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In the 1970s, when Elon Musk was just a child, actor Lee Majors portrayed The Six Million Dollar Man, an injured test pilot born again with enhanced abilities thanks to the help of bionic implants. The tech messiah now wants to create the “sixty-thousand-dollar man” in real life by having engineers at his Tesla and Neuralink companies work together to design prosthetic limbs for amputees.
“By combining a Neuralink implant and a robotic arm or leg for someone that has their arm or leg—or all arms or legs—amputated, we believe we can give basically a cyborg body that is incredibly capable,” he told Tesla investors on Wednesday.
“I think it would be incredible to potentially help millions of people around the world, and give them an arm or leg that is as good, maybe long term better than, a biological one.”
However, the two companies are still some distance from demonstrating they can accomplish anything of the kind.
Tesla only began to conceive a humanoid robot in 2021 and is taking its first steps in developing purpose-built actuators to enable rudimentary limb movement for such a machine.
Neuralink meanwhile, convinced the Food and Drug Administration in May to approve a first human clinical study for its brain-machine interface (BMI) chip, but it has not demonstrated this can actually be of any real use.
We are excited to share that we have received the FDA’s approval to launch our first-in-human clinical study!
This is the result of incredible work by the Neuralink team in close collaboration with the FDA and represents an important first step that will one day allow our…
— Neuralink (@neuralink) May 25, 2023
Yet Musk is known for his boundless confidence and sheer optimism.
Perhaps his true gift is an ability to gather together some of the best minds working on the most challenging problems of the day like OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever and recruit them for his cause.
On Wednesday he explained how he convinced Apple’s then-director of product design, Charles Kuehmann, to work for him, because he could offer the engineer the chance to work at both Tesla and SpaceX.
Musk is, however, also a showman that borrows ideas from science fiction and gives products names that reference pop culture to make them instantly relatable.
His “Optimus” humanoid robot was taken from Hasbro’s Transformers toy line, while the “Plaid” that designates a certain performance version of the Tesla Model S and X is borrowed from Mel Brook’s 1987 Star Wars parody Spaceballs.
Musk has a habit of promising the moon
The Tesla CEO also has a penchant for making outlandish promises, prompting allegations some claims may be fraudulent.
In 2015, he likened the construction of his fabled hyperloop tunnel—with aimed to transport people from New York City to Washington DC in 29 minutes—to something essentially akin to an air hockey table.
“I swear it’s not that hard,” he told CNN, laughing at the possibility it could actually be more complex than he might conceive.
Nearly eight years later, the best his Boring Company has managed, after claiming it would finally test the technology in 2022, is a Twitter post of something that resembles nothing like a pod running on air skies.
Before debuting an initial working prototype of his Optimus droid, he predicted his army of robot butlers would one day usher in an “age of abundance” where humans would no longer have to chase after scarce goods and resources.
Upon unveiling last September, three men needed to gingerly push the machine onto the stage.
Confronted about his more wildly unrealistic predictions, Musk’s been known to sheepishly shrugs his shoulders and say the public shouldn’t have believed them so easily.
“I don’t want to blow your mind, but I’m not always right,” he told TED Talk’s Chris Anderson last April.
Where his latest cyborg idea ranks on this scale of ideas is yet to be determined.
