In 2016, Neuralink, an American neurotechnology startup co-founded by tech billionaire Elon Musk, whose objective is to develop electronic components that can be integrated into the brain, for example to increase memory, better control terminals, help heal neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, dementia as well as lesions of the spinal cord and possibly to better combine the brain and artificial intelligence.
An implantable device can actually solve these problems, Musk said in a webcast Friday in which he presented the latest advances in his connected brain project, mentioning conditions such as memory loss, hearing loss, depression and insomnia.
Musk has not released a timeline for those treatments, appearing to retract after previous statements that human trials would begin by the end of this year. The first clinical trials of Neuralink will focus on people with paraplegia or ttraplgia, resulting from an injury to the cervical spinal cord. The plan for a first trial is to recruit a small number of these people to test the technology’s efficacy and safety, said the company’s chief surgeon, Dr. Matthew MacDougall.
Neuroscientists unaffiliated with the company said the presentation indicated that Neuralink had made great progress, but warned that longer studies were needed.
The company provided a demo of the technology. Musk said the purpose of this presentation was recruiting and not fundraising or any other kind of promotion: We are not trying to fundraise or do anything else, but the primary focus is to convince great people to come and work at Neuralink and help us bring the product to maturity – make it affordable and reliable, and make it possible for anyone who wants to benefit from it, he said.
This presentation is therefore, among other things, a seduction operation for new recruits: engineers, surgeons, chemists or even robotics specialists, since the Neuralink company currently has only around 100 people and is ultimately targeting 10,000 employees.
The goal may be ambitious (and could certainly be the source of many ethical and medical debates) but the technology that Musk presents is still far from the promised land. Musk first noted that Neuralink had changed in design since last year’s revelation, with a smaller physical device profile that he said can be completely hidden under the hair once installed in the skull. He had a physical device in hand to show his size.
It should be noted that the interface was originally intended to take the form of tiny electrodes implanted in the brain and connected to a device located on the skull to link with a computer. The prototype presented by Neuralink evolved and a chip, the size of a small coin, was preferred. It is this which must be implanted inside the skull; it measures 23 mm in diameter and 8 mm in thickness.
The implant works with Bluetooth technology to communicate with the computer. It is rechargeable by induction, that is to say by a wireless transfer of energy, via electromagnetic waves.
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Musk presented what he described as the Demo of the Three Little Pigs. Why did Neuralink choose its animals? Musk explained that they are actually quite similar to humans. If we want to understand how it works on people, then pigs are a good choice.
Of the three pigs, one (a sow christened Joyce) had no implant, a second (a sow christened Gertrude) had an implant (which Musk called the Link) for two months already, and a third (a sow christened Dorothy) had an implant. implant which was subsequently removed (to show that the operation was reversible).
The prototype was connected to the snout of the animal. Musk showed a notch that played a sound and showed a visual spike whenever the Link detected that Gertrude was in contact with something with her snout as she walked around the pen and sniffed the ground for food.
Musk closed this part of the presentation by noting that the company is getting ready for the first human implantation soon, pending required approvals and further safety testing.
While the device was only a reading device, receiving data from signals in the pig’s brain, the aim is to provide both reading and writing skills in order to be able to solve the neurological problems mentioned above. Musk also clarified that the reason he showed the pig whose implant had been safely removed was that Neuralink might be driven to provide hardware updates over time as better versions became available.
Musk referred to the Fitbit Neuralink devices in your skull with tiny threads several times in the presentation, which may actually sound like a pretty dystopian claim, depending on your perspective. The abilities he put forth ultimately include the ability to summon your Tesla with thinking and video game control interfaces – including full control over Starcraft. Musk also said that in the future he expects people with a Link to be able to record and replay memories, adding that it obviously looks more and more like a Black Mirror episode, but hey, I guess. they’re good enough to predict it. He even went so far as to say that you could potentially download [des souvenirs] in a robot body.
Elon Musk’s projects arouse skepticism in the scientific community, in which some doubt Neuralink’s real advances in the field of implants.
Source: presentation video
And you ?
What do you think of Link? Would you be ready to try it? Are you skeptical or convinced of Neuralink’s advances? What do you think of the idea of starting testing on people with paraplegia?
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