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The Internet exploded when it was announced that Elon Musk's Neuralink company, dedicated to making implantable brain-computer interfaces, was looking for volunteers. According to Bloomberg, the company was looking for a person willing to have a piece of their skull removed for a robot to precisely insert a plethora of electrodes and wires into their brain.
The company received an FDA approval for human trials in May of this year. Netizens were stunned when they first heard the news and remarked that the whole thing sounded very dystopian. Memes and jokes were aplenty, as some wanted Musk to do it himself, and others felt like this was a mission for the Elon Musk fanboys. One X user commented:
Netizens bewildered at Neuralink and Elon's dystopian experiment
Many people felt a sense of fear when the news broke that Neuralink was looking for human volunteers as the whole concept had an eerie dystopian feel to it, something people had only seen in science fiction that rarely ends well. "Skull drilling for science" was not all that appealing to people.
However, the news succeeded in creating a plethora of jokes and memes. A lot of people believed that Musk should volunteer himself, while others pointed fingers at his fanboys. Some users were up for it but only if they get paid in millions or even billions.
A "hulking, 7-foot-tall" robot to implant Neuralink devices on subjects
In May of this year, Neuralink announced that they had received the FDA's approval to launch their first "in-human clinical study." They called it an "important first step" that will allow their technology to help many people in the future. At the time, recruitment was closed but now, according to a November 7 Bloomberg article, the company was looking for its first human volunteer.
According to Ashlee Vance of Bloomberg, the company was looking for a person willing to have a "chunk" of their skull cut open and removed for a "large robot" to insert electrodes and wires into their brains. The removed "chunk" will be replaced with a quarter-sized computer that will be intact for years and will analyze brain activity to relay it to a computer or tablet wirelessly.
The study would ideally require a candidate under 40 with all four limbs paralyzed. They would have the implant inserted into the "hand knob area of their premotor cortex." The initial removal of the piece of skull will be done by a surgeon but a machine will handle the following procedures.
The Bloomberg report described the robot as a "hulking, 7-foot-tall white machine". The robot will push 64 threads of 1/14 the diameter of a human hair strand each, all lined with 16 electrodes, into the brain with the help of a "laser-milled needle", while at the same time "carefully" avoiding the blood vessels.
The implant will allow the brain's neural signals to be transmitted to Neuralink, which can decode them successfully.The company has yet to release information on the number of participants who will be enrolled in the program.However, Bloomberg reported that the trials ignited the interest of 1000s of potential volunteers.
Documents given to investors state that the company is slated to perform 11 surgeries in 2024, which will then be amped up to 27 in the following year and 79 in the year after that. After this initial period, the numbers increase massively as they aim to perform surgery on 499 patients in 2027, and by 2030, it would have done 22,204 surgeries. The patient registry is open on the company's website.
