Mark Zuckerberg vs Elon Musk: Meta boss thinks ‘normal people’ wouldn’t want Neuralink brain implants

Elon Musk has promoted research on brain chips using his company neurolink, still with uncertain results. The tycoon added a new doubt around his company: that of Mark Zuckerberg, that he believes “normal people” wouldn’t want his brain chips.

The statements were given on the Joe Rogan podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, and were cited by Business Insider.

Zuckerberg also revealed that Meta is investigating neural interface technology as part of its push into the metaverse, so his words could be seen as a competitor attack on Musk.

“Some people, like Elon with Neuralink and those companies, are taking this too far. I mean, maybe it’ll be ready in a couple of decades,” Zuckerberg said.

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company, has worked with monkeys in its experiments, but has not yet tested on humans. This, unlike its rival Synchron, which announced human trials last July.

“I think normal people in the next 10 to 15 years probably won’t want to have something installed in their brain for fun,” Meta’s boss joked. “You want the mature version of that technology, not the one where it’s going to get a lot better next year and you need to update your brain implant every year.”

Research by Meta, a Mark Zuckerberg company, to work with brain signals

According to Zuckerberg, Meta is focusing on technology that can receive signals from the brain, but send information back.

“The super hard part,” says Zuckerberg, “will be to have a computer that provides information directly to your brain, and that is not something we are working on,” he acknowledged.

Zuck’s company wants to use wearable devices to capture brain signals that he says could be detected in other parts of the body.

“The pathway that we have is based on the fact that we have all these extra motor neurons in our body. It turns out that you can have a device on your wrist that basically your brain can communicate with your hand, tell your hand to move in a pattern that it’s not used to and then the (Meta) bracelet can pick up those signals and translate them.”

For now, it is unknown when Zuckerberg’s technology would be available. In that it coincides with Elon Musk’s timetable.

Elon Musk’s disdain for Zuckerberg’s technology

Last January, Elon Musk had disdained the technology promoted by Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview with The Babylon Bee portal, quoted by La Vanguardia.

“Of course you can put a television on your nose (…) I’m not sure that makes you feel in the metaverse,” said the South African.

Musk continued in his statements: “(People don’t want to) strap a fucking screen to their face all day (…) to never leave this digital world. It gets awkward having this thing strapped to your head all the time.”

For the richest man in the world, the metaverse “just sounds like a buzzword. I don’t want to sound like an old moron who dismisses the Internet like in 1995, saying it’s not going to amount to anything, there’s some danger, but I can’t currently see a convincing metaverse.”