Another company of Elon Musk seems to be on the verge of a breakthrough: The technological development of the brain implants Neuralinks has reached a point where clinical studies with humans are being prepared.
The company is currently looking for a senior executive with experience of such a process, reports the British daily The Guardian. This indicates that the previous phase of animal testing has been successfully completed and that people are confident that the technology will be tested on humans and that the necessary official approvals will be obtained.
Neuralink had already implanted its interfaces between the nervous system and electronics in a monkey named Pager and the pig Getrude. These experiments worked well. In monkeys, for example, brain activity was measured via the interface when operating a simple computer game and a connected AI was trained to interpret the signals. The animal could then operate the game without the previously offered joystick.
Schedule not quite kept
In the future, the technology will be used primarily in the medical field. Musk had defined his goal in such a way that in the future people with paralysis or comparable impairments should be able to use smartphones faster than someone who can use their thumbs for it.
Further developments should also be possible later. For example, the entrepreneur was optimistic that people with spinal cord injuries would also be able to walk again. Because the Neuralink interface could also read the motor signals that are normally sent to the legs and either pass them on to the muscles or a prosthesis from the outside. The plan was actually to work with people as early as 2020, but this schedule was probably a bit too optimistic.