Elon Musk is an outstanding entrepreneur and business magnate. He is so influential that stocks can rise and fall depending on his words and actions alone. He is the founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer at SpaceX; early-stage investor, CEO, and Product Architect of Tesla, Inc.; and co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. With an estimated net worth of around $243 billion as of February 2022, he is currently the wealthiest man alive.
Neuralink is his next big project in terms of technological advancements: a brain interface chip that the company hopes to start implanting into humans within the next few years. Neuralink was co-founded by Elon Musk in early 2016 with the goal of being implanted into peoples brains to simultaneously record and stimulate brain activity, with very big claims to hopefully treat serious spinal-cord injury, optic nerve damage, neurological disorders and many more.
These medical issues have affected humans all throughout our entire history and have seemed impossible to find a reasonable solution to up until now. As to the testing stage of this, Musk said, “Neuralink’s working well in monkeys, and we’re actually doing just a lot of testing and just confirming that it’s very safe and reliable, and the Neuralink device can be removed safely.” Even so, in the most recent testing on a group of 23 monkeys, 15 reportedly resulted in their deaths. Both physical and neurological side effects were reported in the testing, with self harming behavior being reported, brain hemorrhaging, and in one instance even as far as a monkey was found missing fingers and toes. Others died from infection after the chip was implanted and poor care was taken of said area.
It is safe to say that it may be too early to tell if these Neuralink chips are even remotely safe for humans; more testing is necessary. In the event that these chips do become perfected, our world could see drastic change in terms of the medical field.
