Elon Musk is known for his innovations in the automobile and aerospace sectors. While Tesla and SpaceX continue to perform marvels for humanity, Elon Musk decided to put his mind into medical sciences as he laid the foundation for another company, Neuralink.
Elon Musk met up with Joe Rogan on the 7th of March for a podcast and discussed the progress that Neuralink had made after its announcement in 2019
. In his recent chat with Joe Rogan, Elon Musk stated that the days of testing neural links on monkeys and rodents are about to come to an end and soon the testing phase will begin on humans.
He even talked about the risk factors that could be involved in the surgical procedures. Turns out, they are next to being nil. There are very low chances that the body will reject the neural implant, and to support his claim Elon Musk brought the viewers’ attention towards the chips that are used to monitor heart rate, and artificial hips implanted in old people.
The scary part is, the implant is approximately one inch in diameter, and it cannot be implanted without removing a small piece of the skull.
The neural links will be used to improve the memories of people who suffer from Alzheimer’s. Elon Musk talked about how the neural links will connect/fix the broken circuits in the brain of the people who suffer from the disease.
What are these neural links?
Neural links have been a hot topic ever since the launch of Neuralink. So, what are these really? Well, neural links are actually small electrodes connected via a string. The string of electrodes could be imagined as a hair, only ten times thinner. The strings cannot be seen with a naked eye, and certainly cannot be implanted in the brain with the help of hands. To implant the nanotechnology, Neuralink has developed a robot that will carry out the procedure with extreme accuracy.
Not only will the robot detach the strings from each other and carry them to the brain, but it will also perform the surgery. The robot is designed to perform the surgery in such a way that it does not cut any veins during the procedure. This will reduce the risk of a scar forming on the body later on. When people expressed amazement regarding this technology, Elon Musk took it to twitter and informed people that they have not yet seen the recent version of the robot that was in the spotlight a year ago.
Rogan expressed his concern regarding humans becoming part-robots in the near future, especially after looking at the pace at which technology is progressing. To this, Musk replied that with all the cellphones and technology around us at the moment, we are already halfway towards being cyborgs.
Musk assured the viewers that they will be performing tests on people in less than a year, however, the technology is still in its initial stages and has a long way to go.
Medical science has a lot of potential and combining it with AI may open up a whole new dimension in this field, while Elon Musk is up on his feet trying to serve humanity in any way he can. Fingers stay crossed till the neural implants are tested on human beings!
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