Turns out Elon Musk’s FDA prediction was only off by about a month. After reportedly denying the company’s overtures in March, the FDA approved Neuralink’s application to begin human trials of its prototype Link brain-computer interface (BCI) on Thursday.Â
Founded in 2016, Neuralink aims to commercialize BCIs in wide-ranging medical and therapeutic applications — from stroke and spinal cord injury (SCI) rehabilitation, to neural prosthetic controls, to the capacity “to rewind memories or download them into robots,” Neuralink CEO Elon Musk promised in 2020. BCIs essentially translate the analog electrical impulses of your brain (monitoring it using hair-thin electrodes delicately threaded into that grey matter) into the digital 1’s and 0’s that computers understand. Since that BCI needs to be surgically installed in a patient’s noggin, the FDA — which regulates such technologies…
