CNN Business —
Elon Musk — the SpaceX founder, Tesla CEO, and most recently Twitter owner — hosted a flashy event Wednesday night for another of his companies: Neuralink, the startup that proposes implants that connect your brain to a computer.
The event featured 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 input words or play video games using only their brain has been done before.
Musk noted during the “Show and Tell” event that the main goal of the night was to recruit talent for Neuralink.
“A lot of times people think they can’t really work at Neuralink because they don’t know anything about biology or how the brain works,” Musk said. “What we really want to emphasize here is that you don’t have to, because if you break down the skills required to make Neuralink work, it’s actually many of the same skills required to make a smartwatch or modern Phone works.”
DJ Seo, vice president of implants at Neuralink, showed off the company’s latest version of the device, noting that it will be wireless and rechargeable. He also shared footage of a robot he said was being built to perform the implant surgery and also did a demonstration of what that surgery might look like, noting that there is a manufacturing and testing clinic in Austin, Texas would be set up.
Musk launched Neuralink more than five years ago with the goal of developing technology that could improve the connection between humans and computers by implanting chips in people’s brains. The company has only tested on animals so far.
Last year, for example, Neuralink said it could allow monkeys to play the video game Pong using only their brain implants, even though something similar had been achieved in a human with a brain implant more than a decade ago. Musk on Wednesday touted footage of the monkey playing pong again.
However, the use of animals has angered activists. The company has admitted that one monkey died during the testing process.
“We’re doing everything we can with rigorous benchtop testing so we’re not complacent when it comes to putting devices in animals,” Musk said Wednesday.
The core idea behind Neuralink raises numerous ethical and socio-political questions. But proponents say such devices offer life-changing help to amputees and the disabled when they lose the ability to use their hands or see, for example.
However, Musk also tends to emphasize non-medical applications, such as using brain implants to level the playing field as digital artificial intelligence becomes smarter than any human.
“How do we mitigate this risk? At the species level?” Musk asked on Wednesday. “Even in a benign scenario where the AI is very, very benevolent – how do we handle the ride then?”
Musk’s Neuralink isn’t the only organization pursuing this technology. And some federally funded researchers are already conducting some clinical trials.
During Wednesday’s event, Musk was asked if Neuralink plans to make its tools available to neuroscientists. He replied that the company would do so after it reached the production stage.
Before Neuralink’s brain implants can be mass-produced and released to the broader market, they must receive regulatory approval. The US Food and Drug Administration issued a paper last May outlining the agency’s initial thoughts on brain-computer interface devices, noting that the field is making “rapid advances.”
Musk said Wednesday that Neuraink has filed “most” of its filings with the FDA and could begin human testing within six months. However, it should be noted that from his claims of when SpaceX would launch its Mars rocket to his predictions of when self-driving cars would hit the streets, Musk frequently announces deadlines that don’t materialize.