Neuralink , the startup led by Elon Musk and founded in 2017, is working on a technology based on “threads”, which can be implanted in human brains with much less potential impact on the surrounding brain tissue compared to brain-machine interfaces that are used today.
“Most people don’t realize, we can solve it with a chip,” Musk said at the Neuralink launch event, as he spoke about some of the brain disorders and problems the company hopes to solve with this new device.
Musk also stated that, in the long term, Neuralink will try to find a way to “achieve a kind of symbiosis with artificial intelligence. This is not mandatory. It’s something you can choose if you want. “
Medical purposes
For now, the goal is medical , and the plan is to use a robot that Neuralink has created that works like a “sewing machine” to implant these threads, which are incredibly thin (between 4 and 6 μm, which is about a third the diameter of the thinnest human hair), deep within a person’s brain tissue, where it will be able to perform read and write operations with a very high volume of data.
The chips, which measure about 4mm by 4mm, will be designed to stimulate neurons (or nerve cells in the human brain that communicate with other cells), using tiny flexible wires of electrodes. Each electrode wire would be inserted using a precision robot in a procedure that Musk said would be as safe and painless as LASIK eye surgery (there are 3,072 electrodes and 96 wires in a single device).
Although it really sounds like the purest cyberpunk aesthetic, and to a certain extent it is, the Neuralink scientists said they still have a “long way to go” before they can offer a commercial service.
Neuralink co-founder and president Max Hodak commented that Neuralink could, in theory, allow amputees to regain mobility through the use of prosthetics and reverse vision, hearing, or other sensory impairments. In fact, the company hopes to begin working with human test subjects in 2020, including through possible collaboration with neurosurgeons at Stanford University and other institutions.
The current incarnation of Neuralink technology would involve drilling actual holes into a subject’s skull to insert the ultra-thin threads into their cerebral cortex, but future iterations will switch to using lasers to create tiny holes that are much less invasive and essentially , the patient will not even feel them.
Although working with humans may seem unlikely at the moment, the company has already demonstrated the feasibility of the technology in experiments with laboratory rodents, with performance levels that exceed current systems in terms of data transfer. The mouse data was collected via a USB-C port on its head, and it provided roughly 10 times more than today’s best sensors can deliver.
The plan is also for electrodes implanted in the brain to be able to communicate wirelessly with chips outside the brain, providing real-time monitoring with unprecedented freedom of movement, without cables or external connections.
Elon Musk is funding most of this project, in addition to acting as its CEO, with $ 100 million of the $ 158 million he has raised so far. Neuralink has 90 employees, and it seems to continue hiring staff aggressively because basically we can only find job postings on the company’s website.
Before Neuralink can offer this device commercially, it will have to wait for the approval of the US Department of Health ( FDA) , something they hope will be viable very soon as well.
