Limitless Podcast - Neuralink’s Plan To Merge AI With Humans Before It’s Too Lake

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

Is the future of humanity dependent on the groundbreaking potential of brain-machine interfaces?Explore Neuralink’s Telepathy and its success in restoring mobility for paralyzed patients with us. What about the ethical implications of granting access to our thoughts, Elon Musk's vision for enhancing human cognition in an AI-dominated future, and the possibilities of telepathic communication and augmented senses?As we outline Neuralink’s ambitious roadmap toward 2030, we invite you to reflect on the merging of technology and humanity.------💫 LIMITLESS | SUBSCRIBE & FOLLOWhttps://limitless.bankless.com/https://x.com/LimitlessFT------TIMESTAMPS0:00 Intro to Neuralink1:00 Real Medical Technology1:40 Human Liberation2:35 Civilizational Survival4:50 Singularity and Transhumanism6:40 Timelines8:00 A Connected Future------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/Josh_Kale------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

So this is a different type of episode, but you gotta stick with me because one of the most interesting frontiers that I have been personally obsessed with is brain computer interfaces, especially Neurrelink, which is what I believe to be the last personal device that will ever need to make. As I went down this rabbit hole, I was fascinated at how awe-inspiring that technology is, but also it's inevitability. This technology is here today, and it's becoming sci-fi level great incredibly quickly, so what you're about to listen to is a short video essay on just that. It's most exciting to watch this visually, either through YouTube or you can even watch the video straight from your Spotify feed. Everything you need is at limitless.benglist.com or you can click the link in the top of this episode description. Thank you as always for the support and sharing these episodes with any friends who might be interested in this cool frontier crazy tech stuff. So with that said, let's get right into this mini episode on Neurrelink. Would you allow a developer you've never met to install software in your brain that gives total access to all of your thoughts, your memories, and everything that makes you, you,

the same way you install an update on your iPhone? The knee-jerk reaction is probably no. That's creepy. It's weird enough that my phone knows everything about me. The last thing I want is accompanied to see my literal thoughts and fears. But what if I made you a few promises? Like this chip can remember your dreams and memories and then play them back as if you were reliving them for the first time,

fully viscerally. It'll hijack your senses and you'll feel everything you felt as if you were right back there for the very first time. It can give you super sight that allows you to see night vision. or infrared rays. It can teach you the language overnight before you get on that plane to Japan. It could cure you of injuries, curing paralysis and blindness. It can remove your depression, fix hearing loss, remove that annoying tinnitus you have. It can stop your loved ones from suffering from Alzheimer's, dementia, and strokes. Oh, and you'll be able to communicate with others

totally telepathically. Suddenly, this sounds a little more compelling, doesn't it? And if you're thinking this is just like an episode of Black Mirror, you're right, but this technology is real. and just this week two more patients answered yes to that question. They received the chip that will eventually do all these amazing things, but for now, in these patients, it's doing just one job, and that's fixing people's paralysis. The company is called Neurrelink, and their first product is called telepathy.

And just last week, they embedded the telepathy chip into patients number eight and number nine. These are some of the first people in the world to benefit from this technology, and the results are pretty remarkable. We'll get into that, but first let's peel back the skull figuratively and see exactly how this thing works and why it matters. So there's two reasons Neurrelink is important, and they actually couldn't be more different.

The first is human liberation. If your spinal cord quits on you or you become paralyzed, telepathy can give you digital hands, and this isn't sci-fi. Patient number one is this guy named No one, who's already trash-talking friends in the popular video game called Civilization 6, just by thinking about it. And just recently, the Neurlink team gave the super cool demo

of their patients actually playing call of duty together using just their thoughts, walking around the 3D world, pointing their gun, than actually shooting enemies, and as a fellow Call of Duty player, seeing someone telepathically walking around Nooketown, it's pretty freaking cool. They also continue the demo with an example of how a person can telepathically connect to an optimist humanoid robot.

Picture you're disabled, but want to interact with the physical world? Well, with the chip, you can telepathically embody a humanoid robot and walk and talk and one day even feel the sensory inputs that the robot also feels. They gave an early demo of this playing rock paper scissors, and the optimist hand flipping off the audience, which, you know, nice touch. The second reason Erlink is important is for civilizational survival. Elon's gamble is that when AI superintelligence levels up to God mode,

we'll need a bandwidth upgrade to stay co-pilots and not turn into passengers. So if artificial general intelligence keeps compounding, human decision-making bandwidth becomes the bottleneck that turns us from stewards of the future into mere spectators. Elon frames the link as a defensive and democratizing upgrade, a direct cortical interface that scales our input output rate. So to explain that simply, think of your body as a computer for a second. Over the course of the day, how many operations per second on average can you do?

It's pretty low. You can say a couple of words, type a few things into your phone, walk a step or two, and that's really it. We're pretty low bandwidth. Like, think about it. You're using your two thumbs on a slide of glass that way you call a smartphone to communicate incredibly complex thoughts with this device. There's a ton of compression of your big ideas, reduced down to just a few keystrokes.

And the same is true about communication. As I'm talking to you, I'm having this whole rich idea. of how I want to describe this technology. That idea then has to be compressed into words, then spoken to you, the listener. I make my vocal chords vibrate, those vibrations resonate against your eardrums, where you interpret the words I'm saying,

and build your own model of what you believe my message means. Like right now, I'm imagining this world in which I'm telepathically connecting to an optimist robot on Mars and walking around the planet as if it was my real body. The visual I have is almost certainly drastically different than yours, but if we had a neuralink, well, you could just see it exactly how I see it. So, to tie back to the civilizational survival thing, we're looking to go from sluggish thumbs per second to megabits

and then hopefully gigabits per second of neural data, letting us collaborate with superintelligent systems instead of being outmaneuvered by them. In this view, the implant is less a medical device and more a civil engineering project for the species, us. It's a neural on-ramp that allows every individual brain to tap into the real-time computational power that a frontier model AI enjoys. By hard-wiring humans, into the loop,

The argument is we keep moral judgment, creativity, and lived experience inside the feedback cycle that guides the machines, preventing a narrow elite or the AI themselves from monopolizing the layers of economics, politics, or even kinetic forces like our military. So in short, boost the bandwidth, merge the perspectives, and humanity maintains a seat at the negotiation table instead of being placed on top of it. And yeah, this is effectively the point at which we merge ourselves with the singularity defined as a hypothetical point in time at which technology growth becomes completely alien to humans, uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseen consequences for the human civilization. Well, good news is NeurLink is trying to avoid just that. And in doing so, opens up the door to an ideal called transhumanism, which is a philosophical, intellectual movement that kind of advocates for using technology to enhance human capabilities

and improve the human condition as a whole. Remember earlier when I said NeurLink could cure blindness? It can do a lot more than that. Think of your eyeballs as a camera. And then think of all the amazing things that cameras are capable of doing today, it gets pretty wild. Blindsight could deliver high resolution vision that's equal to or better than perfect 2020 eyesight, but with even more fun features on top. Imagine built-in telephoto capability to zoom in and see things further out, or a macro ability, just like your iPhone, to see microscopic objects without any external tools. But it gets even cooler. It can let you perceive beyond normal human limits, like infrared for detecting heat in the dark, spotting warm objects in the night, or ultraviolet for

for hidden patterns, even radar, to see through fog and walls. And imagine augmented overlays, too, with real-time info like navigation directions projected right into your view, no need for glasses, just your eyeballs. And for those born blind, your brain would just adapt these new signals, creating vision from scratch. Now, that's for the advanced versions in the future, but for the initial versions, well, it still works. It won't be like your natural crystal clear eyesight at first.

It'll be basic and low resolution, kind of like pixelated graphics from an old video game on Atari or early Nintendo. you'll perceive the world in blocky images, maybe gray scale or with simple colors, spotting large objects, basic outlines, movement. Think navigating a room, dodging obstacles, are noticing a door or a person nearby, but not being able to make out the specific details just yet. But it gets really good, really fast, and they've laid out a pretty cool timeline from when we can expect these things to work.

So as of this month, which is July 2025, Neurrelink has nine human implants, patient one through patient nine, with patient eight and nine done in one day, which is a first. bandwidth is about 9.5 bits per second with the team aiming for 40 by end of year, so about a 5x, at which they will plan to have the chip implanted in 30 patients as well as roll out their blind sight and the robot arm controller project, they call convoy. From 2027 to 29, they plan to increase the throughput of the chip to 25,000 channels, which basically means a full HD neural feed to the chip. Also during this window, they want to release a pair link with spinal cord stim to reanimate your limbs. You can think of it like a digital bridge on steroids in the case

that you've actually damaged your spinal cord. Then by 2030, things start to get pretty weird. We get elective cognitive co-processor for memory search and language translation, which means real-time translate and searching through your past memories, whether you are excited to do that or not. This comes with always-on-cloud AI,

creating a true symbiosis for the first time between human and AI. You are always connected all the time. As well as creating a chip mesh network, This is also all we can expect to see what NeuroLink is calling the telepathy party mode. So humanity now is a USBC port poking through the blood-brain barrier. Today, it's letting nine paralyzed pioneers swipe, click, and maybe soon see again. Tomorrow, it can be Mgrotan straight into our visual stream.

So ask yourself, when the install wizard pops up and you have to click the terms of service. With the risk-adjusted return on investment of civilizational survival, do you click, accept? because whether we're ready or not, the age of downloadable upgrades for wetware has officially booted. Our next grand task isn't actually inventing the tech, it's just deciding, together, what it means to stay human while we use it. Thank you so much for watching.