Undeniably, we are living in the most transformative times the world has ever seen.Elon Musk’s company Neuralink wants to start making its brain chips in large numbers and use mostly automated surgery to put them into people’s heads this year. The idea is to move from a rare, experimental treatment to something that could be used much more widely in hospitals.
There are many moonshots which have already become a reality, why not this one? Right now, only about a dozen people with severe paralysis have received the implant, which lets them move a computer cursor and even play games just by thinking. For now, the focus is on patients with serious brain and nerve problems, so they can communicate better and handle basic daily tasks.
Neuralink says its tiny wires will go through the brain’s protective outer layer, called the dura, without doctors having to open it up fully, and Musk wants the surgery to become almost completely done by robots. But the company still has to finish careful medical trials and get full approval from the US FDA before this can become a routine operation.
Does it have the chance to get the requisite approval and then to scale in the near foreseeable future? Musk has talked about eventually helping thousands of patients and turning this into a real business, beating other brain‑chip companies like Synchron and Precision Neuroscience to scale. The big question now is whether the world is ready for brain surgery to become a mass‑produced, almost factory‑style medical service.
BRAIN TECH AT SCALE WILL TEST HOW MUCH HUMANITY IS REALLY READY TO MERGE WITH MACHINES.