Tom Oxley came up with his idea for a brain chip while at Melbourne University in the late 2000s. Now his company has attracted high-profile backers such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
When 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh was finally given free rein to use his Neuralink brain chip, he was able to enjoy something that had once been impossible.
If Musk is to be believed, Neuralink will one day do much more than that. Its chip, which is weaved into a person’s brain under their skull, will allow the blind to see, people to communicate telepathically and even act as a way to meld the human mind with artificial intelligence – or so the billionaire claims.While Neuralink is the most eye-catching and best-known company trying to put chips in people’s brains, it is not the only one.
“To achieve scale, what we don’t need to do – which is what companies like Neuralink need to do – is basically build robots in surgical centres that can make this happen,” Oxley, who is based in New York and Australia, says. Synchron was envisaged by Oxley well before Musk’s endeavour launched in 2016. He came up with the idea for implanting a chip using a stent while at Melbourne University in the late 2000s, pitching the idea to Darpa, the US military research division, in a cold call in 2010. The innovation agency, which was instrumental in the development of new technologies such as GPS, jumped on the idea, providing early capital.
“Things like text messaging, emailing, shopping banking, healthcare access, all of that happens on the phone.“ Synchron’s stent, for instance, can’t yet pick up a movement as detailed as, say, a mouse moving across a screen. “It’s a trade-off,” Oxley admits.
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