Neuralink, the brain-machine interface developed by Elon Musk's eponymous company, continues to be implanted in more and more patients, and its functional capabilities continue to improve. Just recently, one patient even published a YouTube video entirely edited and dubbed using the brain chip.
The person in question, Brad Smith, has the particularity of suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, a neurodegenerative disease that leads to progressive paralysis of the muscles involved in voluntary movement. In addition to depriving him of his mobility, it also reduces his ability to express himself: he is unfortunately no longer able to articulate words to form sentences, and must make do with a few onomatopoeias.
He therefore perfectly matched the profile sought by the Neuralink teams, one of whose main objectives is to reduce the impact of these highly debilitating diseases. And the least we can say is that the results have been very satisfactory.
A once impossible creative project
Neuralink has already shown in the past that its chip allows patients to control various electronic devices through “thought.” We remember, for example, the case of Noland Arbaugh, the company’s first patient. Thanks to his newly implanted chip, he was able to resume using his computer and even play some video games, such as Mario Kart.
First Neuralink patient plays Mario Kart with his mind
Same goes for Brad Smith: the brain-machine interface allowed him to resume using his favorite device—a MacBook Pro—intuitively, without having to resort to a slow and cumbersome gaze-tracking system. He was even able to start a creative project that would have been excessively laborious without this technology. Last week, he created and published a YouTube video describing the impact of this device on his daily life.
To recount his experience, Smith also benefited from another very popular technology: artificial intelligence applied to speech synthesis. Thanks to an AI model trained on old recordings of his voice, before he lost his ability to speak, he was able to recount his experience in person for the first time since the emergence of the disease.
A glimmer of hope for millions of patients
As encouraging as these stories are, we should not forget that this technology is still far from being able to restore patients' full capabilities. Moreover, it is not yet fully mature; Despite significant progress in this area, industry leaders are still encountering some challenges in implanting the chip. The first patient, for example, had a near-disaster when some of the chip's electrodes became dislodged after surgery.
But it's only thanks to these patients that brain-machine interfaces will one day be able to make a real difference on a large scale. And like Arbaugh before him, Smith takes this pioneering role very seriously. Beyond the obvious benefits in terms of personal autonomy, he's delighted to be able to contribute to the evolution of a technology that will likely ultimately change the lives of millions of people.
"It's really nice to have a goal bigger than myself. "I'm really looking forward to serving others in the future through this work," he explains in a blog post by Ashlee Vance, the journalist and Elon Musk biographer.
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