At the start of the live update event today: full video and cyber-pig ping test.
It felt like a scene from a sci-fi movie when we entered.. surrounded by brain robots, and the sounds of neural-jacked pigs rustling behind the curtains…
C|Net: “Elon Musk shows Neuralink brain implant working in a pig. A wireless link from the Neuralink computing device showed the pig’s brain activity activity as it snuffled around a pen on stage Friday night. The demonstration shows the technology to be significantly closer to delivering on Musk’s radical ambitions than during a 2019 product debut, when Neuralink only showed photos of a rat with a Neuralink connected via a USB-C port. The FDA granted approval for “breakthrough device” testing.
“It’s like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires,” Musk said of the device.
It communicates with brain cells with 1,024 thin electrodes that penetrate the outer layer of the brain. Then there’s a Bluetooth link to an outside computing device, though the company is looking at other radio technology it can use to dramatically increase the number of data links.
Neuralink has a medical focus to start, like helping people deal with brain and spinal cord injuries or congenital defects. The technology could, for example, help paraplegics who’ve lost the ability to move or sense because of spinal cord injury, and the first human uses will aim to improve conditions like paraplegia or tetraplegia.
“If you can sense what people want to do with their limbs, you can do a second implant where the spinal injury occurred and create a neural shunt,” Musk said. “I’m confident in the long term it’ll be possible to restore somebody’s full body motion.”
“The future is going to be weird,” Musk said, discussing sci-fi uses of Neuralink. “In the future you will be able to save and replay memories,” he said. “You could basically store your memories as a backup and restore the memories. You could potentially download them into a new body or into a robot body.”
Musk also discussed seeing in infrared, ultraviolet or X-ray using digital camera data. “Over time we could give somebody super vision,” Musk said.”
Full disclosure: Future Ventures is an investor
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One benefit of using pigs as a test animal; they can be trained to walk on a treadmill. And with the wireless Neuralink puck implanted, you can see how they can read out the pig’s proprioception of its front leg position (faint lines) compared to the actual position (dark lines recorded by motion capture of the BGRP color spots indicated on the far right).
The brain compensates for signaling lag effects by thinking the leg is in a certain position slightly before it is. Jump to
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