Elon Musk's Neuralink puts computer chips in animal brains
The HinduBillionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's neuroscience startup Neuralink on Friday unveiled a pig named Gertrude that has had a coin-sized computer chip in its brain for two months, showing off an early step toward the goal of curing human diseases with the same type of implant. Mr. Musk presented what he described as the “three little pigs demo.” Gertrude, the pig with a Neuralink implant in the part of its brain that controls the snout, required some coaxing by Musk to appear on camera, but eventually began eating off of a stool and sniffing straw, triggering spikes on a graph tracking the animal's neural activity. Mr. Musk said the company predicted a pig's limb movement during a treadmill run at “high accuracy” using implant data. Mr. Musk described Neuralink's chip, which is roughly 23 millimeters in diameter, as “a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires.” “I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldn't know,” Mr, Musk said. Mr. Musk, who frequently warns about the risks of artificial intelligence, said the implant's most important achievement beyond medical applications would be “some kind of AI symbiosis where you have an AI extension of yourself.” Small devices that electronically stimulate nerves and brain areas to treat hearing loss and Parkinson's disease have been implanted in humans for decades.