Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk announced on Wednesday that his startup Neuralink Corp. will soon implant a device into the brain of the first human patient. Neuralink started human trials earlier today after receiving approval from an independent review board for patients with quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). It said the trial, authorized by the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) in May, "represents an important step in our mission to create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs."
"This ultimately has the potential to restore full body movement," Musk said of the trial. "In the long term, Neuralink hopes to play a role in AI risk civilizational risk reduction by improving human-to-AI (and human-to-human) bandwidth," he added in a post on his social platform X, formerly known as Twitter.