Elon Musk’s brain chip company to start trials in humans in next six months
Elon Musk’s ambitious brain chip company Neuralink is hoping to begin human trials in the next six months.
Neuralink had initially planned to start trials in human brains later this year, but Musk announced today that that plan has been pushed back into 2023.
“We are now confident that the Neuralink device is ready for humans, so timing is a function of working through the FDA approval process,” Musk wrote on Twitter last night.
The eccentric billionaire also said he would get one of the coin-sized brain chips implanted into his brain in one of Neuralink’s demonstrations.
Texas-based Neuralink has been conducting tests on animals over the past few years as it seeks approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin clinical trials.
“We want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device into a human,” Musk told the public in an update last night. “The progress at first, particularly as it applies to humans, will seem perhaps agonisingly slow, but we are doing all of the things to bring it to scale in parallel.”
“Even if someone has never had vision, ever, like they were born blind, we believe we can still restore vision,” he added.
In April, Musk said the so-called wireless brain-machine interface (BMI) which could help people with paralysis to use their brain activity to operate computers – and potentially walk again.
“First Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs,” Musk tweeted at the time. “Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again.”
To achieve this, the chip would read brain signals and use them to stimulate nerves and muscles in the body, allowing the person to control their own limbs.
The company has received its fair share of criticism, beyond making onlookers feel as though they have been flung into a sci-fi novel.
A US doctors’ group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which partners which the technology company filed a complaint against it at the beginning of the year with the Department of Agriculture for its treatment of its current test subjects, macaque monkeys.
Neuralink in February was forced to deny claims that it has been torturing monkeys for the futuristic technology.