Billionaire Elon Musk recently got weirded out after playing Cyberpunk 2077 due to how the game depicts human augmentation. This hits quite close to home for him, Musk said recently in an interview, because while Cyberpunk 2077 is fiction, he’s working on similar technology in real life with his Neuralink company. Musk is developing brain-machine-interface technology to help people restore functionality after a brain or spinal cord injury. But further into the future? Musk said he believes Cyberpunk 2077’s depiction of the future might happen.
“I was playing Cyberpunk, the game, and I was like uhhh this is pretty close to home here,” he said on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “Like, oh man. Like, is this where it leads? It might lead there eventually. I’m just saying for now, it’s going to help people who really need it.”
Musk said we won’t wake up one day and everyone will have a chip in their bodies. It will be very gradual process. “You’ll see it coming,” Musk said.
This isn’t the first time that Musk has mentioned Cyberpunk 2077. He previously tweeted about the game and how it can be played on the latest model of his Tesla car, and this tweet led to a big surge in share value for CD Projekt Red.
Nuralink is designing what it claims to be the world’s first neural implant that allows you to control a device with your mind. Musk’s team has already put a chip inside a monkey’s skull to try to get it to play video games with its mind. Humans could be next, and Musk isn’t alone in believing such technology could prove to be one of the next steps that humans take as it relates to technology-driven evolution.
Another tech billionaire, Valve founder Gabe Newell, shared his thoughts on the matter in an interview earlier this year.
“We’re working on an open source project so that everybody can have high-resolution [brain signal] read technologies built into headsets, in a bunch of different modalities,” Newell told TVNZ in January.
In the context of video games, Newell said such technology could be used to determine if a player is excited, sad, bored, or surprised and then have the game in question adapt as a result. Newell also said he predicts a future where the real world will seem too boring and dull compared to what’s possible with brain-machine-interface systems.
“The real world will seem flat, colourless, blurry compared to the experiences you’ll be able to create in people’s brains,” he said.
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