The Californian company wants to test its technology on human beings, and it seems that things are starting to become concrete.
Neuralink is one of Elon Musk’s most ambitious companies. Its objective is none other than to improve the capabilities of the human brain. If the primary goal is to prevent Homo sapiens from being overtaken by artificial intelligence, the other objective is purely medical and aims to improve the condition of the hearing impaired or paralyzed people, for example.
The latter will also be able to take part in the adventure, since the company is looking for volunteers to test implants intended for them.
Controlling computers with your mind
Last May, Neuralink received authorization from the FDA (the US Food and Drug Administration) to conduct its first clinical trials on humans. A giant step for the company, which will now be able to check whether “ The Link », its brain-computer interface, is functional, and above all… safe.
For now, the technology does not promise to give the powers of Cyborg, the DC Comics superhero, but rather to control objects with the brain. The company initially wishes to “ allow people to control a cursor or computer keyboard using thought alone », which will not be an easy task.
These capabilities would be very useful for people suffering from paralysis, for whom using computers and other smartphones can become a real obstacle course. So why not test the technology and advance it with the help of the people involved? This is what Neuralink, which has received the approval of an independent review committee to recruit people suffering from “ quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis “.
However, we can only hope that the company knows what it is doing. In 2022, she was heavily criticized for the way she treated her laboratory animals. Mashable reports that Neuralink allegedly conducted highly invasive experiments and killed “ about 1,500 animals, including rats, monkeys, pigs and mice “. However, given the issues at stake, we can expect that the means and methods deployed will not be the same.
Sources: Mashable, Boursorama
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