2023-05-26 02:19:05
The start-up Neuralink, one of Elon Musk’s companies, announced on Twitter on Thursday 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, adding 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.
Towards “a symbiosis” with artificial intelligence
The start-up then wants to make these implants safe and reliable enough to be elective (comfort) surgery – people might then pay a few thousand dollars to equip their brains with computer power.
For Elon Musk, these chips must allow humanity to achieve a “symbiosis with artificial intelligence (AI)”, in his words from 2020, delivered at the company’s annual conference.
The billionaire fears that AI systems will overtake humans and one day take control.
In March, he founded X.AI, a new AI company, likely to compete with OpenAI, the company that designed ChatGPT, a successful generative AI program capable of interacting with humans and to produce all kinds of texts on demand.
Tests already carried out on monkeys
So far, Neuralink prototypes, the size of a small coin, have been implanted in the skulls of animals. Several monkeys are thus able to “play” video games or “type” words on a screen, simply by following the movement of the cursor on the screen with their 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’ll all be dead before anything useful happens,” he told them at a meeting last year, according to the Bloomberg news agency.
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