Elon Musk Plans to Start Human Trials on AI Chips Planted on Human Brain

Billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla and SpaceX, stated that he would want to put an implant in a person and merge the human brain with artificial intelligence.

Treating brain injury

Musk stated on Joe Rogan's podcast that Neuralink, the AI-brain-chip company lead by SpaceX and Tesla, is ready to experience on human brains within a year.

Neuralink was founded in 2016 and it is Musk's neural technology company that is creating an implant that is designed to interface directly with the human brain. The main goal of the brain implant is to use it as a means to treat trauma and brain injury, according to Musk.

Musk told Rogan that there is still a lot of work to do, but they do have a chance to put it in a person within a year. Neuralink has a chance of putting input in one end, having the person be healthy, and restore functionality that the person has lost.

The said chip could also be used to restore hearing, eyesight, and limb movement to patients, aside from addressing diseases that affect the brain, as reported by Business Insider.

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The chip would also be implanted directly into the person's skull to enable electrode threads to interface with certain areas of the brain. Musk added that in principle, the chip could help fix anything that is wrong with the human brain.

This is not the first time that Musk had talked about the chip. In July 2019, he also said that he hoped to have an implant in a human patient before 2019 ends.

However, that is just an early goal that Musk has set for Neuralink. In the future, he hopes to create a device that could help enable symbiosis between AI and human.

Neuralink chip

According to Musk, Neuralink will be used to treat brain diseases such as Parkinson's disease. The long-term goal for the chips is to allow humans to compete with the type of advancement that artificial intelligence has.

An early version of the Neuralink has already bee tested on animals and the human trials are said to begin this year. Musk hopes to achieve symbiosis with AI, that will make human language obsolete.

This could be possible within the next 10 years, Musk told Rogan. He said that talking won't even be necessary and people can communicate faster and with more precision. According to scientists in the field of brain-computer interfaces, Musk's plan is not far-fetch.

A report by the Royal Society in 2019 showed that people can communicate by reading minds and that it can be done through neural interfaces. Philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky has doubts about Musk's technology, as he questioned whether it would be possible to talk to other people by using only thoughts.

Chomsky told Inverse back in 2017 that developing methods such as what Musk wants is conceivable. However, trying to find out what a person is thinking is impossible because technology is nowhere near advanced enough for that kind of project. There is no way that technology knows how to proceed if it wants to read minds.