Just when you thought the year 2020 couldn't get much weirder, billionaire Elon Musk has introduced a group of pigs with mind-reading brain implants.
During an event on Friday afternoon at Neuralink's headquarters in Fremont, California, Musk found himself hanging out with a passel of Yucatan swine.Several of them had previously undergone a surgical procedure in which a robot placed the latest version of Neuralink's computing implant into their brains.
As for Neuralink itself, Musk expects the company to go from its 100 current employees to about 10,000. It's that sort of ambition, coupled with theoretical future abilities like piping music directly into a person's mind, that could transform Neuralink from an expensive research project into a consumer electronics company-and someday justify the $US158 million of capital invested so far, most of it from Musk.
Over the past couple of months, Neuralink has been implanting pigs with a device that's 22.5 millimetres across and 8 millimetres thick. The hardware has a computing chip on top with 64 minuscule threads-or wires-that dangle off it with sensors at the ends. During the procedure, the animals are taken to an operating room at the Fremont facility and anesthetised before a surgeon performs a craniotomy on them.
In a bid to prove the safety of its technology, Neuralink has removed the implants from some animals and found that they go back to their regular lives with no apparent ill effects, the company said. In some cases, Neuralink has managed to place two implants in a single animal, getting signals from both hemispheres of the brain at the same time. The company has also managed not just to read out brain activity but also to send in signals to the electrodes and stimulate the brain.
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