Elon Musk’s Neuralink start-up announces permission to test its brain implants on humans

It almost feels like a dystopia. The start-up Neuralink, one of Elon Musk’s companies, announced Thursday, May 26 on Twitter that she had received approval from US health authorities to test her connected brain implants on humans. The Californian company clarified that “recruitment for clinical trials is not yet open”.

Neuralink designs connected devices to be implanted in the brain to communicate with computers directly through thought. They must first be used to help people who are paralyzed or suffering from neurological diseases. The start-up then wants to make these implants safe and reliable enough for them to be elective surgery. People could then pay a few thousand dollars to endow their brains with computer power.

For Elon Musk, the boss of Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX, these chips must allow humanity to reach a “symbiosis with AI”, in his 2020 words, delivered at the company’s annual conference. 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 people in 2020. So far, the coin-sized prototypes have been implanted in the skulls of animals. Many monkeys are thus able to “play” to video games or “type” words on a screen, simply by following the movement of the cursor on the screen.