Will you plant chips in your brain this time? Musk’s unimaginable’telepathy’ challenge

Following the popularization of electric vehicles, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who opened the era of civilian spacecraft, planted a computer chip in the monkey brain. He said that he will open an era of controlling computers, fixing brain diseases, and exchanging telepathy with only thoughts.

According to foreign media such as Business Insider on the 1st (local time), Musk announced the development of a microchip that connects the human brain and a computer in an interview with the social media clubhouse.

He said his founding neurotechnology company Neuralink implanted a wireless computer chip that connects to a video game in the monkey’s brain, and the results will be released in video a month later.

“We want the monkeys to do’mind pong’ with each other,” he called the monkey “happy monkey.” Mind Pong is a video game that moves with thoughts without using the body.

In August of last year, Neurallink also introduced the’Gertrude’, a pig whose brain was chipped. Gerturt, which was released on YouTube live broadcast, apparently was no different from a regular pig. But every time I smelled it, a signal sent to my brain was sent to my computer.

In Gerturt’s head, there was a chip measuring 23mm wide and 8mm long. Called’Link V0.9′, the chip is housed in a coin-shaped case with electrodes along with a communication device. When the chip reads the signal sent to the brain, the communication device transmits the brain wave to the computer at a rate of 10 megabits per second. Because the chip was implanted in the brain cortex, it was not visible from the outside.

At the time, Musk called the chip a’pitbit’ in the skull. Fitbit is a smart watch that measures the amount of exercise or heart rate. He said that the chip will be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the’Great Innovation Device’ program, and will easily pass from clinical trials to formal approval applications.

Musk plans to treat various brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and memory loss with this chip. Furthermore, the ultimate goal is to read brain waves with each other, communicate telepathically, and preserve thoughts by implanting them into robots. Neurallink was founded in 2017 to realize this. At the time, Musk made plans to plant chips in human brains by 2020 and commercialize them by 2024.

However, the evaluation of experts is not very generous yet. It was pointed out that Gerturt’s experiment was no different from the brain-computer connection devices developed by other research institutes and companies. There is no groundbreaking idea for how to use the brain data that Chip perceives.

There have been many similar attempts so far. Over the course of more than 30 years, not only treatments for brain diseases through electrical stimulation, but also experiments to move arms by connecting brains and robots have been successful. Last year in France, a patient who was diagnosed with quadriplegia operated a robot with a chip implanted in the brain.

It is also a question of how to experiment with people. This is because the chips planted in the brain can corrode and cause bleeding or inflammation. As safety is not guaranteed, experts predict that it will be difficult to persuade the subject. Various ethical issues may be raised here.

MIT Technology Review, a global science and technology magazine, predicted that “permanently implanting a chip in the brain is a different problem than an experiment,” and “it will take only a few years to solve the chip corrosion problem.”

Reporter Lee Min-jung [email protected]