“We need to get there before the AI takes over,” he told engineers in 2023, according to his biographer Ashlee Vance. “We want to get there with a maniacal sense of urgency. Maniacal.” Musk believes that with brain implants, humans will be able to prevent a future artificial superintelligence from wiping us out, and so he wants Neuralink to perform surgeries on more than 22,000 people by 2030.”