Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company, Neuralink Corp., announced today a successful surgery in what is now its second human implant.
This follows the first success back in January this year, a milestone for Neuralink, which has been talking about hooking human brains up with computers since it was founded in 2017. Hundreds of millions of dollars later, and with healthy competition, a kind of digital telepathy is fast becoming a reality.
Little is known about this latest recipient of the Brain Computer Interface, or BCI. Neuralink says his name is Alex and at some point in his life he suffered a catastrophic spinal injury. After a successful surgery at Arizona’s Barrow Neurological Institute, Alex was using his implant, Link, to do things he certainly hadn’t been able to do before the surgery.
“It took less than 5 minutes for him to start controlling a cursor with his mind,” Neuralink reported on its website. He was soon browsing the web, creating 3-D designs with CAD applications and as a video shows, playing Counter-Strike 2 like a baller.” He had previously played the game using a mouth-operated controller called a QuadStick.
How he’s now able to navigate the game and exterminate the enemy leveraging mind-control is impressive. Alex was an automotive technician before his injury. One of the things he missed was “building things…and destroying things.”
“I’m already super impressed with how this works,” he said. “Just running around is so enjoyable because I can look side to side, and not need to move Quadstick left and right… I can [think about where to] look and it goes where I want it to. It’s insane.”
Last week, scientists at the University of California at Davis reported that they’d used an implant to decipher neural signals in a man who suffers from the neurodegenerative disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. He had previously been unable to speak, and then with a chip that can interpret signals in the part of the brain responsible for speech, and with the help of AI to generate his voice, he was chatting with his daughter again.
It seems after years of research, progress in the brain chip domain is moving fast. “If all goes well, there will be hundreds of people with Neuralinks within a few years, maybe tens of thousands within 5 years, millions within 10 years,” Musk wrote on X.