New Delhi: Tech billionaire Elon Musk has announced his company Neuralink to begin the clinical trial of brain chip implant in human brain in the next six months. The state-of-the-art technology, which is in the development stage, will help disabled patients to move and communicate easily again. Musk further said that it will also help to restore vision among partially blind people. Speaking to a crowd of select invitees in a presentation at Neuralink headquarters that lasted nearly three hours, Musk emphasized the speed at which the company is developing its device.
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“We want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device into a human,” Musk said during a much-awaited public update on the device.
“The progress at first, particularly as it applies to humans, will seem perhaps agonizingly slow, but we are doing all of the things to bring it to scale in parallel,” he added. “So, in theory, progress should be exponential.”
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The first two human applications targeted by the Neuralink device will be in restoring vision and enabling movement of muscles in people who cannot do so, Musk said. “Even if someone has never had vision, ever, like they were born blind, we believe we can still restore vision,” he said.
How will the technology work?
The company is working on a new kind of robots termed as ‘Surgical robot (R1) that will quickly cut a portion of the human skull to implant the advanced chip. The N1 chip is a small micro-processor that will be fixed firmly within a person’s brain and can record and stiumate the brain of the host. According to the reports, it will be thin electrodes around the ear and that will be directly connected to the brain. Electric currents sent by these electrodes can stimulate the brain.
“Upgradeability is very important because our first production device will be much like an iPhone 1 and pretty sure you would not want an iPhone 1 stuck in your head if the iPhone 14 is available,” said Musk.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Austin, Texas, Neuralink has in recent years been conducting tests on animals as it seeks approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin clinical trials in people.
Neuralink’s last public presentation, more than a year ago, involved a monkey with a brain chip that played a computer game by thinking alone.
Musk, who also runs electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, rocket firm SpaceX, and social media platform Twitter, is known for lofty goals such as colonizing Mars and saving humanity. His ambitions for Neuralink, which he launched in 2016, are of the same grand scale.
He wants to develop a chip that would allow the brain to control complex electronic devices and eventually allow people with paralysis to regain motor function and treat brain diseases such as Parkinson’s, dementia and Alzheimer’s. He also talks of melding the brain with artificial intelligence.
(With Reuters Inputs)