musk said the company’s brain-computer interface has enabled five tetraplegic individuals to operate phones and computers using neural signals alone. Tetraplegic persons suffer from paralysis of all four limbs and the torso. The next stage, Musk said, will focus on direct visual implants.

“In the next 6 to 12 months” Neuralink plans to begin procedures that “write directly to the visual cortex,” potentially restoring basic sight even to the completely blind, he remarked.

Early results are expected to be low-resolution, he added, but future versions may offer access to full-spectrum and multi-spectral vision: “You could see in infrared, ultraviolet, radar — like a superpower situation.”

Framing human activity in computational terms, Musk presented the implants as a solution to the “input-output bandwidth constraints” of the human brain, which he said limits cognitive activity to the equivalent of “less than one bit of information per second.”

A brain-machine interface, he also argued, could increase this dramatically — initially to restore function, but ultimately to extend it.

“At some point,” Musk added, “the cybernetic implants wouldn’t simply be correcting things that went wrong but augmenting human capabilities dramatically — augmenting intelligence and senses and bandwidth dramatically.”

READ: Elon Musk’s controversial Neuralink completes first-ever chip implantation in human brain

Musk further emphasized that digital superintelligence would precede these developments. He therefore predicted a future in which biological intelligence makes up less than 1% of all cognition on Earth. Even in a world where human IQ is enhanced to 1,000, he said, digital systems would exceed it by a factor of one billion.

“We’re the biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” Musk said, returning to an analogy he has used before.

A bootloader is a piece of software that allows a computer to start in the first place, suggesting that human intelligence is only a stepping stone to what is to succeed it.

AGI will come first, but there are many levels of AGI. As @waitbutwhy’s charts suggest, we are at the very beginning of intelligence.

Humans are the biological bootloader for digital superintelligence and we may serve as a backup plan for intelligence, given that humans are far…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 26, 2024

Asked what young engineers should focus on, Musk reiterated a familiar priority: “Focus on super-truthful AI. That’s the most important thing for AI safety.”

Musk also invited attendees to consider joining X AI, his startup aiming to develop “the maximally truth-seeking AI.”

Musk’s comments follow his recent announcement that Neuralink has completed its first human implantation. They also come amid previous scrutiny over the company’s animal testing practices and broader concerns about the social and ethical consequences of neural augmentation.