What Is Neuralink: A Look At What It Is, What It Wants to Be, and What It Could Become – Kenny L.

Written by MedTech UCL



AI and Machine Learning | Biomedicine | Neuroscience

When I first took science class in elementary school, we learned about the five senses. Maybe not far into the future, that information might be as outdated as the idea of nine planets in our solar system (sorry, Pluto). This might be thanks to Neuralink, a company that’s been making headlines for its controversial brain-chip interface. On July 17, 2019, the company finally unveiled its hard work in a YouTube live stream.

When you first hear it, Neuralink’s pursuit sounds like it comes straight out of a mad genius’s diary; certainly, with Elon Musk at the head of the company, that image might not be a far stretch. But if you look beyond what seems to be a Sci-Fi horror movie, you can get a glimpse of quite a different future for humanity — one that has a new, sixth sense: Neuralink.

What is Neuralink Right Now?

Neuralink is a device that will first be used to help paraplegics with simple tasks such as using an iPhone and making mouse clicks on a computer — by making no physical movement. To be clear, human trials have not yet started; Elon Musk and his team are optimistic about beginning by the end of 2020, but they anchor that timeline with the fact that FDA approval is not easy. So far, Neuralink prototypes have been tested on rodents and apparently even a monkey, according to Musk.