by Elon Musk showed a nine-minute live streaming video of the patient with the first Neuralink brain implant being used to play chess.
Volunteer Noland Arbaugh, who had the pound coin-sized chip implanted in his brain earlier this year, also played the video game Civilization for eight hours, he said.
The former paraplegic athlete, who was left with no movement from the shoulders down after a car accident in 2016, said the operation was “really easy” but admitted there have been “some problems” since.
Arbaugh said: “I don’t want people to think this is the end of the journey, there’s still a lot of work to do, but my life has already changed,”
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently gave Neuralink approval to begin human trials, after initially rejecting it.
Neuralink, launched in 2016, is focused on creating devices that can be implanted in the human brain, and has already successfully implanted chips in mice, pigs and monkeys.
A report by one of Musk’s biographers, Ashlee Vance, recently described the procedure – where a surgeon removes a chunk of a skull, before a robot inserts electrodes and ultra-thin wires into the brain.
A separate unit sits behind the ear, with wires running directly into the wearer’s brain.
Is this really advanced?
While Musk’s achievement has been widely praised around the world, Kip Ludwig, former program director for neural engineering at the US National Institutes of Health, described what Neuralink revealed as “destiny”.
Ludwig said: “It’s still very early post-implantation days, and there’s a lot of learning going on both on the Neuralink side and on the material side to maximize the amount of information that can be extracted for control.
“It’s definitely a good starting point.”
A number of competing firms are already testing similar technology, with direct competitors such as Synchron and other companies such as Blackrock Neurotech.
Writing in The Conversation, David Tuffley, Senior Lecturer in Applied Ethics & Cybersecurity at Griffith University, said: “Neural implants have been helping people since the early 1960s when the first cochlear implant was fitted to someone with hearing loss. progress since 60 years ago.”
Monkeys were moving cursors with brain implants in the early 2000s.
An under-the-radar firm, Blackrock Neurotech (not related to the asset management firm), has implanted ‘brain computer interfaces’ (BCIs) in dozens of patients over the past 19 years. .
Their chips have helped paralyzed patients create art and play Pong in the lab – and the company hopes to create a version for home use soon.
What would happen next?
The companies leading the technology are hopeful that it could treat disorders including deafness, blindness and even paralysis, which could theoretically allow people to walk again.
Researchers at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland have shown how brain chips could be used to enable a man paralyzed in a cycling accident to walk again.
The researchers show how a signal could be transmitted to a second device in his spine that would cause his limbs to move.
Neuralink aims to implant a chip in more people this year, with thousands of volunteers lined up to take part.
Neuralink also believes its device will eventually be able to restore neural activity within the body, allowing those with spinal cord injuries to move limbs.
The company based in San Francisco and Austin is trying to cure neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s and dementia.
What could happen in the long term?
In the long term, advocates of the technology (like Musk) believe that the technology could lead to a way to connect people directly to computers.
Musk described this advance as “species-level important” and envisioned a future where humans could communicate with computers “faster than a speed typewriter or an auctioneer.” He believes that one day, people could save their memories and replay them from computer systems.
He also predicted that the technology would “solve many brain/spine injuries and is ultimately necessary for an AI symbiosis”.
“Over time I think we’ll see a closer merging of biological information and digital information,” he said in 2017. “It’s mostly about bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of you , especially the output. “
Research from forecasters Foresight Factory suggests that more than a third of consumers (35%) would be willing to implant such a chip, to connect directly to computer systems.
The firm has begun work on flexible threads, much thinner than a human hair, designed to be implanted in the brain by a large robot to “read” brain activity.
Musk has also made various claims about what Neuralink could one day do – from ‘telepathic’ communication, to wearers being able to operate bionic limbs based on Tesla’s Optimus robot.
