Elon Musk has said that he believes that his Neuralink brain chip will be able to be implanted into people’s heads by next year.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said that whilst he doesn’t want to ‘raise hopes unreasonably’, he is ‘increasingly confident’ that his intriguing brain machine will be implanted into the first humans in 2022.
He’s also ‘cautiously optimistic’ that the Neuralink chips will be able to restore full body functionality to those who are tetraplegic and quadriplegic.
He also said that the standards that he’s imposing on Neuralink will be higher than those demanded by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
In a video interview for the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Conference, Musk said:
“I think we have a chance with Neuralink to restore full-body functionality to someone who has a spinal cord injury,
“I don’t want to raise hopes unreasonably, but I’m increasingly convinced that this could be done.”
So, what Neuralink is and what it actually does is quite complicated, but it has some seriously bold ambitions, such as restoring movement to those who are paralysed.
Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk speaks with WSJ’s @JoannaStern at #WSJCEOCouncil https://t.co/OiyO7UJuMz https://t.co/0xUmYBJH9b
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 7, 2021
In April, they released a video that showed a monkey called Pager learning to play the 1970s video game Pong using only its mind.
Apparently, two chips implanted against the monkey’s skull send brain signals from the monkey through a 1,024 electrode transmission device, with the signals then decoded and calibrated in order to predict what the monkey wants to do.