Elon Musk is working on a program to wirelessly connect human brains and computers. Potential purposes include boosting brains with artificial intelligence and tackling neurodegenerative conditions.

Musk plans to detail his new company, Neuralink, some time next week. What’s already known is that it will be based around neural lace, the concept of implanting electrodes in the brain and wirelessly connecting them to computers. He says he’ll struggle to find the time for the project but that it has too much potential to ignore.

There’s no real indication that at the moment the technology goes beyond concepts and from some of the descriptions of the possible uses, it doesn’t appear society currently understands enough about the brain’s working to realistically expect practical implementations any time soon.

However, Neuralink will reportedly start by focusing on medical uses, treating conditions such as Parkinson’s where certain nerve cells have died. The electrodes could conceivably be used to build shortcuts and reroute pathways in the same way as brains can often adapt themselves to deal with minor damage.

In the longer term, Musk is looking at the idea of transferring data to and from the brain, for example to “back up” knowledge or quickly get new information in the brain without having to go through the learning process. He’s even talked about trying to combine the brain’s abilities to think and reason (which often involves the equivalent of parallel processing) with the power of computers.

To say the least, the whole project has some major ethical, medical and technological barriers to overcome, but Musk has certainly shown a willingness to put his considerable fortune into ridiculously ambitious products. And while I don’t fancy my brain being DDOsed, perhaps my semi-serious desire for a USB socket at the back of my skull to make a daily back-up isn’t quite as ludicrous as I’d assumed.