It’s easy to forget that Elon Musk has other ventures outside Twitter. And recently, it was announced that one of Musk’s tech companies, Neuralink, will soon have people insert approved coin-sized implants in the next six months. This is huge news, especially for those who are paralyzed or disabled.
During Neuralink’s Fall 2022 Show and Tell livestream, Musk said that discussions with the US Food and Drug Administration about Neuralink’s brain-computer interface (aka BCI) implants have “gone well.” He also announced that the first human trials for these implants could begin in the next six months, where it starts small by recovering basic human movement and eyesight.
How these implants work is that a tiny device is inserted into the human body. The implants have electrode-laced wires and a tiny robot that “carves out a piece of the human skull” so that it could be attached to the brain.
“You want to read the signals from the brain, you want to write. You ultimately want to do that for the entire brain. And also extend that to the rest of the nervous system if you have a severed spinal cord neck”
The tech billionaire is confident that these devices will change people’s lives and it would be powerful enough to cure one’s disability.
“As miraculous as that may sound, we are confident that it is possible to restore full-body functionality to someone who has a severed spinal cord. Even if they have never seen before, we are confident they could see.”
The end goal for the Neuralink interface goes beyond health and human restoration. Musk plans to create a “whole brain interface” that can communicate with “every aspect of the brain.” He also hopes that these implants would allow data to be transferred between humans and machines, similar to how data transfers from one device to another.
Musk ensured that before the implants make it to a human, or an animal even, they would go through rigorous tests to ensure it’s safe. Hopefully, positive results would come out once human testing has begun. But it is important to note that Musk’s Neuralink is one of the handful of companies that have announced progress with their BCI developments. Only time will tell when one of them becomes commercially or medically available for the public.