Billionaire Elon Musk announced the first human brain chip test. The neurotechnology company Neuralink, which he owns, plans to do this in six months.
On November 30, 2022, Neuralink held a show-and-tell event at which CEO Elon Musk announced, "We think that probably in about six months, we'll be able to install Neuralink in a person."
With the help of such a chip, according to the billionaire, computers and smartphones can be used without the help of hands. He added that Neuralink will conduct operations carefully. Necessary precautions, as the founder of the company noted, were already used when the chip was administered to animals in previous studies.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk's Neuralink is still working to get US regulatory approval for its implant.
Musk has previously said that Neuralink hopes to implant its brain chips in people in 2022. In 2019, he estimated that human testing would begin in 2020.
Two years ago, Musk's company implanted its technology in the head of a pig, and a little more than 19 months later, it showed a macaque playing a video game thanks to such a chip.
In February, Neuralink confirmed that monkeys had died while testing prototype implants at the University of California, Davis' primate center, but rejected allegations of animal cruelty by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Musk indirectly responded to the allegations on Wednesday:
"Before we even think about putting a device on an animal, we do everything we can to do thorough laboratory testing... We're very careful and always want the devices when we do the implantation—in a sheep, a pig, or a monkey—to be validated, and not research".
Neuralink is Elon Musk's company developing the world's first implantable neurocomputer chip. Musk created a company with the help of which computers will be able to communicate with the human brain. Neuralink was incorporated in California as a "Medical Research" company.
