Entrepreneur, business magnate, and billionaire Elon Musk believes Neuralink's sophisticated brain-machine interfaces and not Mark Zuckerberg's VR-driven metaverse could soon put humans fully into virtual reality. In an interview with Babylon Tree, Neuralink co-founder Musk took a dig at Zuckerberg and other proponents of virtual reality and metaverse. The billionaire revealed his lack of support for the metaverse and Web 3, two trends that are believed to have a significant impact on the tech world.
For Time Magazine's 2021 person of the year, his neurotechnology company, Neuralink, is more capable of providing a better environment for people to fully immerse in virtual reality. Musk noted that a sophisticated Neuralink could put you fully into virtual reality in the long term.
Neuralink is focused on developing brain implants in humans to help restore and improve physical capabilities with the help of computers. In April 2021, Musk shared that later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in the brain to Neuralinks in motor sensory neuron clusters, enabling for example, paraplegics to walk again. Musk provided an update on Neuralink's plans for 2022 earlier this month. Neuralink's working well in monkeys, and we're doing just a lot of testing and just confirming that it's safe and reliable and the Neuralink device can be removed safely, he shared during a live-streamed interview at The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council Summit.
He said we hope to have this in our first humans, which will be people with severe spinal cord injuries like tetraplegics, quadriplegics next year, pending FDA approval. The CEO stated in a tweet that Progress will accelerate when we have devices in humans hard to have nuanced conversations with monkeys next year, because of the fact that the company has a 2022 timeline. During the discussion about tech trends, especially around Virtual Reality VR and Metaverse, Musk stated that he does not envision a future where people would trade the physical world for virtual reality.
According to his personal experience, the Tesla CEO told the Babylon Bee that VR headsets are more likely to cause motion sickness, especially when playing video games.
It appears that Musk's indifference toward the metaverse is centered on the disappointing consumer experience and lack of compelling usage. I m not sure that makes you in the metaverse, he told the satire site.
I don't see someone strapping a frigging screen to their face all day and not wanting to leave. That doesn't seem to be the case. He acknowledged that he might be too old to understand these latest technologies, but he said he is unable to see a compelling metaverse situation.