Addressing an event held by the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, Musk said the brain implant, which has been successfully used in animals such as pigs and monkeys, would be ready for real human testing sometime next year.
“Neuralink’s working well in monkeys, and we’re actually doing just a lot of testing and just confirming that it’s very safe and reliable, and the Neuralink device can be removed safely,” he said.
Despite Musk’s comments, he has given several different timeframes for human Neuralink tests in the past, saying in 2019 that they would launch sometime around the end of 2020, a prediction later revised to 2021 as of last February and again to 2022 on Monday.
The businessman said that FDA rules haven’t been a major hurdle, as Neuralink’s own standards for implanting the device are “substantially higher” than what the federal agency requires, suggesting the apparent delays could be on the technical, rather than regulatory, side.
Among the most controversial of Musk’s various projects, the Neuralink implant is meant to be inserted directly into the brain to compensate for neurological or spinal cord injuries resulting in disability, such as paralysis. After unveiling a working model of the device in pigs last year, the chip was successfully tested in a nine-year-old macaque monkey in April, with stunning footage purporting to show the animal playing a game of Pong with its mind only.
READ MORE: Musk tells why ‘civilization is going to crumble’
© 2021, paradox. All rights reserved.
