The company Neuralink, one of Elon Musk’s many companies, obtained the green light from the American authorities in May 2023 to test its implant on humans and no longer just on animals. This implant is supposed to allow humans who wear it to control a computer by thought.
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The boss of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X announced at the end of January 2024 that Neuralink placed its first brain implant on a patient, as part of its first clinical trials. According to Elon Musk, the guinea pig “is able to control the mouse, move it around the screen just by thought.“
Before humans could be used as guinea pigs, there were numerous experiments on animals whose results were more or less conclusive. If Elon Musk had bragged about getting a macaque to play a video game Pong without a controller or keyboard, it became much quieter in 2021 when Neuralink implanted chips of the wrong size in 25 pigs who had to be euthanized.
Also silent about these monkeys who died of a generalized infection linked again to the implantation of electrodes, as revealed by the American magazine Wired.
In total, 1,500 animals have died in experiments linked to the Neuralink brain implant since 2018. But if the American authorities have given the green light to implant human guinea pigs, they have also opened several investigations, particularly for violations of laws on animal wellbeing.
Combating AI risks
Elon Musk is pleased that a human being can now, thanks to a lithium chip, make a computer mouse move with his thoughts. The stated goal is ultimately to allow humans “to communicate better with computers in order to limit“, according to Elon Musk, the “risks that artificial intelligence poses to our civilization.“And why not by the way, thanks to this implant, it can give sight to the blind, make paralyzed people walk again, and cure depression…
Elon Musk says he wants to offer his implant to everyone in the world, the world of tomorrow, the one he dreams of, a world where we would all have become guinea pigs, and which would perhaps not be so different from that of today ‘today.