Elon Musk’s brain implant startup Neuralink to begin human trials

Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink revealed Tuesday that it will begin testing its medical device in human trials.

The company announced that the human trials will be used to evaluate the safety of its “fully implantable, wireless brain-computer interface.” It will test the effectiveness and safeness of the company’s implant and surgical robot, which aims to enable “people with paralysis to c ontrol external devices with their thoughts.”

Musk, who also owns X and Tesla, wrote that the first patient “will soon receive a Neuralink device.”

“This ultimately has the potential to restore full body movement,” Musk wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “In the long term, Neuralink hopes to play a role in AI risk civilizational risk reduction by improving human to AI (and human to human) bandwidth by several orders of magnitude. Imagine if Stephen Hawking had had this.”
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Eventually, the goal of the brain implant startup is to allow those with paralysis to use a keyboard or c ontrol a computer with just their thoughts. The company said that the trial was awarded the investigational device exemption by the Food and D rug Administration in May.

The study is calling on those who have quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), are at least 22 years old and have a reliable caregiver to apply for the trial, which will take place over six years in total.

thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4214652-el...59848tTw5AZ9Gry26RFo

An interesting concept. I hope it works better than the Tesla autonomous driving function...

I know there have been other wireless interfaces implanted into people in the past who have lost all or part of a limb, so I suppose this is a logical step forward, but just hope it works and does not cause any side effects with those who will volunteer for this procedure .

Hopefully, it will give some hope to those with medical need. But one can imagine the process being part of a Terminator style dystopian movie plot where others can hack the system and take c ontrol.