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08th Dec 2021

Elon Musk says humans could receive Neuralink chips from next year

Danny Jones

Musk co-founded the company back in 2016 and its already looking at human trials

Elon Musk says humans could start receiving his Neuralink chips from as early as 2022.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal for its ‘CEO Council’ program, the company’s 50-year-old co-founder discussed everything – from Tesla, Joe Biden, the US government and its poorly managed “capital allocation” as he perceives it, to his groundbreaking brain-machine-interface chips.

You can watch the full interview below:

As interviewer Joanna Stern asked what his plans were for pushing the technology along in the New Year, the SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO said: “Neuralink’s working well in monkeys and we’re actually doing a lot of testing and confirming that it’s very safe and reliable and that the device can be removed safely.”

He then goes on to reference a video of Neuralink technology we reported on back in March when they released a rather staggering and also controversial clip of a monkey using the implant to play Pong with its mind.

Musk added that, as well as being “completely wireless, charge[ing] inductively”, he hopes that they will be able to be inserted into their first humans suffering from “severe spinal cord injuries” sometime next year.

Naturally, he added the caveat that this is all “pending FDA approval” and didn’t want to “raise hopes unreasonably” – but he did state his increasing confidence that the implants could “restore full-body functionality to someone who has a spinal cord injury”.

Though certainly a divisive figure, the goal of this technology were it to be achieved would be astonishing. However, perhaps the biggest takeaway from the Q&A was his belief that the US should “get rid of all government subsidies” – despite having previously received billions in support for Tesla.

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