Neuralink Corporation is a Neurotech Company founded by celebrity engineer Elon musk and others (Ben Rapoport, Dongjin Seo, Max Hodak, Paul Merolla, Philip Saps, Tim Gardner, Tim Hanson and Vanessa Tolosa, a group of experts in different areas) in 2016. Successfully aiming at developing implantable brain –machine interfaces; sounds a bit out of some sci-fi movie, doesn’t it?
But what wait till you really understand its true motive and nature of development. Neuralink announced that it was working on a "sewing machine-like" device capable of implanting very thin (4 to 6 μm in width) threads into the brain, and demonstrated a system that read information from a lab rat via 1,500 electrodes; they had anticipated starting experiments with humans in 2020 but have since moved that projection to 2021.
Musk’s goal is to build a neural implant that can sync up the human brain with AI, enabling humans to control computers, prosthetic limbs, and other machines using only thoughts with the help of Artificial Intelligence. When asked during the live Q&A whether the device would ever be used for gaming, Musk answered an emphatic “yes.” (Imagining how dope its sounds with csgo visuals).
By 2018, the company had "remained highly secretive about its work since its launch", although public records showed that it had sought to open an animal testing facility in San Francisco; it subsequently started to carry out research at the University of California, Davis. In 2019, during a live presentation at the California Academy of Sciences, the Neuralink team revealed to the public the technology of the first prototype they had been working on. It is a system that involves ultra-thin probes that will be inserted into the brain, a neurosurgical robot that will perform the operations and a high-density electronic system capable of processing information from neurons.
Musk demonstrated the device with live pigs, one of which had the implant in its brain. A screen above the pig streamed the electrical brain activity being registered by the device. “It’s like a Fit-bit in your skull with tiny wires,” Musk said in his presentation. “You need an electrical thing to solve an electrical problem.”
These external components create the potential risk of infection and aren’t practical outside a research setting. A few groups have experimented in animals with self-contained, fully implanted devices, but not with the capabilities that Neuralink claims to have.
Neuralink’s implant contains all the necessary components, including a battery, processing chip, and Bluetooth radio, along with about a thousand electrode contacts, all on board the device. Each electrode records the activity of somewhere between zero and four neurons in the brain. A thousand of them in a living animal would be the highest number the BCI field has seen from a self-contained implant.
The neurotech company has been criticised by a lot of neuroscientists and publications including MIT Technology Review and PETA. In their own words of censure, “the so good to be true tech” sounds straight out of new Christopher Nolan movie. PETA has criticised the company for using farm animals as their lab rats for the demonstration.
According to MIT technology review, “Neuralink has provided no evidence that it can (or has even tried to) treat depression, insomnia, or a dozen other diseases that Musk mentioned in a slide. One difficulty ahead of the company is perfecting micro wires that can survive the “corrosive” context of a living brain for a decade. That problem alone could take years to solve “.
The primary objective of the streamed demo, instead, was to stir excitement, recruit engineers to the company (which already employs about 100 people), and build the kind of fan base that has cheered on Musk’s other ventures and has helped propel the gravity-defying stock price of electric-car maker Tesla.
Apart from all those criticism and reprove, it’s definitely the next big thing to look forward to for coming few years. How brain implants would bring about such a collective world electronic mind, Musk did not say. Maybe in the next update. Maybe it’s the beginning of the future we’ve all been promised by all those Netflix sci-fi series.
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