ELON MUSK’S NEURALINK CONFIDENT FIRST CHIP WILL
BE IMPLANTED IN A HUMAN BRAIN IN 2023

THE TWITTER OWNER SAID PENDING FDA APPROVAL A PROCEDURE TO INSERT A SEMICONDUCTOR ALLOWING THE BRAIN TO CONNECT WITH A COMPUTER VIA BLUETOOTH COULD BE TESTED IN SIX MONTHS

Elon Musk suggested
could be ready for testing as early as 2023. “It could be that I am one of those test samples,” he added, somewhere between joking and serious, to laughter from those present at the live-streamed event. The man who in recent weeks has infuriated the American left, staged a brief confrontation with Apple and turned Twitter on its head, for a few hours placed his role as provocateur to one side to wear the mask of a visionary entrepreneur focused on technological advances.

In 2021, Neuralink published a video of a monkey playing Pong
the Atari console video game based on the dynamics of ping pong. It became a viral sensation with more than six million views. The novelty was not that the primate, a macaque named Pager, was interacting with the game, but that he was manipulating the controls with his eyes: he was playing the game with his mind. The team at Musk’s company had implanted two chips in both sides of his head six months earlier. First, Pager was taught to play the game with a joystick, and then, according to Musk, the device was removed and the Neuralink inserted.

n Twitter: that a user asked Musk about the potential consequences of inserting the chip which is about the size of a US 25-cent coin?
into the human brain. “Once you’re in there, there’s a lot of things you can do, a lot of health monitoring,” Musk responded. “You could measure body temperature to detect a fever early You could detect a stroke early on because you would see electrical impulses from the brain, something like a short circuit,” he added.
restore vision
“I think this is notable in that even if someone has never had vision, like they were born blind, we believe we can still restore vision. The visual part of the cortex is still there. Even if they’ve never seen before, we’re confident they could see,” he said. Medical experts, however, view such claims with a pinch of salt.

on Twitter: that a user asked Musk about the potential consequences of inserting the chip which is about the size of a US 25-cent coin?
into the human brain. “Once you’re in there, there’s a lot of things you can do, a lot of health monitoring,” Musk responded. “You could measure body temperature to detect a fever early You could detect a stroke early on because you would see electrical impulses from the brain, something like a short circuit,” he added.
restore vision
“I think this is notable in that even if someone has never had vision, like they were born blind, we believe we can still restore vision. The visual part of the cortex is still there. Even if they’ve never seen before, we’re confident they could see,” he said. Medical experts, however, view such claims with a pinch of salt.

Neuralink unveiled an extensive technical presentation to discuss progress made in recent months, from the evolution of the robot that inserts the chip into the brain – known as Link or R1 and developed in 2020 – to the debugging of tungsten needles, the production time of which has been drastically reduced, pointing to future mass production.
​One of the videos shows the brief process by which the company’s robot inserts the semiconductor: a quick pinprick lasting milliseconds. After this, however, comes the process by which the wiring is inserted to allow transmission to the external receivers. These consist of thin wires of about the thickness of a human hair. The insertion is so soft that the Neuralink team stated the procedure would not damage a grape.

the FDA had rejected Neuralink’s application
last year to conduct trials in people, citing anonymous sources. Musk said in November that the company had submitted most of its paperwork to the FDA and expected to begin human trials in six month, Musk and Neuralink didn’t respond to interview requests. A reporter who approached Neuralink’s Austin campus was asked to leave. Neuralink’s competitors emphasize they are focused on helping people stricken by paralysis recover control of the body. Their prowess is increasingly impressive — from that presidential fist bump to converting the garbled vocalizations of a woman with ALS to text at 62 words per minute, according to a January study by Stanford researchers that hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed.

The brain as a stadium
People in the field, known as brain-computer interface technology, often offer an analogy to a sporting event. For devices that go on top of the head, it’s like hearing the crowd roar from outside the stadium. For those that penetrate the brain, it’s like lowering microphones into the stands and picking up conversations of individual people.Several companies designing implants want to record from as many of these metaphorical microphones as possible, betting this will provide the clearest signal of brain activity and the fastest way to transmit it to a computer. Others say they can get a decent signal without piercing the brain, and can do so with less risk.
In 2004
A study published in January found relatively few adverse events among 14 adults who’ve received a brain-computer implant going back to 2004. The outcomes involved no deaths or disabling complications, leading the authors to conclude its safety record is “comparable to other chronically implanted medical devices.” the brain-computer implant in that study is now manufactured by Blackrock and has been used by 35 patients. The Utah Array, as it is known, resembles a tiny hairbrush with about 100 spikelike electrodes and is part of a system Blackrock hopes to bring to market this year. The device also has been found to produce inflammation where it penetrates the brain that can eventually damage tissue.

How brain chips can change you
Studies show that Elon Musk's new tech can bend your mind in strange and troubling ways
As Anna Wexler, an assistant professor of philosophy in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania
put it: "Of course it causes changes. The question is what kinds of changes does it cause, and how much do those changes matter?"
A changed mind
There have been no confirmed cases of "Terminal Man"-style violent rampages caused by BCIs, but compelling evidence suggests the devices can cause cognitive changes beyond the scope of their intended applications.
Some of these changes have been positive; after all, BCIs are intended to change certain things about their users. Wexler, the University of Pennsylvania philosophy professor, interviewed people with Parkinson's who were undergoing deep-brain stimulation, a surgical treatment that involves implanting thin metal wires that send electrical pulses to the brain to help abate motor symptoms, and found that many had lost their sense of self before undergoing treatment. "Many felt that the disease had robbed them, in some ways, of who they were," she told me.

"It really impacts your identity
your sense of self, if you can't do the things that you think of yourself as being able to do." In these instances, BCIs helped the people feel like they were returning to themselves by helping treat the underlying disease.

The positive changes
in personality and self-perception among people using BCIs.
In a 2016 paper on attitudes and ethical considerations surrounding DBS, they reported that study participants often felt that the treatment helped them recapture an "authentic" self that had been worn away by depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The negative changes
Frederic Gilbert, a philosophy professor at the University of Tasmania specializing in applied neuroethics, has noticed some odd effects.
"The notions of personality, identity, agency, authenticity, autonomy, and self — these are very compact, obscure, and opaque dimensions," Gilbert told me. "Nobody really agrees on what they mean, but we have cases where it's clear that BCIs have induced changes in personality or expression of sexuality."

There are also privacy concerns
that come with a computer getting access to your brain waves. "If you get a device to help you move your prosthetic arm, for instance, that device will pick up other sources of noise that you may not want to be out of your brain," Gilbert said. "There is a lot of background noise, and that background noise can be deciphered. That noise is necessarily converted, sitting somewhere on the cloud." Someone could learn a lot by studying your brain waves, and if a hacker managed to access your data, they could read your mind, in a sense, by looking for specific expressions of brain-signal activity.

The Links
https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2022-12-01/elon-musks-neuralink-confident-first-chip-will-be-implanted-in-a-human-brain-in-2023.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/03/03/brain-chips-paradromics-synchron/
https://www.businessinsider.com/brain-chips-elon-musk-neuralink-change-personality-behavior-computer-tech-2023-2
​https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9221469/china-invents-mind-reading-brain-chip