AGL 38.48 Decreased By ▼ -0.08 (-0.21%)
AIRLINK 203.02 Decreased By ▼ -4.75 (-2.29%)
BOP 10.17 Increased By ▲ 0.11 (1.09%)
CNERGY 6.54 Decreased By ▼ -0.54 (-7.63%)
DCL 9.58 Decreased By ▼ -0.41 (-4.1%)
DFML 40.02 Decreased By ▼ -1.12 (-2.72%)
DGKC 98.08 Decreased By ▼ -5.38 (-5.2%)
FCCL 34.96 Decreased By ▼ -1.39 (-3.82%)
FFBL 86.43 Decreased By ▼ -5.16 (-5.63%)
FFL 13.90 Decreased By ▼ -0.70 (-4.79%)
HUBC 131.57 Decreased By ▼ -7.86 (-5.64%)
HUMNL 14.02 Decreased By ▼ -0.08 (-0.57%)
KEL 5.61 Decreased By ▼ -0.36 (-6.03%)
KOSM 7.27 Decreased By ▼ -0.59 (-7.51%)
MLCF 45.59 Decreased By ▼ -1.69 (-3.57%)
NBP 66.38 Decreased By ▼ -7.38 (-10.01%)
OGDC 220.76 Decreased By ▼ -1.90 (-0.85%)
PAEL 38.48 Increased By ▲ 0.37 (0.97%)
PIBTL 8.91 Decreased By ▼ -0.36 (-3.88%)
PPL 197.88 Decreased By ▼ -7.97 (-3.87%)
PRL 39.03 Decreased By ▼ -0.82 (-2.06%)
PTC 25.47 Decreased By ▼ -1.15 (-4.32%)
SEARL 103.05 Decreased By ▼ -7.19 (-6.52%)
TELE 9.02 Decreased By ▼ -0.21 (-2.28%)
TOMCL 36.41 Decreased By ▼ -1.80 (-4.71%)
TPLP 13.75 Decreased By ▼ -0.02 (-0.15%)
TREET 25.12 Decreased By ▼ -1.33 (-5.03%)
TRG 58.04 Decreased By ▼ -2.50 (-4.13%)
UNITY 33.67 Decreased By ▼ -0.47 (-1.38%)
WTL 1.71 Decreased By ▼ -0.17 (-9.04%)
BR100 11,890 Decreased By -408.8 (-3.32%)
BR30 37,357 Decreased By -1520.9 (-3.91%)
KSE100 111,070 Decreased By -3790.4 (-3.3%)
KSE30 34,909 Decreased By -1287 (-3.56%)

SAN FRANCISCO: Elon Musk’s start-up Neuralink on Thursday said it has approval from US regulators to test its brain implants in people.

Neuralink said clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its first in-human clinical study is “an important first step” for its technology, which is intended to let brains interface directly with computers.

“We are excited to share that we have received the FDA’s approval to launch our first-in-human clinical study,” Neuralink said in a post on Musk-run Twitter.

Recruitment for a clinical trial is not yet open, according to Neuralink.

The aim of Neuralink implants is to enable human brains to communicate directly with computers, Musk said during a presentation by the start-up in December. “We’ve been working hard to be ready for our first human (implant), and obviously we want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device in a human,” he said at the time.

Neuralink prototypes, which are the size of a coin, have been implanted in the skulls of monkeys, demonstrations by the startup showed.

At a presentation, Neuralink showed several monkeys “playing” basic video games or moving a cursor on a screen through their Neuralink implant.

The technology has also been tested in pigs.

With the help of a surgical robot, a piece of the skull is replaced with a Neuralink disk, and its wispy wires are strategically inserted into the brain, an early demonstration showed.

The disk registers nerve activity, relaying the information via common Bluetooth wireless signal to a device such as a smartphone, according to Musk.

Judge throws out shareholder lawsuit against Elon Musk over Twitter buyout

“It actually fits quite nicely in your skull,” Musk said during a prior presentation.

“It could be under your hair and you wouldn’t know.”

Uploading memories?

Musk said the company would try to use the implants to restore vision and mobility in humans who had lost such abilities.

“We would initially enable someone who has almost no ability to operate their muscles… and enable them to operate their phone faster than someone who has working hands,” he said.

“As miraculous as it may sound, we are confident that it is possible to restore full body functionality to someone who has a severed spinal cord,” he said.

Beyond the potential to treat neurological diseases, Musk’s ultimate goal is to ensure that humans are not intellectually overwhelmed by artificial intelligence (AI), he said.

Other companies working on similar systems include Synchron, which announced in July that it had implanted the first human brain-machine interface in the United States.

Members of the Neuralink team have shared a “wish list” that ranged from technology returning mobility to the paralyzed and sight to the blind, to enabling telepathy and the uploading of memories for later reference – or perhaps to be downloaded into replacement bodies.

Meanwhile, Musk recently established a business devoted to developing sophisticated AI.

The boss of Tesla has also predicted that autonomous driving technology at the electric car maker is heading for a breakthrough.

Musk has contended that synching minds with machines is vital if people are going to avoid being so outpaced by AI that, under the best of circumstances, humans would be akin to “house cats.”

Experts and academics remain cautious about his vision of symbiotically merging minds with super-powered computing.

Comments

Comments are closed.