By Sonny Iroche
As someone who has interest in the development of AI ethical and responsible use of AI, especially the research on the deployment of artificial intelligence systems across healthcare, finance, and defence, I have watched Elon Musk’s twin ventures, xAI and Neuralink, with a mixture of fascination and personal urgency. What Musk is attempting is no longer science fiction: he is actively constructing the technological stack that could, within our lifetimes, allow human consciousness to escape the frailty of biology and live indefinitely inside machines.
I believe this is the most consequential story in technology today, and it deserves far more than the usual skepticism of AI disruption.
Here is the fuller picture of some of the implications could be going forward. The Two Pillars: xAI and Neuralink
xAI, launched in 2023 after Musk’s acrimonious departure from OpenAI, is built on a single overriding principle: create artificial intelligence that seeks maximum truth rather than maximum profit or political correctness. Its flagship model, Grok, is already in its third major iteration. Grok-3 is currently in late beta and, according to Musk’s latest updates this month, Grok-5 (now delayed to 2026) will be the first release he describes as “crushingly superior” to every existing model in long-context reasoning, mathematics, and real-world planning.
The acquisition of X Corp in March 2025 gave xAI access to the richest real-time data firehose on Earth, hundreds of millions of human thoughts posted daily. That data, combined with massive new compute clusters (including the rumoured 100,000-H100 “Cortex-2” super-pod in Memphis), has accelerated progress to a degree that even some seasoned AI researchers may find startling.
Meanwhile, Neuralink has moved from animal trials to routine human implantation faster than any neurotechnology company in history. As of November 2025, at least seven patients carry the N1 implant (branded “Telepathy”). The first recipient, Noland Arbaugh, now controls a computer cursor faster with his thoughts than many able-bodied people can with a mouse. The second and third patients have begun restoring basic motor function below complete spinal-cord injuries by rerouting signals around the damage, a proof-of-concept that left the spinal-cord research community speechless when the videos were released in September.
Musk’s stated roadmap is breathtaking in its ambition: hundreds of implants by the end of 2025, tens of thousands within five years, and more than a million brain interfaces per year by the early 2030s. Each generation doubles or triples the channel count and halves the physical footprint. Version 4 of the threads, demonstrated last month, already exceeds 4,000 electrodes per array, still only a tiny fraction of the 86 billion neurons in a human brain, but enough to produce fluent thought-to-text at more than 100 bits per second.
The Real Goal: Digital Immortality
Musk has never been shy about the endgame. In interviews throughout 2025 he has repeated variations of the same sentence: “If we can map a human connectome at sufficient resolution and run it on a suitable substrate, that person effectively becomes immortal.”
The pathway he describes is now technically visible:
1. Neuralink scales to millions of channels, achieving whole-brain readout and write-back.
2. xAI delivers artificial general intelligence capable of simulating biological neural networks at synaptic fidelity.
3. At the moment of death (or earlier, for those who choose), the complete pattern of a mind is migrated to silicon, to the cloud, or, Musk’s personal favourite, to a Tesla Optimus humanoid body that never ages.
In March 2025 Musk told Lex Fridman that full-upload capability “is definitely coming this century, probably within twenty or thirty years.” In private conversations reported by close associates, he has shortened that estimate to “inside fifteen years for early adopters.”
Why This Matters More Than Mars Colonising Mars is inspirational, but it extends human lifespan by a few decades at best. Digital consciousness upload offers literal immortality, plus the ability to merge, or accelerate subjective experience. A mind running at 10,000× biological speed could live a thousand subjective years inside one calendar year.
From several AI experiments and work, training large language models and deploying autonomous systems, it is evident that the raw compute and algorithmic foundations are advancing faster than public roadmaps admit. The remaining bottlenecks are almost entirely in neuroscience (mapping and stimulating individual synapses non-destructively) and in regulatory approval for elective enhancement rather than medical necessity.
Risks and Ethical Questions
No honest observer can ignore the dangers. A botched upload could produce a fragmented or suffering consciousness. Unequal access would create a literal immortal overclass. And if xAI’s safety efforts fail, we could hand the keys to human immortality to an unaligned superintelligence.
Yet the alternative, doing nothing while biology sentences every one of us to oblivion, feels increasingly indefensible.
The United Nations insists on making AI ethical, safe and beneficial. Watching Musk integrate xAI’s truth-seeking mission with Neuralink’s neural lace, could imply that, for all its audacity and risk, this is the highest-leverage attempt humanity has ever made to defeat death.
The next decade will decide whether we humans remain prisoners of entropy or step into a future where mind, not flesh, defines what it means to be human.
Note: Sonny Iroche is the CEO of GenAI Learning Concepts Ltd, a pioneer AI Consulting firm in Nigeria. He was a 2022-2023 Senior Academic Fellow at the African Studies Centre of the University of Oxford. He is an Oxford University trained AI expert. Iroche is a member of the UNESCO Technical Working Group on AI Readiness Assessment Methodology and a member of the Nigerian National AI Strategy Committee that drafted Nigeria’s AI Strategic framework in April 2024. Iroche has published several articles in leading Nigerian and African newspapers on economic development and AI.
