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Elon Musk has featured a pig named Gertrude with a coin-sized computer chip in his brain to demonstrate his ambitious plans to create a functional brain-machine interface.
“It’s like a Fitbit in your skull with little cables,” the billionaire businessman said in a webcast.
His start-up Neuralink requested the launch of human trials last year.
The interface could allow people with neurological conditions to control phones or computers with their minds.
Musk argues that such chips could eventually be used to help cure conditions such as dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injuries.
But the long-term ambition is to usher in an era of what Musk calls “superhuman cognition,” in part to combat artificial intelligence so powerful he says could destroy the human race.
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Gertrude was one of three pigs in pens that participated in the webcast demonstration on Friday. It took her a while to get going, but when she ate and smelled straw, the activity showed up on a graph that tracked her neural activity. Then she almost ignored all the attention around her.
The processor in its brain sends out wireless signals, indicating neural activity in its snout when looking for food.
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Musk said the original Neuralink device, revealed just over a year ago, had been simplified and scaled down.
“It actually fits your skull pretty well. It could be under your hair and you wouldn’t know it.”
Founded in 2017, Neuralink has worked hard to recruit scientists, something Musk was still announcing on Twitter last month and which he said was the purpose of Friday’s demo.
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Getting the human brain to communicate with machines is an ambitious goal
The device the company is developing consists of a small probe containing more than 3,000 electrodes attached to flexible threads thinner than a human hair, which can monitor the activity of 1,000 brain neurons.
Before the webcast, Ari Benjamin of the Kording Lab at the University of Pennsylvania had told BBC News that the real obstacle to the technology could be the enormous complexity of the human brain.
“Once they have the recordings, Neuralink will need to decode them and one day it will hit the barrier that is our lack of basic understanding of how the brain works, no matter how many neurons they record.
“Decoding targets and movement plans is difficult when you don’t understand the neural code in which those things are communicated.”
Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Tesla, have captured the public’s imagination with their attempts to fuel progress in spaceflight and electric vehicles, respectively.
But both also demonstrate the entrepreneur’s habit of making bold statements about projects that end up taking much longer to complete than planned.
