Elon Musk claims Neuralink brain chips can enable telepathy, cure blindness

Yesterday, in a nine-minute livestream, Elon Musk’s Neuralink showcased the results of its first-ever implant of a pioneering computer chip in a human brain. Received by a 29-year-old man named Noland Arbaugh, the controversial brain-computer interface enables “telepathy” – in Neuralink’s terms, this means that he can manipulate a computer using nothing more than his thoughts. 

“I’m a complete quadriplegic,” says Arbaugh in the stream, explaining that he was injured in a freak diving accident around eight years ago. “I’m paralysed from below the shoulders. I have no sensation or movements below [...] my shoulders.” Despite this, the chip enables him to use a laptop to play online chess and other more complex video games, by moving the cursor with his mind. “It was like using the force,” he says, of getting to grips with the new ability.

This seems like a rare undeniable win for Musk’s neurotechnology company, which has previously provoked horror and outrage due to the reported deaths of around 1,500 animals – including monkeys, sheep, and pigs – that it uses to test its tech. (Elon himself has claimed that no monkeys have died “as a result of a Neuralink implant” and that the test subjects basically live in “monkey paradise”, but this 2023 Wired report tells a very different story.) Riding high on this success, the billionaire has now announced the company’s next big project: curing blindness.

Surprisingly, the news was casually announced via Musk’s X replies – you can find it between his anti-LGBTQ+ fearmongering and pandering to right-wing accounts like @EndWokeness, if you want to see for yourself. “Blindsight is the next Neuralink product after Telepathy,” he wrote yesterday, in response to a video of himself, where he floats the idea that Neuralink could enable vision even in patients that are born blind.

Today (March 21), Musk provided some more details in further X comments. “I should mention that the Blindsight implant is already working in monkeys,” he writes. (Has anyone stopped to think about whether the monkeys even want to see what’s going on at Neuralink?) “Resolution will be low at first, like early Nintendo graphics, but ultimately may exceed normal human vision.”

“Also,” he adds in parentheses, “no monkey has died or been seriously injured by a Neuralink device!” Again, this fact is very debatable, with veterinary records (accessed by Wired) showing “gruesome portrayals of suffering” that were reportedly endured by as many as 12 primates under the company’s care.

Some would argue, perhaps, that a few monkeys’ lives are worth trading for cutting-edge assistive technologies for humans in the near-ish future, especially if they’re as successful as Arbaugh’s implant appears to be. “It’s not perfect,” admits the pioneering patient, adding that they did “run into some issues” with the chip. “But it has already changed my life... I think [Neuralink] are going to change the world.”

If you are excited about the revolutionary potential of brain-computer interface technologies, then you can read Dazed’s deep dive into brain uploading here (and don’t google any macaque videos, because they are very cute).