The implants, which Elon Musk says could allow paralyzed people to walk, have already been tested in macaques and pigs.
A source: Guardian
The Musk company will implant implants in people’s brains
Billionaire Elon Musk’s startup is preparing to launch human clinical trials.
Musk, who co-founded Neuralink in 2016, promised the technology would “allow a paralyzed person to use a smartphone with their mind faster than a person using their thumbs.”
The company has already successfully implanted AI microchips in the brains of a macaque named Pager and a pig named Gertrude, and is now looking for a “clinical trials director” to perform human tests.
“As Director of Clinical Trials, you will work closely with innovative physicians and engineers, and will also work with early participants in Neuralink clinical trials,” the announcement reads.
Musk, the world’s richest man with an estimated net worth of $256 billion, said last month he was cautious that implants could allow paralyzed people to walk.
“I think with Neuralink we have a chance to restore full body functionality to a person who has a spinal cord injury. Neuralink is working well on monkeys and we are doing a lot of testing and confirming that it is very safe and reliable and that the Neuralink device can be safely removed.
However, Musk has a long history of overpromising on the speed of development of his projects. In 2019, he suggested the device would be implanted in the human skull before 2020.
Musk said the device would be “implanted directly against your skull and charged wirelessly to make you look and feel absolutely normal.”
Neuralink previously posted a video of a chip-implanted monkey playing the video game Pong using only his mind.
The implant consists of a coin-sized device and a set of thin, flexible electrodes that are attached to brain cells by a special sewing machine.
Neuralink’s future products are expected to be neural chips integrated into the human brain with the aim of eliminating the effects of certain brain diseases, extending memory, treating paralysis, blindness, depression, Parkinson’s disease and better manage complex systems, etc.
He’s supposed to mentally play video games, summon a Tesla car, or download and read memories.
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