Elon Musk drags out pigs in a Neuralink Brain Implant demo

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-machine interface company, showed off a pig with the company’s device during a live stream on YouTube. One pig, Gertrude, had a device that picks up signals from a part of the brain attached to her snout. She had had the implant for two months at the time of the demonstration.

When Gertrude’s snout hit things, a series of dots and a series of sounds indicated that more neurons were firing. Pigs have large areas of their brains devoted to the snout, a sensitive measuring instrument.

The design of the Neuralink device has changed since it was unveiled last year, making the device itself difficult to see on Gertrude. It is now coin-shaped and intended to sit flush with the skull, rather than having a small module resting by the ear. It’s “like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires,” said Musk. A user can communicate with the device via Bluetooth Low Energy and would pair with an app on someone’s phone, he said.

As with last year’s event, Musk said the demonstration’s primary goal was recruitment. (Neuralink currently employs about 100 people, Musk said. Ultimately, he hopes to employ more than 10,000 people.) Merging human brains with AI is why Musk wants to make the devices. But the device has not yet been tested on humans, although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has labeled it a groundbreaking device, a programme with which they would receive feedback from the agency during the development process, Musk said in the presentation.

Neuralink didn’t invent the brain-machine interfaces – they have been around and have been implanted in humans since the first published report in 2006. The company’s main contribution to the technology is their thin, flexible wires, which are covered with electrodes. to pick up the brain. activity.

The wires have more electrodes than other systems – meaning more information – and they may not cause as much damage as stiff needles. Foreign objects in the brain degrade over time, and smaller ones break more quickly. A member of the team said during tonight’s demonstration that one of the biggest challenges for Neuralink was to ensure that the device will last for decades in a corrosive environment like the brain.

The other distinction is Musk’s ambition. He said at tonight’s event that the device could help solve a number of neurological problems, from memory loss to strokes to addiction, or monitor users’ health and alert them if they are having a heart attack. At last year’s event, he said Neuralink could make the device implementation process as simple and safe as Lasik eye surgery; tonight he said it could be done in an hour without general anesthesia.

The first clinical studies will be in a small number of patients with severe spinal cord injury to make sure it works and is safe. Last year, Musk said he hopes to start clinical trials in humans by 2020. In the long run, Musk said they can restore full motion to people with those kinds of injuries with the help of a second implant on the spine.

But the most important thing the device could do, Musk said, is allow humans to achieve what he calls “ AI symbiosis, ” allowing the human brain to merge with artificial intelligence. “Such that the future of the world is controlled by the combined will of the people of Earth – I think that will clearly be the future that we want,” he said tonight.

At this point, the device is limited to the surface of the brain – it doesn’t tunnel to deeper areas. Many important functions, such as movement, vision and hearing, take place on the surface of the brain.

Musk said the company is looking for robotics, electrical and software engineers to work on the device and fine-tune the surgical procedure for its implementation. Since its inception in 2017, the company has had a lot of turnover and only two members of the founding team are still working at Neuralink.

Former employees told Stat News that the company was chaotic and that researchers were under a lot of pressure to go through projects. Scientists were sometimes given weeks to complete projects that would take months, for example. “They’re building a medical device and a surgical approach to implant that medical device, and they’re approaching it with the help of a technology company – move fast and break things,” said an employee.

Musk said the device would be “quite expensive” when it first launches, but he wants to lower the price to a few thousand dollars. “I think it should be possible to make it look like Lasik,” he said.

Update Aug 28, 7:57 PM ET: Updated with additional comments from Musk.