neuralink presentation 2022

Elon Musk hopes humans will be testing Neuralink brain implants in the next six months

Experts argue for caution as FDA approval still looms in the distance.

By Andrew Paul | Published Dec 1, 2022 11:45 AM EST

Elon Musk hosted Neuralink’s latest “show and tell” presentation last night, focusing on progress in the development of highly advanced, affordable brain-computer interface implants for humans. Co-founded by Musk in 2016, Neuralink joined a crowded field of companies and medical organizations already making strides for years towards wireless human-computer interfaces. Wednesday evening, Musk expressed confidence that human trials can begin within the next six months pending FDA approval. But the technology on display was once again met with skepticism from industry experts , who cited existing projects already meeting or surpassing some of Neuralink’s benchmarks.

[Related: Brain interfaces aren’t nearly as easy as Elon Musk makes them seem .]

Musk explained on stage that Neuralink’s initial two goals for humans will be restoring vision, even for those born congenitally blind, and connecting with the motor cortex for those with a “Stephen Hawking-type situation,” as Musk puts it, to do things like “control their phone better than someone who has working hands.” Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 1962, and in later years communicated using a speech generating device controlled via augmented keyboard systems as his paralysis intensified.

Eventually, Musk wants Neuralink devices to bridge the signal between brain and spinal cord with additional implants, and is confident there are no physical barriers to restoring full body functionality. He also noted Neuralink plans for devices to have complete reversibility and upgradability, likening the hypothetical future process to replacing outdated iPhones for the new edition. The company’s current “N1” chip is now roughly the size of a quarter and connected into the brain underneath the skin. A robotic surgeon is used to implant the chip’s multitude of wires, each no wider than a few red blood cells, which then establishes communication with test subjects’ brains.

While Musk now has his eye on 2023 human trials, the Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter CEO has made similarly ambitious, ultimately unrealized timeline claims in the past—in 2019, he previously stated an aim to receive a regulatory green light by the end of 2020. Two years later, Musk expressed hope that Neuralink human trials could begin by the end of this year . Critics within the fields of neuroscience, neurosurgery, and biomedical engineering have already described last night’s presentation as offering “ incremental advances ,” adding that audiences should be wary of any promises made before approval from the FDA or any other regulatory bodies.

[Related: Watch Elon Musk unveil the next version of his AI-powered brain implant, Neuralink .]

Another major theme of the night wasn’t focused on the technology but those undergoing testing. Neuralink first debuted its early prototypes in rats during a 2019 demonstration . Since then, the company has moved on to additional interface developments for sheep, pigs, and macaque monkeys—experiments that drew scrutiny and criticism from activists after Musk confirmed in February that some monkeys have died during testing. Ahead of last night’s presentation, the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine urged Musk to release additional information on past tests which purportedly resulted in infections, seizures, internal bleeding, and paralysis in animals.

Musk repeatedly emphasized test animals’ safety and comfortability, and stressed that Neuralink “not cavalier about putting devices into animals.” At one point, he argued that a monkey shown in a video operating a computer keyboard using a Neuralink implant “actually likes doing the demo, and is not strapped to the chair or anything.”

“I don’t want to oversell this thing,” Musk said at one point while on stage.

Andrew Paul is Popular Science's staff writer covering tech news. Previously, he was a regular contributor to The A.V. Club and Input, and has had recent work also featured by Rolling Stone, Fangoria, GQ, Slate, NBC, as well as McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He lives outside Indianapolis.

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Work in progress? —

Over a year later, musk’s neuralink still 6 months from human trials, lots of tech in development, but we're still waiting for indications of an application..

John Timmer - Dec 1, 2022 9:59 pm UTC

On Wednesday night, Elon Musk hosted an update from his brain-computer interface company, Neuralink. Most of the update involved various researchers at the company providing overviews of the specific areas of technology development they were working on. But there wasn't anything dramatically new in the tech compared to the company's 2020 update , and it was difficult to piece the presentations together into a coherent picture of what the company plans to do with its hardware.

But probably the most striking thing is that the prior update indicated that Neuralink was getting close to human testing. Over a year later, those tests remain about six months out, according to Musk.

Lots of tech

Neuralink involves a large series of overlapping technical efforts. The interface itself requires electrodes implanted into the brain. To connect those electrodes with the outside world, Neuralink is using a small bit of hardware implanted in the skull. This contains a battery that can be recharged wirelessly, and a low-power chip that gathers data from the electrodes, performs some simple processing on it, and then transmits that data wirelessly.

Getting all that in place requires delicate neurosurgery, and the company is developing a surgical robot to make that process safe and consistent.

On the other end of the process, neural signals have to be interpreted in near real time to understand what's happening in a given brain region. This requires computer systems that can handle everything from patient-to-patient variability to hour-to-hour differences in brain activity. Finally, in some cases, the device will need to send information back to the brain in a way that the nerve cells there can interpret (either immediately or following a learning process).

That's... a lot of things. And the event saw people talking about almost all of them. In many cases, the information was substantially similar to what was shown the year before. Various animals with implants were shown doing everything from playing Pong to manipulating cursors and typing using their implants—more examples than last year, but not radically different. Similarly, Musk talked a bit more about the implant's processing capacity, now provided partly by an ARM processor. There are some indications of evolutionary progress, but there are no indications that it's close to a finalized design that's ready for a Food and Drug Administration submission.

Perhaps the most significant difference from years prior is the level of detail involved in the surgical robot. This time, there was both an on-stage demo of the hardware and a fair bit of time spent discussing the details of the surgical procedure it was being developed for. In the previous update, the development of the robot appeared to be lagging.

We've been here before

The event was said to be a general overview of the company's activities, and the presentations seemed to cover all of the key areas Neuralink is working on. But there are issues with that approach.

One is that brain implants have been an active research area for decades. While the details are different, many things Neuralink was showing off have been done before. To an extent, that's understandable. Neuralink is developing its own electrodes, implant, and processing system. As such, it needs to demonstrate that these systems can perform like previously tested electrodes in animal experiments. But, so far, at least, Neuralink hasn't provided any indications that its systems are superior to those that have already been tested extensively or were on a trajectory to get there.

Meanwhile, some of its competitors progressed in the areas where Neuralink sought to differentiate itself. Blackrock Neurotech, for example, is now touting fully implantable electronics that offer wireless charging and data transfer. And the company has already sent hardware through a clinical trial and is applying for FDA approval. In fact, the company has several additional clinical trials in progress.

The custom surgical robot seems unique to Neuralink (though surgical robots are widely used for other purposes). But one of the Neuralink staff mentioned that the robot was a sticking point with the FDA, saying it's difficult to demonstrate its safety to the satisfaction of regulators. And another one of its competitors, Synchron, hopes to avoid the need for major surgery by using blood vessels to get implants deep into the brain. And those devices have also managed to go through clinical trials already.

Another problem with Neuralink's progress update is that it doesn't clearly indicate that the company is ready to go to the FDA. Starting a clinical trial will mean that the company has finalized a hardware design (even if it's working on next-generation hardware separately) and chosen a specific neural defect that it plans to treat. The update's scattershot progress reports gave no indication that any of that has been done.

None of this is to say that there won't ultimately be space for multiple technologies in the brain-computer implant space. Neuralink will likely eventually arrive where some of these other companies are now, or it might find a niche where its hardware is especially effective. But so far, the company isn't sharing any information that indicates that it's close to either result—much less accomplishing some of the more outlandish claims thrown around by Musk.

Neuralink's presentation is available online . Oddly, for an organization run by a self-professed fan of free speech, the company has disabled comments on the video.

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Elon Musk claims Neuralink is about ‘six months’ away from first human trial

This year’s ‘show and tell’ demonstration focused on the tech behind the brain-computer interface company..

By Mary Beth Griggs

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At a ‘show and tell’ event on Wednesday, Elon Musk said that his brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, could implant one of its devices in someone’s head within the next six months — meaning it’s not happening this year. He also claimed that he would get the device implanted in his own head at some point in the future.

During the presentation, Musk said that the company had submitted most of the paperwork needed for a human clinical trial to the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medical devices in the United States. Previously, Musk had said that he’d hoped for human trials to begin in 2020, and then 2022. Now, that’s slipped to at least 2023.

Neuralink’s goal is to create a device that can be implanted in the brain, and use it to control a computer with brain activity. Back in 2019, Musk revealed that the company was  testing its device in monkeys . In 2020, it  trotted out pigs  with the implants. And last year, Neuralink released a video  showing a monkey playing Pong with its brain . This year, the monkeys are back . In a video demonstration, one of them helped “type” the phrase ‘welcome to show and tell’ using their implant by focusing on highlighted words and letters. Another video showed how the monkeys were trained to charge the devices by sitting under a wireless charger.

Later in the presentation, Neuralink researchers also showed off a pig on a treadmill, which they said was helping them study how to address mobility issues in people in the future.

The Neuralink devices themselves are small, with multiple flexible “threads” that can be inserted into the brain. “It’s like replacing a piece of your skull with a smartwatch, for lack of a better analogy,” Musk said.

In about 15 minutes, 64 of these “threads” can be implanted into the brain using a robotic system, said DJ Seo, the vice president of Implant and co-founder of Neuralink, during the presentation — while using a mannequin to show how the process might work.

The reason for the robot surgeons comes down to just how tiny those threads are. “Imagine taking a hair from your head and sticking it into jello covered by saran wrap, doing that to a precise depth and precision, and doing that 64 times in a reasonable amount of time,” said Christine Odabashian, the leader of Neuralink’s hardware insertion team.

The company’s demos in 2019 and 2020 were designed as recruitment events, and this one is no different; the company admitted recruiting was its primary goal of the evening. Neuralink is currently looking to fill many different kinds of jobs as it moves from “prototype to product”, Musk said at tonight’s show and tell.

The event was mostly a technical presentation of the device, showcasing how the system was built, challenges the team has faced, how the tech has improved so far, and what developments are coming next. Researchers at the company said they were developing treatments that could either help improve or restore vision, or restore movement in people with paralysis. On the tech side, the company has ambitions to make sure that the device itself can be upgraded easily.

“I’m pretty sure you would not want an iPhone 1 in your head if an iPhone 14 was available,” Musk said.

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Watch Live: Neuralink Brain Implant 'Show and Tell' Update

What will we see at Neuralink's first update in over a year? Here's how you can watch the event tonight.

• Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.

This still from an April 2021 Neuralink video shows a 9-year-old macaque playing "mind Pong."

Neuralink, the neurotechnology startup co-founded by Elon Musk that aims to directly connect our brains to computers, has been silent since showing a  "mind Pong" demonstration  on YouTube in April 2021. 

Over the last few months, Musk has teased an  event  that will detail what's going on behind Neuralink's firmly closed doors.

A recent  tweet , with letters gradually spelling out "please join us for show and tell," offered a hint that the startup might have made some progress in helping people type just using just their minds, though it could just be a look at Neuralink's aspirations. The event is slated to begin at 6 p.m. PT Wednesday and the livestream link is right here.

Musk's long-term ambitions for Neuralink are about as sci-fi as it gets: "With a high-bandwidth brain-machine interface, I think we can ... effectively have the option of merging with AI," he said in 2019.    

Don't be surprised to hear Musk promising civilization-changing advances at the event. He has some cred when it comes to revolutionary tech, with his electric-vehicle company Tesla profoundly changing cars and his SpaceX outfit transforming space access with reusable rockets. But his reputation as a tech genius has taken a beating with the  chaos at Twitter  after his  $44 billion acquisition . Musk's Boring Company, which aims to revamp auto transportation with tunnels, also hasn't lived up to its promises yet.

Neuralink doesn't look any easier than social networking. Connecting computer hardware to our own wetware comes with enormous technical, regulatory and ethical challenges.

The company envisions projects like helping people with paralysis to type, and bypassing spinal cord injuries that keep people from walking. That could mean links in the spinal cord, not just in brains. Musk said in an April  tweet , "We're working on bridging broken links between brain & body" to "restore full body functionality."

Although Neuralink has tested its technology on monkeys and pigs, there's no mention of human experiments yet at the US government's clinical trials website .

Neuralink isn't alone in trying to wire us to computers, a field called brain-machine interfaces (BMI) or brain-computer interfaces (BCI). There's a steady stream of academic interest , and work at companies such as Synchron , Paradromics and BlackRock Neurotech . Some efforts hope to interface digitally with the brain using noninvasive external hardware instead of invasive surgical procedures.

Neuralink progress

Neuralink has made some headway. In 2019, the  company debuted its first designs for an implant that would lace 1,024 tiny wires into a patch of brain, listening to the brain cells' electrical activity and sending its own. In 2020, Neuralink revealed plans for a coin-size, battery-powered N1 chip implant and showed its devices listening in on the brain activity of a snuffling pig . In 2021, Neuralink showed a monkey playing "mind Pong," controlling the classic video game with its mind.

With mind Pong , Neuralink technology interpreted brain signals that the monkey used to control its hands. So far, we haven't seen any Neuralink demonstrations of a computer sending signals to a brain.

In 2021, Neuralink raised $205 million from investors including Google, Vy Capital  and OpenAI research lab Chief Executive Sam Altman. It's expanding now, with dozens of job openings in robotics, surgery, programming, materials, veterinary care and manufacturing.

A key part of Neuralink's approach is a surgical robot designed to drop electrodes into the brain, steering past blood vessels to avoid bleeding.

Another challenge will be human trials. The company's 2019 plan was to begin human trials in 2020 . It's still working toward that goal, now trying to hire a clinical research coordinator .

Other challenges include interfacing with enough of the brain's 80 billion or so neurons to be useful and developing implants that don't degrade or trigger our immune systems to reject them.

So don't expect to be able to type with your mind or pal around with a superintelligent AI anytime soon. But with all the medical applications and research around the world, don't dismiss brain-machine interfaces as mere science fiction.

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Elon Musk's Neuralink will show brain implant progress at a Halloween show-and-tell

A lot could depend on the october 31st event..

Neuralink is finally ready to share more about its work on brain implants . Elon Musk has revealed that Neuralink will hold a "show & tell" progress event on October 31st. He didn't provide any clues as to what to expect, but the last big demo involved a monkey playing Pong . It wouldn't be surprising to see a similar example.

A lot may be riding on this showcase. Neuralink still hasn't begun human trials, and the Food and Drug Administration hasn't said how close the company might be to receiving approval. Most of the co-founders have left the company since it was founded six years ago, for that matter. Throw in Fortune 's unofficial reports of a flawed workplace culture and the event could reflect Neuralink's overall health.

The timing is apt, at least. The presentation comes just as rumors have swirled that Neuralink has offered to invest in its rival Synchron, which recently completed what appears to be the first endovascular installation of a brain-computer interface in the US. While there's no guarantee of a deal, an event like this could answer questions about Synchron's possible involvement.

Neuralink progress update show & tell on October 31 st (Halloween) — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 22, 2022

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Elon Musk expects Neuralink's brain chip to begin human trials in 6 months

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The Next Frontier for Brain Implants Is Artificial Vision

Brian Bussard has 25 tiny chips in his brain. They were installed in February 2022 as part of a study testing a wireless device designed to produce rudimentary vision in blind people. Bussard is the first participant.

Bussard, who’s 56, lost vision in his left eye at age 17 after his retina detached. The right eye followed in 2016, leaving him completely blind. He remembers the exact moment it happened. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through,” he says. Eventually, he learned to adapt.

In 2021, he heard about a trial of a visual prosthesis at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Researchers cautioned that the device was experimental and he shouldn’t expect to regain the level of vision he had before. Still, he was intrigued enough to sign up. Thanks to the chips in his brain, Bussard now has very limited artificial vision—what he describes as “blips on a radar screen.” With the implant, he can perceive people and objects represented in white and iridescent dots.

Bussard is one of a small number of blind individuals around the world who have risked brain surgery to get a visual prosthesis. In Spain, researchers at Miguel Hernández University have implanted four people with a similar system. The trials are the culmination of decades of research.

There’s interest from industry, too. California-based Cortigent is developing the Orion , which has been implanted in six volunteers. Elon Musk’s Neuralink is also working on a brain implant for vision. In an X post in March, Musk said Neuralink’s device, called Blindsight, is “already working in monkeys.” He added: “Resolution will be low at first, like early Nintendo graphics, but ultimately may exceed normal human vision.”

That last prediction is unlikely, considering vision is such a complex process. There are huge technical barriers to improving the quality of what people are able to see with a brain implant. Yet even generating rudimentary sight could provide blind individuals with greater independence in their everyday lives.

“This is not about getting biological vision back,” says Philip Troyk, a professor of biomedical engineering at Illinois Tech, who’s leading the study Bussard is in. “This is about exploring what artificial vision could be.”

When light hits the eye, it first passes through the cornea and the lens, the outer and middle layers of the eye. When light reaches the back of the eye—the retina—cells there called photoreceptors convert it into electrical signals. These electrical signals travel through the optic nerve to the brain, which interprets those signals as the images we see.

Without an intact retina or optic nerve, the eyes can’t communicate with the brain. This is the case for many people with total blindness. The types of devices that Troyk and Neuralink are building bypass the eye and optic nerve completely, sending information straight to the brain. Because of this, they have the potential to address any cause of blindness, whether due to eye disease or trauma.

The specific brain region that processes information received from the eyes is called the visual cortex. Its location at the back of the head makes it easily accessible for an implant. To place the 25 chips in Bussard’s brain, surgeons performed a routine craniotomy to remove a piece of his skull.

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The chips in Bussard’s brain are actually miniaturized stimulators that emit a mild electrical current. One chip is about the size of a pencil eraser and contains 16 tiny electrodes, each thinner than a human hair. Each electrode can be controlled individually. Altogether, Bussard has 400 implanted electrodes. “It’s like a cell phone network in your brain,” Troyk says.

A camera mounted to a pair of glasses captures Bussard’s surroundings. Those images are processed with special software and translated into commands that talk to the network of chips, turning on individual electrodes to stimulate neurons. The stimulation produces visual perceptions called phosphenes that look like dots of light—except no light is actually reaching the eye.

Because the stimulators are clustered in one part of the visual cortex, Bussard only sees phosphenes in the lower left part of his visual field. But it’s enough to improve his ability to navigate in a room and perform basic tasks, such as picking out a plate among four different objects on a table.

Producing better images is one of the major challenges of these systems. “The more electrodes you have, the more phosphenes you could produce in theory and the more complex shapes you could generate artificially,” says Xing Chen, assistant professor of ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Last year, Chen and her colleagues published a study on a visual prosthesis they created with 1,024 electrodes. When they tested the system in monkeys, it allowed the animals to recognize artificially generated letters. To restore low vision in people, estimates of the number of electrodes needed range in the hundreds to thousands. But Troyk thinks it’s not so much the number of electrodes but their location that’s important; spreading them out across the visual cortex could produce more spots of light across a larger visual field. The tradeoff though, is that that could mean a more invasive surgery.

In the study at Miguel Hernández University in Spain, volunteers received just one implanted device containing 100 electrodes. Yet even that system allowed a 60-year-old woman to identify lines, shapes, and simple letters, according to results published in 2021 . Researchers have since replicated the findings in three additional blind volunteers, according to Eduardo Fernández, the neuroscientist leading the study.

He stresses that artificial vision is “not like seeing again.” His main goal is to improve orientation and mobility in blind people. In one test, a man wearing the prosthesis is able to avoid objects while walking on a treadmill in front of a virtual reality video screen. In the future, Fernández wants to add more electrodes to increase the number of phosphenes to produce more detailed images.

For now, his team is learning a lot from the study’s four initial volunteers. Everyone’s visual cortex is a little bit different, so researchers have to experiment with the placement of the implanted electrodes and how much electrical stimulation to deliver. “We customize the stimulation for each volunteer,” Fernández says.

Tailoring the implants for optimal performance is a challenge. In early experiments at producing artificial vision, researchers used large electrodes placed on the brain’s surface that needed relatively high electrical currents to produce phosphenes. The stimulation sometimes caused seizures, pain, and damage to the brain tissue. Chen says there’s a balance between needing a strong enough current that induces phosphenes but doesn’t cause unwanted side effects.

Another hurdle is the longevity of devices that are implanted in the brain . In the studies from Pittsburgh and Spain, researchers used a rigid device called a Utah array, a square grid of 100 tiny silicon needles, each with an electrode at the tip. The Utah array can last months to years but can stop working when scar tissue forms around the implant and interferes with its ability to pick up signals from nearby neurons. The Illinois team’s implants look like the heads of miniature hairbrushes and are made of iridium oxide, a type of metal.

Neuralink and others are developing devices with smaller, more flexible electrodes that penetrate the brain. For instance, Neuralink’s coin-shaped device sits in the skull with thin, threadlike electrodes extending into the brain tissue. Chen says softer electrodes have the potential to improve an implant’s longevity, but it remains to be seen how long these alternatives will last in the brain.

Another unanswered question is whether the duration of a person’s blindness will affect how well these devices work. The first participant in the Spanish study had been blind for 16 years and yet was able to see crude shapes. And Bussard had been completely blind for six years.

“We do know that after years of blindness, the visual system starts to degenerate,” Chen says. “It’s possible that the sooner you are able to intervene, the better, although this remains to be systematically studied and proven.”

In a November 2022 event, Musk claimed that “even if someone has never had vision ever, like they were born blind, we believe we can still restore vision.” Fernández isn’t so sure, but notes that restoring vision in someone born blind has never been tried before. He says in theory, a person would need to have a functioning visual cortex. But people who are born blind have never used that part of the brain to process visual information.

Right now, Bussard is limited to using his visual prosthesis in the lab, where researchers can control the stimulation. Troyk and his colleagues are working on a mobile system so that future study participants could use the device at home. Troyk is looking for additional volunteers who lost their vision as an adult but who had normal or near-normal vision for at least the first 10 years of life. In the Spanish study, participants are implanted with the visual prosthesis for six months before having it removed as part of the trial protocol.

Bussard says he would love to use the device outside the lab. He has a dog who’s deaf and partially blind, and he jokes that it would be a lot easier to find his dog if he could use his prosthesis at home. But he knows he may not benefit much from the device in his lifetime. “I’m not necessarily doing this for me,” he says of his participation in the trial. “I’m doing this for future generations.”

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Elon Musk's Neuralink to host a 'show and tell.' What we know about the brain implant startup.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink – the startup working on technology that allows humans to control computers with their thoughts – is set to showcase a "show and tell" event this Wednesday. 

Cofounded by Musk in 2016, the startup plans to implant devices in human brains to treat neurological disorders such as quadriplegia, the paralysis of all four limbs.

Neuralink has so far been sparse with details on what we can expect from Wednesday’s event. During its last demo in 2021, the company showed a video of a monkey playing the video game Pong with a Neuralink device.  

The update is set to begin Nov. 30 at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET . Neuralink did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Neuralink: Elon Musk's Neuralink plans to implant chips in human brains to treat neural disorders

What will Neuralink do?

Neuralink is working to build a brain-computer interface (BCI) that lets people control a computer or mobile device wirelessly with their mind “just by thinking about it,” according to its website.

The technology, if it does come to fruition, could be especially promising for people with paralysis  and other neurological disorders.  

Does Elon Musk still own Neuralink?

Musk was one of eight founding members who launched Neuralink in 2016. Since then, all but one of Musk's co-founders have left the company, according to Reuters. 

The startup is the fifth company Musk runs, along with Twitter, Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company.

What will Neuralink do to your brain?

Neuralink's plan is to have a surgical robotic insert small and flexible threads that contain electrodes into areas of the brain that control movement. The threads are connected to an implant dubbed "the link" that processes and transmits neural signals.

A Neuralink app would allow users with the implant to control their keyboard and mouse with just their thoughts.

“Our goal is to build a system that is safe, fully implanted and cosmetically invisible, available at home or out and about, and usable without assistance,” Neuralink’s website reads. 

Scientists have already created  BCI devices (people have used implants to play Pong and control robotic arms ) but Neuralink’s website says its technology would differ by offering more electrodes that “provide unprecedented scale.”

Its flexible wires – which are less likely to cause damage – could also set it apart from other devices. 

Ultimately, Musk said at a 2019 event, the company wants to “achieve a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” Musk has also discussed the possibility of  telepathic communication with the device.

Is Neuralink FDA approved?

No, Neuralink has yet to gain approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to implant its technology into humans. 

Neuralink: Elon Musk touts brain implant technology to treat health conditions, enable 'telepathy'

Does Neuralink test with monkeys? 

The company works with monkeys and pigs, according to its website.

Earlier this year, the animal rights nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed a lawsuit  against the University of California, Davis for the "invasive and deadly brain experiments" it conducted on 23 monkeys for Neuralink. 

The committee accused university staff of failing to provide dying monkeys with adequate veterinary care and not providing for the psychological well-being of the animals. 

A blog post from Neuralink said that it has euthanized eight animals . The company said those were due to suspected infections from the devices, and one was due to device failure.  

The company says it is "absolutely committed to working with animals in the most humane and ethical way possible" and says the facilities and care at the university continue to meet federally mandated standards. 

What can we expect to see Wednesday?

Details on what we can expect from Neuralink Wednesday are scarce.

Some people on social media have speculated that the company's 14-second tweet – which shows large green letters slowly typing out "please join us for show and tell"  – was typed using Neuralink technology. The company has yet to confirm. 

When will Neuralink be available?

Neuralink executives in 2019 said they were aiming for their first human clinical study in 2020. In April,  Musk said the company was on track to conduct its first trial application of Neuralink in a human by the end of 2022. 

Neuralink has yet to say when it expects to begin trials on humans, but in January said it was looking to hire a clinical trial director .  According to its website, it has yet to begin clinical trials. 

The company plans to focus on developing medical devices before rolling out a product with non-medical applications for consumers . 

You can follow USA TODAY reporter Bailey Schulz on Twitter  @bailey_schulz  and subscribe to our free Daily Money newsletter here for personal finance tips and business news every Monday through Friday.

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Brain Implants Have Begun to Restore Functions, but Advances Are Slow

But achieving full-body restoration of movement, as Elon Musk envisions with such devices, is considered far into the future, if at all.

By Christina Jewett and Cade Metz

A jumble of cords and two devices the size of soda cans protrude from Austin Beggin’s head when he undergoes testing with a team of researchers studying brain implants that are meant to restore function to those who are paralyzed.

Despite the cumbersome equipment, it is also when Mr. Beggin feels the most free. He was paralyzed from the shoulders down after a diving accident eight years ago, and the brain device picks up the electrical surges that his brain generates as he envisions moving his arm. It converts those signals to cuffs on the major nerves in his arm. They allow him to do things he had not done on his own since the accident, like lift a pretzel to his mouth.

“This is like the first time I’ve ever gotten the opportunity or I’ve ever been privileged and blessed enough to think, ‘When I want to open my hand, I open it,’” Mr. Beggin, 30, said. Days like that are always “a special day.”

The work at the Cleveland Functional Electrical Stimulation Center represents some of the most cutting-age research in the brain-computer interface field, with the team connecting the brain to the arm to restore motion.

It’s a field that Elon Musk wants to advance, announcing in a recent presentation that brain implants from his company Neuralink would someday help restore sight to the blind or return people like Mr. Beggin to “full-body functionality.” Mr. Musk also said the Neuralink device could allow anyone to use phones and other machines with new levels of speed and efficiency.

Neuroscientists and Mr. Beggin alike see such giant advances as decades away, though. Scientists who have approval to test such devices in humans are inching toward restoring normal function in typing, speaking and limited movements. Researchers caution that the goal is much harder and more dangerous than it may seem. And they warn that Mr. Musk’s goals may never be possible — if it is even worth doing in the first place.

“It is fun to think about science fiction scenarios describing how the world might be,” said Paul Nuyujukian, a professor of bioengineering and neurosurgery at Stanford University who has spent years working on similar technology. “But given where we are right now with the science, it is not clear how those scenarios will be realized.”

The scientists at the Neuralink event on Nov. 30 and those watching online agreed that the engineering that Mr. Musk showed off was an elegant mash-up of some of the best ideas in the decades-old field. Replacing the soda-can-like protrusion from the head would indeed be a significant advance, they acknowledged.

Neuralink’s device prototype would eliminate that problem, but only after patients undergo robotic surgery to cut a hole in the head slightly larger than a quarter. Then the robot knits 1,024 cobweb-thin electrode tendrils into the gray matter of the brain and rests the puck-like device in the hole.

With work so delicate, some researchers in the field worry that one high-profile misstep could erase years of progress.

“The communications coming out of Neuralink too often sounds like cowboy activity, right?” said Marcus Gerhardt, chief executive of Blackrock Neurotech, a brain-computer interface company that could be a Musk rival.

Mr. Gerhardt said the neurosurgeons affiliated with his company “are petrified every day that something terrible could happen there and affect the rest of the space.”

Mr. Beggin is one of about three dozen people who have a device called a “Utah array” implanted in the brain for research purposes. The device includes a small grid of electrodes that are dipped barely two millimeters into his brain. That is linked to a portal mounted on his head and, via cables, to another computer.

Most of the days Mr. Beggin spends working with the Cleveland research team involve looking at a moving arm or hand on a computer screen and envisioning himself making the same motion. That allows researchers to detect the neuron-firing patterns in his brain that give rise to each movement. Those signals are communicated to a system that manipulates eight nerves in his arm to make it move, said A. Bolu Ajiboye, a professor of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University whose team has been working with patients like Mr. Beggin.

The work can be tedious, Mr. Beggin said, but he finds it worthwhile for the days when he can move his hand. His experience builds on work with a prior volunteer, who was also paralyzed in the arms and legs, and managed to lift a forkful of mashed potatoes to his mouth with the system.

Mr. Beggin did not watch the Neuralink presentation last month. But he said he was dismayed to hear that Mr. Musk raised the notion of “full-body functionality” for people who are paralyzed.

It’s an outcome that, given the painstaking work involved in his hand motions, Mr. Beggin expects will take a generation to achieve.

His mother, Shelly Beggin, agrees. “As a parent, I would love to hear that,” Ms. Beggin said. “I would have held onto that hope that he would be able to walk.”

Realistically, she said, she’s happy to see her son’s hard-won hand motions. Scientists who work on the brain-computer interfaces say that tempering patient expectations is important in a field that has seen stunning progress, but faces daunting challenges.

Academic teams across the nation are working on projects aimed at restoring function to those with disabilities or degenerative diseases. Scientists are working to map the visual center of the brain so points of light can be projected in the mind’s eye to help the blind see shapes and letters. Other teams are working on translating neural electricity into speech, cursor control, handwriting and typing applications.

Several companies, including Neuralink, are working on fully implantable devices. Paradromics, a start-up in Austin, Texas, is developing a device that sits inside the skull. Another company, Synchron, based in New York City, is taking a different approach, making an incision in the chest and pushing a tube-shaped device into an artery close to the brain. This avoids the dangers of brain surgery, but the signal it captures from the brain is considerably weaker, according to Tom Oxley, chief executive of Synchron.

Despite all the promise in the field, scientists say this technology has very little to offer to the typical consumer, as it is merely approaching the speed and precision of able-bodied control.

That seems as if it’s about to change, Dr. Ajiboye said. He compared to the field to the computer industry in 1980 when it was on track for a revolution.

“I firmly believe that we’re at the same initial ramp curve in terms of understanding brain mechanisms,” he said.

During the Neuralink presentation, a video showed a monkey named Pager reportedly using a prototype implant in its brain to move a cursor across a computer screen. Mr. Musk’s team also showed off the inner workings of the device, impressing some of the neuroscientists who watched the event.

During the event, Mr. Musk announced that Neuralink was seeking permission from the Food and Drug Administration to test the device in humans, and he guessed that a clinical trial would begin next year.

This would be a notable step forward for the field. Others have tested wireless devices in humans, but Neuralink is investing so heavily in the project that it may come forward quickly with a more powerful device than before.

“They basically sourced a lot of the best ideas out there in the top of the field and paid to bring them together into a new system. And I think that is exciting,” said Cristin Welle, a University of Colorado neuroscientist and former F.D.A. brain-implant lab director and device consultant. “Now whether they can really surmount all of these technical hurdles to demonstrate that it is in fact safe, it remains to be seen.”

It is the F.D.A. that will decide when the trial begins if it grants approval to Neuralink. The agency will pay close attention to device durability, given the risks and feasibility of repeated brain surgeries, Dr. Welle said. That means device makers will have to surmount the challenge of operating electronics for years in the soggy milieu of the brain. They will also need to prove that their supercomputing device does not generate heat or current that unduly injures the delicate brain tissue, she said.

There are also very real limits to what the device can do. There may be ethical limits too.

As Neuralink pursues a human trial, it is fighting complaints over its tests with monkeys. The company filed papers in a California court this month seeking to block the release of photos of primates it tested from 2017 through 2020. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an advocacy group, previously obtained hundreds of pages of veterinary records and filed a complaint with the Agriculture Department, claiming primate test subjects developed infections and were treated carelessly.

The Agriculture Department said it could not comment on the group’s complaint, citing the pending litigation. Neuralink has denied the claims, but they could affect the progress of its technology.

If and when Neuralink begins a human trial, it would be limited to people who have real needs for the technology, most likely those with spinal cord injuries or other forms of paralysis.

Although Mr. Musk has said the Neuralink device could be implanted in healthy humans to enhance their abilities, that seems a remote possibility at this stage. He has compared future uses of the implant to those of another medical device that is marketed for reasons that are not purely disease-curing: Lasik surgery lasers, which are used to improve vision.

“There is an ethics question that needs to be answered, and they have yet to address it,” Dr. Ajiboye said, referring to Mr. Musk and Neuralink.

To Mr. Beggin, implanting such a device in a completely healthy person is a step too far. He would prefer that Mr. Musk and his company focus on people like him who could use this device to restore functions that have been taken away, like shaking someone’s hand or waving to a curious child who approaches his wheelchair.

“Using the technology to allow an able-bodied person to start a car?” he said. “It is a hard thing for me to rationalize.”

An earlier version of this article misstated the current name of a company involved in brain implant research. It is Blackrock Neurotech, not Blackrock Microsystems.

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Elon Musk’s Neuralink hopes to test its brain implant in a human next year

Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink is planning to test a brain implant in humans in six months, the company has announced.

At a ‘show and tell’ event yesterday, Musk said that the company was in the process of submitting paperwork to the US Food and Drug Administration, which has the power to approve or deny the company’s application to start clinical trials in humans. When Musk launched Neuralink in 2017, he outlined plans for “a high-bandwidth, long-lasting, biocompatible, bidirectional” brain implant. This brain modem, he claimed, could somehow allow humans to keep pace with artificial intelligence. Now, after years of delays and experiments on monkeys, he’s hoping to prove it can be safely implanted in humans. Musk also announced that the company is working on repurposing the implant for two further parts of the body: the spinal cord, to potentially help to restore movement in someone who is paralysed, and an ocular implant to restore vision in people with sight loss. He demonstrated the latter product with a video explaining how a Neuralink implant had stimulated a flash of light in a monkey’s brain.

Antonio Regalado, our senior biomedicine editor, correctly predicted that a vision implant capable of generating images in an animal’s brain would make its way into the company’s presentation. Read why that matters —and what, in theory, it could mean for humans.

While everyone waits for GPT-4, OpenAI is still fixing its predecessor

Buzz around GPT-4, the anticipated but as-yet-unannounced follow-up to OpenAI’s groundbreaking large language model, GPT-3, is growing by the week. But OpenAI is not yet done tinkering with the previous version. The San Francisco-based company has released a demo of a new model called ChatGPT, a spin-off of GPT-3 that is geared toward answering questions via back-and-forth dialogue. But while the conversational format allows ChatGPT to admit its mistakes, and reject inappropriate requests, it’s still far from perfect. Read the full story .

—Will Douglas Heaven

In defense of plastic (sort of)

Plastics have a bad reputation, there’s no denying it. They’re an environmental, climate, and public health disaster. But, simultaneously, they’ve brought down costs across industries and saved lives, thanks to their use in everything from medical equipment to electronics. The question is, where do we go from here? Taking steps to cut down on gratuitous plastic use is a start, and finding ways to reinvent plastic recycling could also play a huge role in cutting down on its negative impacts. Among the most promising of these is chemical recycling, which, if chemists successfully pull it off, could allow us to handle different plastics using a single process. Read the full story . Casey’s story is from The Spark, her weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The European Central Bank thinks bitcoin is on its last gasp It says the cryptocurrency is on “the road to irrelevance.” ( The Guardian ) + Sam Bankman-Fried has given another disastrous interview. ( NYT $) + Unsurprisingly, he said his lawyers had advised him against speaking publicly. ( Vox ) + Times aren’t great for NFT artists right now. ( New Yorker $) + It’s okay to opt out of the crypto revolution. ( MIT Technology Review ) 2 Chinese protests could be the beginning of the end for zero covid  It is damaging the country’s economy, and much of the population has had enough. ( Vox ) + Xi Jinping has painted himself into a corner. ( The Atlantic $) + Simply lifting the restrictions won’t magically return life to normal, though. ( Wired $) 3 An American journalist is suing NSO Group He and his colleagues allege they were surveilled using the company’s Pegasus spyware. ( New Yorker $) + Password manager LastPass says some user data was exposed in a hack. ( The Verge ) + The war in Ukraine has shifted cybercriminals’ focus away from stealing money. ( Economist $) + Google has blocked a Spanish hacking tool. ( Wired $) + The hacking industry faces the end of an era. ( MIT Technology Review ) 4 San Francisco police can now deploy killer robots They can kill someone in order to save the life of a civilian or an officer. ( TechCrunch )  + The policy could easily end up harming the city’s most vulnerable people. ( Wired $)

5 Children are still dying from TikTok’s blackout challenge  Parents feel the platform’s not doing enough to prevent other minors from copying the videos. ( Bloomberg $) 6 California wants to punish doctors who spread covid misinformation But two legal challenges claim the new law is unconstitutional. ( NYT $) 7 Gasoline consumption in the US barely fell last year Despite more electric vehicles hitting the roads, gas use fell by just 0.54%. ( Wired $)  + Electric vehicle startups are struggling to survive. ( The Information $) + Where are those superbatteries we were promised? ( IEEE Spectrum )  8 A Singapore therapy chatbot has been accused of gaslighting  The government-backed bot is designed to help teachers, but seems to be doing anything but. ( Rest of World )

9 Gen Z really doesn’t like Instagram Its cringey pivot to video isn’t cutting through. ( The Atlantic $) + Social networks in general are shrinking. ( Slate $) 10 You can still poke someone on Facebook 👉 Why not brighten up a friend’s day? ( BuzzFeed News )

Quote of the day

“If you look at all the major competing platforms that have existed — iOS, Android, Windows — Apple stands out. It is the only one where one company can control what apps get on the device. I don’t think it’s sustainable or good.”

—Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (no stranger to accusations of monopolistic behavior himself) joins Elon Musk in criticizing Apple’s power as a gatekeeper for apps in comments made at a New York Times conference.

The big story

Finding homes for the waste that will (probably) outlive humanity

October 2020

Since 2013, when regulators decided to shut California’s San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station down, teams of scientists, engineers, and policymakers have been hard at work to make sure it could be safely decommissioned. The big question is: what to do with all the spent nuclear fuel? Its radioactive waste could outlast the human race, and is being kept in storage holes buried along the seismically active California coastline.

They are sitting ducks for the next big earthquake, which is likely to hit within the next century. If the nuclear waste somehow got out, the results would be devastating. And the fact the problem exists at all highlights how the US government has so far been unable to fulfill its legal duty to find a long-term home for America’s radioactive waste. Read the full story .

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas?  Drop me a line  or  tweet 'em at me .)

The Download

The download: the problem with plug-in hybrids, and china’s ai talent.

Plus: Silicon Valley is desperate to snap up top AI talent—before anyone else does

The Download: defining open source AI, and replacing Siri

Plus: the EU has announced a raft of new Big Tech probes

The Download: the mystery of LLMs, and the EU’s Big Tech crackdown

Plus: the trade secret war between China and the US is hotting up

The Download: new AI regulations, and a running robot

Plus: Nvidia has unveiled a whole load of new AI chips

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Neuralink implanted a device in a patient’s brain, Elon Musk says

Neuralink, a company working to develop computer interfaces that can be implanted in human brains, placed its first device in a patient Sunday, said its founder, Elon Musk.

Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said Monday that the company’s first product was called Telepathy and would allow a human to control a phone or computer “just by thinking.”

“Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs,” Musk wrote in a series of posts on X, his social media platform, formerly known as Twitter. “Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer.”

Musk and Neuralink did not provide further details about who received the implant or whether it was working. Musk did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

In November 2022, Musk predicted that the company would begin tests in humans within six months. At the time, Neuralink demonstrated a product in a video that reportedly showed two monkeys moving computer cursors with their brains, a feat that had been shown to be possible in humans more than 15 years earlier.

While Musk is often optimistic with predictions for his companies, some of which have yet to pan out, Neuralink received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to begin human trials last May.

• Elon Musk’s Neuralink lab monkeys: Doctors group alleging abuse opens rare window into secretive world (2022)
• Elon Musk wants YOU to build a brain-computer interface (2020)

The company’s website says that its “first clinical trial is open to recruitment” for people with limited or no use of both hands due to a cervical spinal cord injury or to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurological disorder that affects nerve cells.

“This study involves placing a small, cosmetically invisible implant in a part of the brain that plans movements,” Neuralink’s website reads. “The device is designed to interpret a person’s neural activity, so they can operate a computer or smartphone by simply intending to move — no wires or physical movement are required.”

At the Neuralink presentation in late 2022, Musk said the company’s devices would eventually allow blind people to see or give someone with a severed spinal cord “full-body functionality.” His claims at the time drew skepticism from experts who argued that science had yet to advance that far.

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Neuralink Blog

Prime study progress update.

In January, we conducted the first human implantation of our brain-computer interface (BCI). We were able to detect the participant’s neural signals shortly after the implantation surgery, and since then, he has used our end-to-end BCI system for various applications, like playing online chess and Sid Meier's Civilization VI*. 

This marks a significant milestone towards making BCI technology available to potentially restore autonomy to millions of people with unmet medical needs. We’ve prepared this blog post to share a high-level snapshot of where we are as a company: the mission that guides us, the technology we have built, the study we are currently conducting, and the work we have yet to do.

Neuralink’s Patient Registry Opens to Canada

Our Patient Registry is now accepting applications from Canadian residents! 

This international expansion allows us to assess preliminary eligibility of participants for future Neuralink clinical trials in Canada.

Understanding Preclinical Research at Neuralink

Become acquainted with the Preclinical Team, which is responsible for the design, conduct, documentation, analysis, and reporting of preclinical studies. It is their responsibility to provide a means for ensuring the implantation of Neuralink devices into animals, and ultimately people, is safe, effective, and robust.

Neuralink’s First-in-Human Clinical Trial is Open for Recruitment

We are happy to announce that we’ve received approval from the reviewing independent institutional review board and our first hospital site to begin recruitment for our first-in-human clinical trial.

The Role of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee

Our 3 R’s blog series continues, this time highlighting the importance of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) and its role in promoting R efinement, R eduction, and R eplacement at a research facility. All animal research must be conducted in an ethical and humane manner. An institution's IACUC provides oversight that is critical in achieving this requirement. In this blog article, we explore the role and functions of Neuralink’s IACUC.

Environmental Enrichment

Environmental enrichment is used to maximize animal  agency and joy , the top goals of Neuralink’s animal care program. In our second blog on  refinement , we highlight our methodology to ensure that we are providing an enriching environment and experience to animals within our care.

Announcing Neuralink's Patient Registry

Over the last few years, we have worked with patient advocacy groups and a consumer advisory board consisting of individuals with spinal cord injury and their caregivers to guide product development and community engagement.

As an expansion of these efforts, we’ve launched a Patient Registry to learn more about individuals who want to contribute to this initiative and who may be interested in enrolling in future Neuralink clinical trials, when they become available.

Husbandry Refinement

The first episode of our  R efinement Series will look at how we evaluate the well-being of an animal as it pertains to housing, food, and water - the key elements of husbandry. We share examples of how we identify gaps in our program and how we tackle those with the help and support of our engineers and animal care teams.

Championing the 3 Rs

At Neuralink, we are committed to championing the “3 Rs” of research:

• R efinement
• R eplacement

In this blog post, we describe the 3 Rs and introduce our upcoming multi-part series highlighting the challenges we encounter in animal medical research. We discuss how we think about solutions to these problems using the framework of the 3 Rs. We hope you will take this opportunity to learn alongside us as we dive into the complex world of ensuring animal well-being in a research setting.

Neuralink's Commitment to Animal Welfare

Animals at Neuralink are respected and honored by our team. Without proper context, information from medical records and study data can be misleading. In this blog post, we want to provide an accurate statement of Neuralink’s commitment to animal welfare.

Series C Funding Round Announcement

Neuralink Corp is pleased to announce our Series C funding round of $205 million, led by Vy Capital, with participation from Google Ventures, DFJ Growth, Valor Equity Partners, Craft Ventures, Founders Fund, and Gigafund.

Pager Plays MindPong

Neuralink is developing a fully-implanted, wireless, high-channel count, brain-computer interface (BCI) with the goal of enabling people with paralysis to directly use their neural activity to operate computers and mobile devices with speed and ease.

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Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink approved for in-human study

The Food and Drug Administration, which had initially rejected the application, finally gave the company the green light

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-implant company, said on Thursday it had received a green light from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to kickstart its first in-human clinical study, a critical milestone after earlier struggles to gain approval.

Musk has predicted on at least four occasions since 2019 that his medical device company would begin human trials for a brain implant to treat severe conditions such as paralysis and blindness.

Yet the company, founded in 2016, only sought FDA approval in early 2022 – and the agency rejected the application, seven current and former employees told Reuters in March.

The FDA had pointed out several concerns to Neuralink that needed to be addressed before sanctioning human trials, according to the employees. Major issues involved the lithium battery of the device, the possibility of the implant’s wires migrating within the brain and the challenge of safely extracting the device without damaging brain tissue.

Thursday’s FDA approval comes as US lawmakers are urging regulators to investigate whether the makeup of a panel overseeing animal testing at Neuralink contributed to botched and rushed experiments.

Neuralink has already been the subject of federal investigations.

Last year, the USDA’s inspector general began investigating, at the request of a federal prosecutor, potential violations of the Animal Welfare Act, which governs how researchers treat and conduct tests on certain types of animals. The company has killed about 1,500 animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys, following experiments since 2018, Reuters previously reported.

The inquiry has also been looking at the USDA’s oversight of Neuralink.

In a tweet on Thursday, Neuralink said it was not yet open for a clinical trial.

“This is the result of incredible work by the Neuralink team in close collaboration with the FDA and represents an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people,” the company said in a tweet on Thursday.

Over the years, Musk has publicly outlined an ambitious plan for Neuralink. He made headlines late last year when he said he was already so confident in the device’s safety that he would be willing to implant them in his own children.

Musk envisions both disabled and healthy individuals swiftly getting surgical implants at local centers. These devices aim to cure a range of conditions from obesity, autism, depression and schizophrenia, and to enabling web browsing and telepathy.

Most viewed

‘We have consistently flirted with death’: The construction problems in Elon Musk’s tunnels

The loop, the modular network of underground connections aimed at ending traffic jams in cities like las vegas or los angeles, has sparked controversy after several workers denounced the precarious conditions of the digging work.

It all started with a tweet. In the fall of 2016, now seven and a half years ago, Elon Musk took to Twitter to tell the world that he was fed up with the traffic in Los Angeles and that he had decided to remedy it. His solution, as prosaic as it was effective, consisted of building tunnels and taking a large part of that traffic underground, to a high-performance network where people could get from any point in the center of the big city to airport terminals in less than 10 minutes — all for just a $1 one-way ticket.

To materialize this utopia of urban mobility in record time, Musk created the Boring Company, his first major infrastructure company, presented with the appropriate pomp and ceremony in Hawthorne, California, in December 2016. Shortly after, Boring announced the launch of The Loop, a “modular” network of underground connections that was going to begin construction in less than a year in four metropolitan areas: Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and the conurbation between Washington D.C. and Baltimore.

The company’s initial steps — the construction of a first tunnel in Hawthorne, a test bed for Musk’s team innovative technology — suggested that the Californian phase was going to be a priority. But in the end, it was the Las Vegas Loop that became the Boring Company’s star project. It was an ambitious project, with an initial budget of $48.7 million that was set to rise to more than $500 million once it had passed the early phases. By 2024, the network was expected to cover nearly 70 miles and include 55 stations. A fleet of Tesla Model 3 cars, mostly self-driving, was going to cover the routes at an average speed of 150 miles per hour.

Problems arise

In recent weeks, media outlets such as Fortune , Bloomberg , Fox and QZ have reported on an incident that occurred several months ago, but has only just become public. As Jessica Mathews explains in Fortune, in May 2023, the then safety manager of one of the Boring Company’s branches, Wayne Merideth, sent a late-night email to his superiors in which he denounced the precarious conditions of the Las Vegas tunnel excavation works.

Merideth wrote that the company “has been very fortunate these past few months that there hasn’t been a fatality.” The safety manager said the lack of supervision and basic precautions had made the underground work highly dangerous. “We have consistently flirted with death,” he said in the email.

Merideth blamed the dire safety conditions on the company’s poorly calibrated attempt to accelerate the pace of excavations to meet deadlines that were never realistic and, what’s more, did not take into account the particularities of the terrain. Bloomberg journalist Max Chafkin reported that the excavation team has been forced to deal with pools of mud at least two feet deep with the “consistency of a milkshake” and a high degree of toxicity. Several employees said they had suffered burns, rashes and allergic reactions attributable to the high concentration of chemical accelerants (the byproducts of any dig) in the mud. Some of these injuries had become chronic due to the workers’ continuous exposure to the accelerants, an issue the company did not try to address. Merideth ended his email with this cutting sentence: “No tunnel is worth a single person’s life.”

Bloomberg reported that the workers’ complaints have reached the Nevada state health and safety commission. The newly opened proceedings could lead to million-dollar penalties for the Boring Company and cause new delays in the construction of the underground network that was going to transform the Las Vegas metropolitan area.

What’s happening in Las Vegas

The first two sections of the Vegas Loop — drilled 12 meters deep — were built in the spring of 2020 and entered the testing phase a year later, once the last of the Covid-19 restrictions were lifted. Tens of thousands of volunteers were willing to act as guinea pigs on wheels in the cutting-edge experiment.

A few weeks later, Boring announced that these two sections and the five stations already operational had demonstrated their capacity to transport nearly 4,400 passengers per hour, with most journeys lasting less than five minutes. The launch and debut of the Vegas Loop would come a year and a half later , coinciding with the 2023 edition of the Consumer Electronic Show (CES).

At that time, Adrián Revuelta, a 43-year-old engineer from Madrid, who was a resident in Las Vegas and accredited at the 2023 fair, had the opportunity to go underground to see what Elon Musk’s new avant-garde development had to offer. “I remember that it seemed like an extravagance without much substance, far below initial expectations,” he told EL PAÍS. “I went down some escalators that gave access to a kind of quite precarious subway platform. Once there, after a short wait, they boarded me with another couple of travelers into a white Tesla Model Y piloted by a company driver. In a few minutes, at a constant speed of about 60 kilometers [40 miles], we traveled the only section available that day, around four kilometers [2.5 miles] between one end of the convention center and the other.”

The driver, apparently repeating the arguments that the company had given him, told Revuelta that this was the first “of more than a hundred tunnels that were going to be available in a few months and that very soon would take in between 5 and 10% of the private traffic of the city of Las Vegas.” Revuelta showed his skepticism and even commented that the tunnel — measuring “just three and a half meters wide, illuminated with rather dim LED lights” — seemed a bit “claustrophobic.” The driver shrugged his shoulders and acknowledged that there were still “minor details” to iron out. He then spoke to him about the magnificent opportunity that this cutting-edge engineering work was going to provide for professional drivers like him. “He imagined a fleet of thousands of electric cars making continuous journeys from one end of the network to the other. I asked him if there were plans to replace them with self-driving vehicles in the very short term and he replied that this idea had been rejected for safety reasons.”

Once on the surface, Revuelta met a co-worker who had also gone down to Musk’s underground tunnel and was as wary as him about the project. “He told me that it seemed like a cross between a private limousine service and the reinvention of the subway. We agreed that, no matter how much they promised individual routes for $1 and daily passes for less than $5, it seemed to be conceived rather as a very restricted and elitist network, a minority solution so that the richest could avoid the inconvenience of traveling on the surface. It seemed to us then and it still seems to me now that its impact on city traffic is going to be very limited. I think it is very unlikely that a network with these characteristics will one day absorb between a twentieth and a tenth of the vehicles that circulate through the city.”

Revuelta lives very close to the southern end of the Strip, the most popular “and most congested” avenue in Las Vegas. Few people would benefit more from Musk’s umpteenth idea becoming a success. What’s more, Revuelta is willing to recognize “its indisputable potential” and give it the benefit of the doubt. But he says nothing he has seen or read has inspired “even moderate” optimism.

The stuff dreams are made of

The four local variants of The Loop project have made hardly any progress in the 15 months since CES 2023. The Chicago, Los Angeles and Baltimore projects appear to have gone into hibernation and there is little news about the Loop, with the exception of controversy in Las Vegas about worker complaints.

In the opinion of Walter Isaacson, the most prestigious of his biographers , Elon Musk is a genuine representative of the culture of the so-called “providential man” and of what could be defined as the syndrome of executive impatience. According to Isaacson, Musk tends to think that what he doesn’t do, no one else will, because contemporary capitalism suffers from a worrying shortage of disruptive leadership. He believes that the changes demanded by our societies are happening at an exasperatingly slow pace for lack of ambition, competence and, very often, financial muscle. And that everything he does not lead seems doomed to failure or, worse, to irrelevance.

Entrepreneurship expert Sid Mohasseb argues that Musk has become obsessed with gaining the superpowers of a James Bond movie villain. Boosted by a fortune that remains around $180 billion despite last year’s drop, the Pretoria-born tycoon “can manipulate entire markets with a single tweet,” says Mohasseb, or embark on cyclopean projects such as plans “to program minds” and take society’s elite on trips to outer space.

In 2022, Mohasseb warned of the self-proclaimed “technological savior’s” dominance in diverse fields, be it driving the electric revolution with Tesla, implanting microchips in human brains with Neuralink , conquering space and destroying the asteroids with SpaceX, providing new payment options with PayPal or guaranteeing the supply of Internet to the farthest corners of the planet with Starlink . And this was all before Musk set out to monopolize public debate through an “alternative” channel (Twitter, now X) or take artificial intelligence to another level with Grok.

Some of these projects may be considered “noble” and worthy of praise — more in line with the work of a philanthropist with an unprecedented fortune than of a Darth Vader or a Montgomery Burns — but Mohasseb points out that even the Joker “wanted to make the world smile.” He argues that it is not a good idea for all the eggs of technological disruption to be in the same basket and that, as Lord Acton once said, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

For Mohasseb, the recipe against this one-man monopoly of large transformative projects is not to clip Musk’s wings, but to create a breeding ground that promotes free competition much more strongly. As much as money attracts money, other entrepreneurs deserve the opportunity to enjoy the generous grants and strong corporate support that Musk has received since his name began to become synonymous with capitalism.

Other analysts have also supported the thesis that Musk is the supervillain of our time. Jim Lepore, from The New Yorker , argues that self-proclaimed superheroes slide down the slope of evil as soon as they begin to put their powers at the service of their own agenda, a switch that may have happened with Bill Gates. When Stephen Colbert invited Musk on his late night show, he asked him — with a heavy dose of irony — if he really wanted to save the world. And Liam Gaughan, from The Dallas Observer , goes so far as to compare him to Joffrey Baratheon from Game of Thrones , an autocrat who invites his subjects to speak out in order to identify the dissidents so he can purge them, as Mao Zedong did in his day.

Ultimately, as Alice Kelly argues in Your Tango , there are at least 16 “valid” reasons to hate Elon Musk, from how he has widened the global wealth, to his arrogant contempt for the diver who rescued a group of Thai schoolchildren, to his dalliances with the anti-vaccine movement, and to his treacherous manipulation of the cryptocurrency market. Seen this way, the fact that his plan to decongest traffic in Las Vegas has become stuck in a puddle of toxic mud with the consistency of milkshake doesn’t seem, by any stretch of the imagination, the worst of his actions.

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