No, this is not the premise of an episode of black-mirror : within six months, it should be possible to have a connected device implanted in the brain, to communicate with computers directly by thought. At least that’s what Elon Musk, whose start-up Neuralink is working on the project, predicted on Wednesday.
“Obviously we want to be very careful and be sure that it will work well, but we have given all our documents to the FDA (the agency in charge of public health in the United States) and we think that within six months we will will be able to have our first implant in a human,” said the boss of Tesla and SpaceX during a presentation of the progress of Neuralink.
We are now confident that the Neuralink device is ready for humans, so timing is a function of working through the FDA approval process
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 1, 2022
“We are now confident that Neuralink’s device is ready for humans, so the timeline depends on the FDA approval process,” he then clarified on Twitter, the social network he bought it. a month ago.
The billionaire is a regular at risky predictions, especially about the autonomy of Tesla electric cars. In July 2019, he estimated that Neuralink could perform its first tests on individuals in 2020.
But so far, the coin-sized prototypes have only been implanted in the skulls of animals.
Several monkeys are thus able to “play” video games or “type” words on a screen, simply by following the movement of the cursor on the screen with their eyes.
Elon Musk and Neuralink engineers also took stock on Wednesday of the start-up’s latest advances in the development of the robot-surgeon and the development of other implants, housed in the spinal cord or the eyes, which would make mobility or vision.
Beyond the potential to treat neurological diseases, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal is to ensure that humans are not intellectually overwhelmed by artificial intelligence systems.
Other companies are working on controlling computers by thought, such as Synchron, which announced in July that it had implanted the first brain-machine interface in the United States.
In recent months, Elon Musk has urged his employees to work faster. “We’ll all be dead before anything useful happens,” he told the Neuralink team during a meeting, according to Bloomberg.
Musk recently fired more than half of Twitter’s staff, as well as executives at the social network who expressed views contrary to his in public. He had asked the remaining employees to commit to working in an “extremely intense” way.
Neuralink’s annual conference also serves to arouse professional interest in recruiting various specialists.
With Agence France-Presse.