The boss of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X announced at the end of January that Neuralink had placed its first brain implant on a patient, as part of its first clinical trials.
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“Progress is good, the patient appears to have made a full recovery, with no side effects that we are aware of.” On his social network, According to the billionaire, the guinea pig “is able to control the mouse, move it around the screen just by thought”said the businessman during a conversation on Spaces, the audio lounge tool from X, formerly Twitter.
The boss of Tesla and SpaceX announced at the end of January that Neuralink had placed its first brain implant on a patient, as part of its first clinical trials.
“We try to get as many button presses as possible through thought,” continued Elon Musk. “So we’re currently working on the ability to click the mouse left and right, move it down and up, which is necessary if you want to click on something and drag it to another place.” .
Getting paralyzed patients to walk again
Founded in 2016, the company is far from the only organization developing a brain-machine interface (BMI). Researchers from the Grenoble Clinatec institute, for example, presented in 2019 an implant allowing a quadriplegic person to animate an exoskeleton and move their arms or move around. Neuralink, which recently raised some $323 million from investors in two tranches, in August and November, says she also wants to make paralyzed patients walk again, but also to restore sight to the blind and even cure psychiatric illnesses such as depression.
Neuralink’s coin-sized implant has already been placed in the brain of a macaque, which successfully played the video game “Pong” without a controller or keyboard. But Elon Musk ultimately aims to offer his implant to everyone. According to him, it should make it possible to communicate better with computers and to contain the “risk for our civilization” what artificial intelligence represents.