Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain control company schedules August 28 update

The Tesla co-founder’s other, other company remains shrouded in mystery but hopefully all will be revealed later this month.

Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk is expected to finally explain what his other company has been up to at an event later this month.

Musk co-founded Neuralink in 2016 with the intention of building “interfaces” that allow people to control computers using their brain.

It might sound like some bizarre piece of science fiction but electric cars and space travel once did too.

RELATED: Musk’s threat to Depp over affair rumour

Elon Musk at a Tesla event in January. Picture: STR/AFP

Musk celebrates the successful launch of SpaceX’s first manned spaceflight in May. Picture: Joe Raedle/Getty Images/AFP

RELATED: Mystery if Elon Musk’s $2.1 billion bonus

Around a year ago the company detailed plans to use surgical robots to implant ultrathin wiring into a person’s brain, which connects to an external processor (though the plan is eventually to make it wireless).

The company revealed last year that it has tested the technology in partnership with the University of California, Davis, achieving some success on mice and apes.

RELATED: Word Elon Musk is not allowed to use

The packaged sensor device implanted in a rat.

Neuralink threads implanted in a rat's brain.

RELATED: Tesla’s ‘s3xy’ new red shorts

The company planned to start testing on its first humans this year, and it’s a faint possibility Musk might be announcing the result or beginning of said testing at a Neuralink event scheduled for August 28.

Neuralink is supposedly a defence against artificial intelligence getting out of control, a key focus of Musk’s interest in AI technology and bizarrely, how he first connected with musician and singer Grimes, the mother of the pair’s recently born child X Æ A-12.

Last month he tweeted the company’s mission statement: “if you can’t beat em, join em”.

RELATED: Grimes slams Musk over tweet

A packaged Neuralink sensor with a USB-C port for connection.

RELATED: Photo comes back to haunt Elon Musk

A little over a year ago a paper authored by Musk and Neuralink was published on bioRxiv, an open access, non-peer reviewed preprint repository for biological science.

“Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) hold promise for the restoration of sensory and motor function and the treatment of neurological disorders, but clinical BMIs have not yet been widely adopted, in part because modest channel counts have limited their potential,” the paper reads.

The paper describes a system with as many as 3072 electrodes per channel across 96 channels.