Elon Musk presents Neuralink September 29, 2015 -
Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP / SIPA
Elon Musk's start-up is advancing in the race for human-machine interfaces.
Neuralink implanted a smart chip in the brain of a guinea pig named Gertrude.
A prototype to manufacture the version for humans that will restore speech and mobility to paralyzed people.
“It's like a Fitbit (smartwatch) in your head,” Elon Musk enthused Friday, during an online conference on the progress of his brain-to-computer interface project, which is getting a lot of attention. skepticism in the scientific community.
Treat neurological diseases
The futuristic entrepreneur (Tesla, SpaceX) presented a year ago a chip with ultra-fine threads, which can be implanted in the brain by a robot - a kind of ultra-precise sewing machine.
The new model, wireless thanks to bluetooth technology, charges at night and measures 23 mm in diameter (like a small coin) by 8 mm in thickness.
In theory, the round chip will be implanted in the brain, without having to spend a night in the hospital, and without leaving any trace, except for a small scar under the hair.
It will first be used to treat neurological diseases.
But the long-term goal is to make implants so safe, reliable and simple that they would qualify for elective (comfort) surgery.
For now, in Neuralink's labs, the pig Gertrude is walking on a treadmill, snouting in a feeder hanging in front of her, while the chip retransmits her neurological signals.
From this information, the computer is able to predict at any time where each of its members is.
What gives hope to restore mobility to paraplegic people.
In the event of a spinal cord injury, one could implant another chip at the site of the injury, and bypass the damaged "transmission circuits", imagines Elon Musk.
"In the long term, I am sure that we will be able to regain full use of our body."
Many scientists point out, however, that the brain is not as compartmentalized as one would like to think.
“Each brain has a unique, massively interconnected structure,” said Dean Burnett, a Cardiff University researcher, ahead of the conference, saying he was skeptical of the real advances of Neuralink.
The goal of the whimsical boss, with this presentation on YouTube, was above all to attract and recruit many engineers, surgeons, chemists, robotics specialists and others.
A "symbiosis with AI"
The chip is thus supposed to allow us to arrive at a "symbiosis with the AI".
He also touched on the possibility of communicating raw thoughts, not limited by human languages - "consensus and conceptual non-linguistic telepathy".
His team dreams, among other things, of putting an end to extreme pain, of curing depressions and addictions or of unraveling the mysteries of consciousness.
Referring to an episode of the Black Mirror series, Elon Musk also said that it would be possible to store his memories in digital form.
“You will be able to save your memories, and also potentially download them to another body or to a robot,” he said.
“The future is going to be weird”.
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Neuralink: Elon Musk's start-up unveils an implant to connect the human brain to a computer
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