Neuralink showed a video where Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old quadriplegic and the first implanted with the company’s chip, he plays chess on his laptop and controls the moves in his mind.

Neuralink, a company owned by Elon Musk and one of the leaders in BCI technology research (implantable brain-computer interface) announced at the beginning of this year the start of experiments on humans. Initial results in the first patient showed promising detection of neuronal spikes, which the company has now completed by reporting a practical case.

The aim of these tests is a well-known goal: to achieve a natural channel of interaction between humans and machines. The idea is to obtain brain waves from people, which are then processed and interpreted by a computer. In other words, the connection of human brains with artificial intelligence in the framework of “neural links” that allows to find solutions that do not currently exist for the treatment of neurological diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease or paralysis, traffic accidents.

This is the case of Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old man who suffered a diving accident. He was paralyzed from the shoulders down. Arbaugh is the first known Neuralink patient. The company announced it was implemented in January after human trials of the surgery were allowed. “super simple” which requires only one day of hospitalization.

in the video we see the movement (with the mind) of the laptop mouse cursor move the chess pieces. He also says he was able to play the strategy game Civilization VI for 8 hours straight. Arbaugh himself clarified that despite his severe paralysis “He has no cognitive impairment” and is therefore an ideal patient for testing with these technologies.

https://t.co/OMIeGGjYtG

— Neuralink (@neuralink) March 20, 2024

Neuralink: hope and caution

Kip Ludwig, former director of the neural engineering program at the US National Institutes of Health, explained that “good starting point”although he expressed his reservations: “We are still in the early days post-implant and there is a lot of learning on both the Neuralink side and the subject side to maximize the amount of control information that can be achieved.”.

It should be kept in mind that the progress reported by Elon Musk’s company They do not yet have adequate scientific confirmation and peer review. In fact, other researchers question whether Neuralink is ready to do research as ambitious as the ones it proposes. The company also has complaints about animal practices.

We’ll see. The first human experiments are being conducted by a group of neuroscientists from Stanford University, and they are undoubtedly encouraging for many patients. Ethical issues are also not insignificant, and behind them are the dangers of the fusion of humans and machines that we have seen in science fiction.