Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink says it has received Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval to start its first human clinical trial. If that’s true, it means actual people could have a Neuralink device implanted in their heads.
The news follows Elon Musk’s claim in November that Neuralink was about six months away from its first human trial — suggesting it’s the rare Musk promise that’s actually being fulfilled in time. The announcement of a future human trial isn’t nearly as big a milestone as the results of that trial. But this is not just any process. This represents Elon Musk of all people, who manages to connect a device to a human brain.
And we ask ourselves: Who would sign up for something like this and why? Will it be someone who may have a compelling medical reason, or someone keen to get the world’s attention alongside Musk, and is there a chance it might be Elon Musk himself? Musk has claimed he will have the device implanted in his own head at an unspecified time in the future.
If you think you’d like to take part in the Neuralink study yourself, you don’t have to do anything for now. Neuralink says recruitment is not yet open and that more information will be announced “soon.”