Musk Can't Pronounce His Baby's Name, Spell Shock Instead

Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has just spelled a shocking speculation of his own, saying that spoken language may soon become obsolete with the rise of new brain tech.

Appearing on another episode of the Joe Rogan Experience on Thursday, the billionaire entrepreneur found difficulties in pronouncing the name of his newborn child. Could you spell this: “X Æ A-12”?

the program host congratulated Musk on the birth of his sixth son this week, but couldn’t help but ask about the infant’s unique, headline-grabbing name.

“How do you say the name? Is it a placeholder?” Rogan asked, drawing an awkward laugh from Musk.

“Well, first of all, my partner is the one that mostly came up with the name... She’s great at names,” Musk said, adding: “It’s just X, the letter X, and then the Æ is pronounced ‘ash,’ and A-12 is my contribution” – which he says stands for “Archangel-12,” the CIA recon aircraft later developed into the SR-71 Blackbird, the “coolest plane ever.”

Moving on to neural nets and artificial intelligence, Musk open us about “Neuralink” technology – a battery-powered device implanted directly into the skull – could be rolled out within the next year, and potentially “fix almost anything that is wrong with the brain.” Eventually, in addition to curing disorders like epilepsy, he said language itself could be made obsolete thanks to the new tech – and perhaps unpronounceable baby names along with it.

“You would be able to communicate very quickly and with far more precision… I’m not sure what would happen to language,” he said, explaining that human beings are “already partly a cyborg, or an AI symbiote” whose ‘hardware’ is merely in need of an upgrade.

Asked about how long it might take before mankind goes mute, Musk said it could happen in five to 10 years in a “best-case scenario” if the technology continues to develop at its currently rapid pace. Of course, even in the entrepreneur's brave new world, he said some might still choose to speak for “sentimental reasons,” even when “mouth noises” are but a primitive vestige of the past.

Past Shocking Reveal by Musk

Earlier in July last year, Musk unveiled what progress his company has made on its “brain-computer interface,” designed to combat what he dubs the “existential threat” posed to humanity by AI.

During an event at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Musk revealed that the company has developed small “threads,” thinner than human hair, which can be injected into the human brain to detect neuronal activity.

He explained: "The company has also developed a robot to implant these threads with the guidance of a human (for now) neurosurgeon. This process involves drilling small holes in the skull, which may in future be done using lasers, for a less invasive procedure overall."

Musk boldly stated that “this is going to be important at a civilization-wide scale.”

“Even under a benign AI, we will be left behind. With a high bandwidth brain-machine interface, we will have the option to go along for the ride.”