Elon Musk estimated Wednesday that within six months his start-up Neuralink would be able to implant its first connected device in the brain of a human, to communicate with computers directly by thought.
“We obviously want to be very careful and to be sure that it will work well, but we have submitted all our documents to the FDA (the agency in charge of public health in the United States, editor’s note) and we believe that within six months we will be able to have our first implant in a human,” said the boss of Tesla, SpaceX (space shuttles) and other start-ups during a presentation of Neuralink’s progress.
“We are now confident that Neuralink’s device is ready for humans, so the timeline depends on the FDA approval process,” he then clarified on Twitter, the social network he bought it. a month ago.
The billionaire is a regular at risky predictions, especially about the autonomy of Tesla electric cars.
In July 2019, he estimated that Neuralink could perform its first tests on individuals in 2020.
But so far, the coin-sized prototypes have been implanted in the skulls of animals.
Several monkeys are thus able to “play” video games or “type” words on a screen, simply by following the movement of the cursor on the screen with their eyes.
On Wednesday, Elon Musk and Neuralink engineers also took stock of the start-up’s latest advances in the development of the robot surgeon and the development of other implants, to be installed in the spinal cord or the eyes, to restore mobility or vision.
Beyond the potential to treat neurological diseases, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal is to ensure that humans are not intellectually overwhelmed by artificial intelligence systems.
Other companies are working on the control of computers by thought, such as Synchron, which announced in July that it had implemented the first brain-machine interface in the United States.
In recent months, Elon Musk has urged his employees to work faster. “We’ll all be dead before anything useful happens,” he told the Neuralink team during a meeting, according to Bloomberg.
He recently fired more than half of Twitter’s staff, as well as social network executives who had expressed views contrary to his in public, and asked the remaining employees to commit to “extremely intense” work.
The annual Neuralink conference is supposed to be used to generate vocations to recruit different specialists.