Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk pledged that he will receive a brain chip implant from his biotech company Neuralink during an event Wednesday night.
Neuralink hosted a “show and tell” event Wednesday night where Musk said he would install one of the products himself. He confirmed the promise on Twitter after the event.
“You could have a Neuralink device implanted right now and you wouldn’t even know. I mean, hypothetically. In one of these demos, in fact, in one of these demos, I will,” Musk reportedly said during the event.
Yup
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 1, 2022
Two of Neuralink’s applications will aim to restore vision, even for people born blind, and a third will focus on body functionality for people with spinal injuries by targeting the motor cortex, CNBC reported. The company could begin testing its motor cortex technology within six months, Musk said Wednesday night. (RELATED: Elon Musk Says Twitter ‘Interfered In Elections’)
“Obviously, we want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device in a human, but we’ve submitted, I think, most of our paperwork to the FDA,” Musk cautioned, according to CNBC. Musk claimed in 2019 that Neuralink was aiming for human trials by the end of 2020 and he has expressed frustration about the company’s slow progress, Reuters reported.
Monkeys tested by Neuralink from 2017 to 2020 allegedly received “extreme suffering” from gruesome experiments, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine claimed in a complaint sent to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in February, the New York Post reported.
Neuralink responded to the complaint in a blog post saying, “we are absolutely committed to working with animals in the most humane and ethical way possible.”