Scientist Ridicules Musk's Neuralink Claims

Despite all the attention it has gotten over the years, the brain-computer interface technology touted by Elon Musk’s Neuralink has been around for decades, Prof. Chad Bouton of the Institute of Bioelectronic Medicine at the Feinstein Institutes of Medical Research, told Miriam Fauzia of Inverse.

Photo Insert: Two major Neuralink applications that Musk announced were restoring vision to those blind at birth and helping people with severed spinal cords to move again.

Other experts also told Inverse back in 2021 that Neuralink hasn’t yet demonstrated anything groundbreaking compared to what’s already been done, which still remains the case for Wednesday’s demo.

Two major applications that Musk announced were restoring vision to those blind at birth and helping people with severed spinal cords to move again.

Bouton said while restoring mobility has been done before — his lab accomplished that in 2014 with a brain implant that helped a man move his paralyzed hand — restoring vision would be a bit more tricky and unlikely to result in any commercial product any time soon.

“I don’t think we’re quite there (to restoring vision), we’re getting closer though,” he says.

Musk ambitiously wants Neuralink’s device to be able to interface with every aspect of the brain, which is also something that seems overzealous considering his accelerated timeline. When you look at the human brain, there are 86 billion neurons and trillions of connections, Bouton says.

“It’s such a complex network that we still don’t completely understand [it], and we don’t even have the tools to tap into enough nodes in that network.”

While Neuralink hasn’t delivered any appreciable technological goods, Bouton says the publicity is drumming up more financial investment and attention toward brain-computer interface technology. In other words, it’s all hype.

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