Musk vows interface implants in human brains within six months

Elon Musk said on Wednesday one of his companies would, in six months, be able to implant a device into a human brain that would allow communication with a computer.

The interface, produced by his startup Neuralink, would allow the user to communicate directly with computers through their thoughts, the technology billionaire said.

“We’ve submitted I think most of our paperwork to the FDA and we think probably in about six months we should be able to have our first Neuralink in a human,” Musk said in a company presentation, using the acronym of the United States’ Food and Drug Administration.

“We’ve been working hard to be ready for our first human [implant], and obviously we want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device in a human,” he added.

Musk — who bought Twitter last month and also owns SpaceX, Tesla and several other companies — has been known to make ambitious predictions about his companies, with several not becoming reality.

In July 2019, he vowed that Neuralink would be able to perform its first tests on humans in 2020.

The prototypes, which are the size of a coin, have been implanted in the skulls of monkeys.

At the Neuralink presentation, the company showed several monkeys “playing” basic video games or moving a cursor on a screen through their Neuralink implant.

Musk said the company would try to use the implants to restore vision and mobility in humans.

“We would initially enable someone who has almost no ability to operate their muscles... and enable them to operate their phone faster than someone who has working hands,” he said.

“As miraculous as it may sound, we are confident that it is possible to restore full body functionality to someone who has a severed spinal cord,” he added.

Beyond the potential to treat neurological diseases, Musk’s ultimate goal is to ensure that humans are not intellectually overwhelmed by artificial intelligence, according to him.

Other companies working on similar systems include Synchron, which announced in July that it had implanted the first brain-machine interface in the US.