Elon Musk’s Neuralink is working on a brain chip that will help human beings regain their eyesight. But to reach human, the experiments are done on monkeys. In a recent podcast of Joe Rogan with Neuralink’s first human patient, Noland Arbaugh spoke about what happens to the animals that are experimented on. He did not specify if that’s the case with Neuralink but he explained the general procedure. He also talked about the facilities that Neuralink gives to animals when they are studying them.
In the podcast, Joe Rogan highlighted that animals, in this case monkeys, are eventually killed after performing these studies. To this, Arbaugh stated that the companies have to kill off the animal, and they call it ‘sacrifice’. The ‘sacrifice’ sometimes happens immediately after the test and sometimes after medium term or long term. This is done to study the effect of the experiment that has taken place in the body of the animal and the intensity of changes.
Back in March, Elon Musk posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, about a Neuralink brain chip being used in monkeys. He wrote, “I should mention that the Blindsight implant is already working in monkeys. Resolution will be low at first, like early Nintendo graphics, but ultimately may exceed normal human vision. (Also, no monkey has died or been seriously injured by a Neuralink device!)”
Notably, Blindsight uses a brain implant to bypass damaged eyes and stimulate the visual cortex of the brain directly. This essentially creates a new kind of vision for the recipient. Musk even stated that this tech will help people see much better than “normal human vision”.
Neuralink’s first human patient
Nueuralink is currently running its first ever human trial of its brain chip on a 29-year-old man, Nolan Arbaugh. The Elon Musk-owned company aims to create a bridge between the human brain and computers with its chip. In this podcast, Arbaugh revealed if this brain chip can be hacked or not.
He stated that the chip can be hacked but at this point in time, they won’t be getting a lot of data. He stated, “At this point at least, hacking the brain chip wouldn't really do much. You might be able to see some of the brain signals and the data that Neuralink is collecting, and then you might be able to control my cursor on my screen and make me look at weird stuff. But that's about it. I guess you could go in and look through my messages, email, and more.” Despite the potential for misuse, Arbaugh is more focused on the transformative potential of Neuralink and less on the hypothetical risks of hacking.
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