Merging our brains with machines won't stop the rise of the robots

Tesla chief executive and OpenAI founder Elon Musk suggested last week that humanity might stave off irrelevance from the rise of the machines by merging with the machines and becoming cyborgs. This doubt is not only due to hardware limitations; it is also to do with the role the human brain would play in the match-up. Musk's thesis is straightforward: that sufficiently advanced interfaces between brain and computer will enable humans to massively augment their capabilities by being better able to leverage technologies such as machine learning and deep learning. But the exchange goes both ways. Brain-machine interfaces may help the performance of machine learning algorithms by having humans "fill in the gaps" for tasks that the algorithms are currently bad at, like making nuanced contextual decisions.