Elon Musk — the SpaceX founder, Tesla CEO, and, most recently, Twitter owner — hosted a flashy event on Wednesday night for yet another one of his companies: Neuralink, the startup proposing implants that connect your brain to a computer.The event showcased a video that Musk said showed a monkey using a brain implant to control a cursor and type on a computer.It’s not a brand-new technology, as researchers have been working on devices that can decode brain signals for a practical purpose for decades.
For example, allowing a person to type words or play video games with only their brain has been done before.Musk noted during the “show and tell” event that the primary goal of the evening was to recruit talent to Neuralink.”A lot of the time people think that they couldn’t really work at Neuralink because they don’t know anything about biology or how the brain works,” Musk said.”The thing we really want to emphasise here is that you don’t need to because when you break down the skills that are needed to make Neuralink work, it’s actually many of the same skills that are required to make a smartwatch or modern phone work.”DJ Seo, Neuralink’s vice president of implants, showed off the latest iteration of the company’s device, noting that it’ll be wireless and rechargeable.He also shared footage of a robot that he said was built to perform the implant surgery and also ran through a demonstration of what that surgery could look like, noting that manufacturing and a test clinic were being set up in Austin, Texas.Musk launched Neuralink more than five years ago with the goal of developing technologies that can enhance the connection between humans and computer by way of implanting chips into peoples’ brains.The company so far has only tested on animals.
