While it's true that the ultimate goal of the company is for people like Elon Musk to upgrade their brains it's also meant to lower the barrier of entry to producing these sorts of products so they'll eventually become affordable to the masses. Tesla started by making super high end luxury cars to establish a supply chain that could produce electric cars with the idea that eventually it would be optimized to a consumer vehicle, which is what we're seeing with the Model 3.
Tim Urban has a great illustration of this strategy
Also all of the initial R&D for Neuralink has focused on medical use cases like neuroprosthetics. Obviously since it's ridiculously expensive it's probably still going to go to rich people who have a medical use case. But Elon has been very upfront about the long term goals of the project and the steps he thinks are necessary to get there, and Elon has a long history of being very upfront about these sorts of things.
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Yeah that's all fine for him to talk about, but it's nothing special to Tesla or Musk, it's basically just an illustration of how new technology works in general: it starts expensive and only-for-the-rich and eventually becomes more affordable. I think this model has major problems: it contributes to the continuous upward consolidation of wealth by constantly giving the already-wealthy a head start with new tech, and it typically takes a really long time for tech to become truly universally affordable, i.e. cheap enough for developing markets to take advantage. These problems become exacerbated with a revolutionary technology that starts off very resource intensive and therefore especially expensive, like a lot of the hypothesized transhumanist ideas likely would be, and when they can have such currently unimaginable effects, e.g. kinda-immortality.
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While it's true that the ultimate goal of the company is for people like Elon Musk to upgrade their brains it's also meant to lower the barrier of entry to producing these sorts of products so they'll eventually become affordable to the masses. Tesla started by making super high end luxury cars to establish a supply chain that could produce electric cars with the idea that eventually it would be optimized to a consumer vehicle, which is what we're seeing with the Model 3.
Tim Urban has a great illustration of this strategy
Also all of the initial R&D for Neuralink has focused on medical use cases like neuroprosthetics. Obviously since it's ridiculously expensive it's probably still going to go to rich people who have a medical use case. But Elon has been very upfront about the long term goals of the project and the steps he thinks are necessary to get there, and Elon has a long history of being very upfront about these sorts of things.
Yeah that's all fine for him to talk about, but it's nothing special to Tesla or Musk, it's basically just an illustration of how new technology works in general: it starts expensive and only-for-the-rich and eventually becomes more affordable. I think this model has major problems: it contributes to the continuous upward consolidation of wealth by constantly giving the already-wealthy a head start with new tech, and it typically takes a really long time for tech to become truly universally affordable, i.e. cheap enough for developing markets to take advantage. These problems become exacerbated with a revolutionary technology that starts off very resource intensive and therefore especially expensive, like a lot of the hypothesized transhumanist ideas likely would be, and when they can have such currently unimaginable effects, e.g. kinda-immortality.