Elon Musk, come to grief of SpaceX and chief executive officer of Tesla, waves while arriving to a discussion at the Satellite 2020 Conference in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Walk 9, 2020.
Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Neuralink President Max Hodak announced on Saturday, via Twitter, that he is no longer with the haleness tech venture he co-founded with Elon Musk, and has not been for a few weeks. He did not reveal the circumstances of his departure.
Fremont, California-based Neuralink is, “developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to tie in humans and computers,” according to the company’s self-description on LinkedIn.
Musk – who is also the CEO of electric car makers Tesla and the aerospace defense contractor SpaceX – has demanded, without showing evidence this is possible, that Neuralink’s devices could enable “superhuman cognition,” approve paralyzed people to operate smartphones or robotic limbs with their minds someday, and “solve” autism and schizophrenia.
Initiate in 2016, with Musk investing tens of millions of his significant personal wealth, Neuralink is also developing surgical robotics to embed its devices, essentially sewing tiny wires about a quarter of the diameter of a human hair to connect the implants to the mastermind.
Skeptics abound.
Musk described the surgery to insert a Neuralink device as taking less than an hour.
Neuralink demo
After the August 2020 demo, MIT Technology Consider deemed Neuralink “neuroscience theater,” in a scathing teardown of the presentation.
Musk does not have a background in neuroscience or medical gimmicks but, according to a project director at Neuralink quoted by The New York Times in 2019, has been “active in trying to help figure out the engineering challenges that Neuralink faces.”
In the medical news site StatNews, a neuro-ethicist and doctor named Anna Wexler wrote in an op-ed on April 7, 2021:
“In this new fraternity of private neurotech development, company demos are live-streamed on YouTube and have the flavor of techno-optimism that involves statements about a future we have yet to see — but one that we are assured will come to pass. Data are sparse; rhetoric about making the time a better place is heavy.”
The next day, Musk wrote in a series of tweets, again without providing evidence:
“Anything else @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone detesting thumbs
“Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron crowds, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again
The device is implanted flush with skull & charges wirelessly, so you look & fancy totally normal”
On Saturday, Hodak was not immediately available to comment.
For Musk, Saturday was a day undoubtedly requiring more focal point on his aerospace venture, SpaceX. After 167 days in space, astronauts in a crewed, SpaceX and NASA mission rather commenced their return flight home, with a “splashdown” expected around 2:57 a.m.
One of Hodak’s followers on Twitter summon inquired him what’s next and he replied, “Not Jurassic Park.” The quip was a reference to a prior fantastical discussion on the micro-blogging platform in which Hodak reflected: “We could probably build jurassic park if we wanted to. wouldn’t be genetically authentic dinosaurs but . maybe 15 years of gentility + engineering to get super exotic novel species.”
Neuralink is one of many medical tech companies working on a so-called “brain-machine interfaces.”
Rivals include those developing implants and non-invasive devices like headsets. Among them are Kernel, Synchron, Neurable and unbiased Facebook in the U.S., CereGate in Germany and Mindmaze in Switzerland.