The Californian company initially aims to help people who are paralyzed or suffering from neurological diseases.
By Le Figaro with AFP
Published update
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The start-up Neuralinkone of Elon Musk’s companies, announced Thursday, May 25 on Twitter that it had received approval from US health authorities to test its connected brain implants on humans. “This is an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people”said the Californian company on its Twitter account, specifying that “Recruitments for clinical trials are not yet open.”
Neuralink designs connected devices to be implanted in the brain to communicate with computers directly through thought. They must first be used to help people who are paralyzed or suffering from neurological diseases. The start-up then wants to make these implants safe and reliable enough for them to be elective (comfort) surgery. People could then pay a few thousand dollars to endow their brains with computer power.
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Allowing humanity to achieve ‘symbiosis with AI’
For Elon Musk, these chips must allow humanity to arrive at a “symbiosis with AI”in his 2020 words, delivered at the company’s annual conference. “We are now confident that Neuralink’s device is ready for humans, so the timeline depends on the FDA approval process. (the agency responsible for public health in the United States, editor’s note)»he said at the end of November on Twitter, a month after buying the social network.
The billionaire is a regular at risky predictions, especially about the autonomy of Tesla electric cars. In July 2019, he estimated that Neuralink could perform its first tests on people in 2020. So far, the coin-sized prototypes have been implanted in the skulls of animals. Many monkeys are thus able to “play” to video games or “type” words on a screen, simply by following the movement of the cursor on the screen.
Implants in the spinal cord or eyes
At the end of November, the start-up also took stock of its latest advances in the design of a robot-surgeon and the development of other implants, to be installed in the spinal cord or the eyes, to restore mobility or vision. . In 2022, Elon Musk urged Neuralink employees to work faster. “We will all be dead before anything useful happens”he told them during a meeting last year, according to the Bloomberg news agency.
Other companies are working on controlling computers by thought, such as Synchron, which announced in July 2022 that it had implanted the first brain-machine interface in the United States. “We are building technology that can directly broadcast the thoughts of people who have lost the ability to move or speak due to illness or injury”, explains Thomas Oxley, the founder and boss of this start-up, in a video on his website. Several patients are testing the implant, which has been inserted into blood vessels, so they can compose emails or go online using their eyes and brain.