Elon Musk’Brain chip company Neuralink has made a major breakthrough. He has announced that the technology, which allows you to control a computer or mobile phone with your brain, will be tested on humans within six months. The billionaire’s secretive company has been trying to create tomorrow’s groundbreaking technology since it was first founded in 2016. While it has conducted several tests on monkeys and pigs in the past, the company has reached another milestone in testing with six monkeys .
This week, the company released a video about its YouTube channel of his Show and Tell event, where Mr. Musk and his colleagues revealed the footage from the monkey experiment. It showed the animals typing out sentences like “welcome to show and tell” and “may I please have snacks” through the implanted brain chip.
Mr Musk said the six monkeys could move a mouse with their mind to arrange the pre-written words in the correct order, although he did note that the monkeys can’t actually spell.
He said, “The monkeys really enjoy doing the demos, and they get the banana smoothie, and it’s quite a fun game. We attach great importance to animal welfare.”
The multibillionaire also noted that the same technology could one day be used to give quadriplegics access to a mouse and keyboard.
He added, “Someone who has no other interface to the outside world would be able to operate their phone better than someone with working hands.”
At Wednesday’s event, Musk said Neuralink had submitted most of the paperwork needed for a human clinical trial to the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medical devices in the US.
However, Mr Musk had previously hoped that human trials would begin in 2020 and later 2022. Now that has been postponed to at least 2023. Mr. Musk first revealed that his brain chip company was testing its device in monkeys in 2019.
And this isn’t the first time the world’s richest man has shown what his fascinating technology can do. Last year, Neuralink released a video of a monkey playing the famous video game Pong with its brain.
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In the final test, the monkeys used the brain implant to focus on highlighted words and letters. Another video released by the company shows the animals being trained to charge the devices by sitting under a wireless charger.
The Neuralink researchers also revealed a clip of a pig on a treadmill, which they claim helped them study mobility problems in humans. The microchips are said to have multiple flexible “wires” that allow them to be inserted into your brain. Musk likens this to “replacing a piece of your skull with a smartwatch, for lack of a better analogy”.
Neuralink’s co-founder DJ Seo, who is also the vice president of a company called Implant, said during the presentation that 64 of these “wires” could be implanted in the brain in just 15 minutes using a robotic system.
A robotic system must be used in the process due to the small size of the wires. Christine Odabashian, the leader of Neuralink’s hardware insertion team, said: “Imagine taking a hair from your head and sticking it in jello covered in saran wrap, doing that to a precise depth and precision, and doing that 64 times. does in a reasonable amount of time. time.”
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Mr. Musk has even claimed that he will have one of these implants put in. During the presentation, he said, “You could have a Neuralink device implanted right now and you wouldn’t even know it. I mean, hypothetically… In fact, in one of these demos I will.
But some experts have sounded the alarm over Mr Musk’s new technology, warning that it could have serious ethical complications and also require invasive medical procedures to get them implanted.
Anna Wexler, an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told CNBC, “From an ethics perspective, I think that hype is very concerning. Space or Twitter, that’s one thing, but if you put it in the medical context , the stakes are higher.
But Xing Chen, from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, added: “There are quite a few disorders, such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s and obsessive-compulsive disorder, where people have received brain implants and the disorders have been treated quite successfully, which has allowed them to have a better quality of life,” Chen said. “So I feel like there’s precedent for doing this.”