Elon Musk and Neuralink chips in the brain. The first patient has problems

Two months ago, Neuralink admitted that most of its electrodes that collect brain signals had become detached from brain tissue. However, the implant has now been found to be “more or less stable,” National Geographic writes.

What is Elon Musk and Neuralink up to? Since 2016, work has been underway to develop chips capable of monitoring the electrical activity of neurons. They will eventually be built. BCI (Brain Computer Interface): Brain-Computer InterfaceA system that allows you to control a computer with your thoughts. Literally, the machine will do the work that the paralyzed person imagines.

Neuralink implantation It involves a robot drilling a hole into a person’s skull. An implant containing 1,024 electrodes arranged in 64 flexible “threads,” each thinner than a human hair, is then attached to the head.

However, on May 8, Neuralink revealed on its blog that there was a problem with the first chip implanted in Arbaugh. Already in late February, shortly after the surgery, some of the leads began to “pull out of the brain” (as the blog post put it). By early May, only 15 percent of them were operational. The rest had shifted their positions and were not sending signals, affecting the device’s efficiency, National Geographic explains.

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Meanwhile, Elon Musk is facing accusations that by rushing the implant, he is contributing to the deaths of animals during lab tests. They appear to be “dropping by the dozens.” However, the billionaire insists that no monkeys have died or been harmed by Neuralink’s technology.

According to Musk, the long-term goal is to mitigate the civilizational risks associated with artificial intelligence. Neuralink could help achieve this by creating “a closer symbiosis between human and digital intelligence.” The idea, as Musk put it, “is to give people superpowers,” Forsal.pl writes.