A U.S. Military DARPA program is putting $65 million into the creation of an implantable device that will provide data-transfer between human brains and the digital world. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the emerging technology organization under the U.S. Department of Defense, announced Monday that five research institutions and one private corporation will be recipients of the brain-to-computer research grants. The program seeks to heighten hearing, sight and other sensory perception as well as creating a digital brain implant to relay neuron transmissions directly to digital devices. The recipients of the $65 million Materials for Transduction (MATRIX) program grants are: Brown University; Columbia University; University of California, Berkeley; Fondation Voir et Entendre (The Seeing and Hearing Foundation); John B. Pierce Laboratory and San Jose, California-based Paradromics, Inc. CEO Matt Angle's Paradromics Inc. is the mind-to-machine "Broadband for the brain" research company set to rake in as much as $18 million from the contract. He tells MIT Technology Review that the funding comes with a "moonshot" list of requirements, including the implant's size being smaller than a nickel and the mandatory ability to send signal back into the brain.
Connecting the human brain to computers is quickly becoming one of the hottest ideas in Silicon Valley, with Tesla's Elon Musk and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg among the many top tech entrepreneurs leading the charge. In March, Musk launched Neuralink, a medical research company that creates brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Musk has previously expressed the importance of upgrading human cognition in order to ensure people are not made obsolete by artificial intelligence. BCIs would initially be used for medical research, with the ultimate goal being to blur the lines between people and artificial intelligence. Read: Will Robots Take Your Job? Elon Musk Thinks We Have 30 Years Until AI Is Better Than Us At Everything Neuralink has been registered as a medical research company, and Musk said they will produce a product to help people with severe brain injuries within four years, the Washington Post reports.