Elon Musk’s health tech company, Neuralink, recently showcased its brain-implant technology.
According to Musk, two of the company’s apps will soon be able to restore eyesight, even for individuals born blind, and a third would concentrate on the motor cortex to restore “whole body functioning” for patients with severed spinal cords.
Musk, who also owns Tesla and Twitter, added that Neuralink may test motor cortex technology in human beings in six months.
The tycoon launched Brain Control Interfaces six years ago and debuted his implanter robot to the public two years afterwards.
Having a microchip inserted in the human body is an ancient practice, but Musk’s new innovation is nonetheless momentous.
Musk demonstrated telepathically playing a video game with a monkey, explaining that when Neuralink implants this gadget in a person’s brain, he or she won’t need to move or pick up the phone. The phone will link straight to his brain. Link, a coin-sized gadget, will allow brain activity to operate a computer, phone, or any other digital device. This chip allows paralysed people to operate the mouse and point without using their hands.
If this chip is implanted in a person, they will stay put and work as they think. Neuralink claims to be developing an undetectable brain-computer interface to manage your computer or phone remotely.
Neuralink’ s ambitious project may make mountain climbing possible for everybody. Photographers may also shoot images without touching a camera if they have this “brain chip” in their brains. Perhaps this wonderful discovery will help cure many neurological problems.
Although some experts doubt whether the chip can be safely fitted in the human brain, it is clear that the technology is so advanced that, in six months, it may change the way look at ourselves as human beings.
Surjit Singh Flora is a veteran journalist based in Brampton, Canada.
