Elon Musk is claiming that the first human to get a Neuralink implant is now moving a mouse cursor with their mind — though, of course, we have to take his word for it.
During a talk on X Spaces, which he owns, Musk said that the unnamed patient whose allegedly successful implantation he announced at the end of last month "seems to have made a full recovery, with no ill effects that we are aware of," per Reuters.
"Patient is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking," Musk added during the chat.
This is now the second Neuralink update we've heard in the past few weeks from the billionaire. Although there's no real reason to believe he's not telling the truth, the lack of any proof beyond the word of the notorious fabulist does make this sort of claim somewhat sketchy.
Beyond the dearth of evidence, there's also the specter of Neuralink's bloody history with its animal experiment subjects, many of whom had to be put down because their brain chips made them act erratically and at times harm themselves. Those appalling incidents were, as Wired reported last fall, during the company's earliest stage of experiments between 2018 and 2020 — but that wasn't all that long ago, so the mind runs wild at the thought of the same company now putting one of its implants into a human.
In fact, just a few months before Musk announced that Neuralink had implanted its bespoke chip into a living human's brain, news broke that lawmakers were pressuring the Securities and Exchange Commission into investigating the company for allegedly misleading investors with its promises of next-generation BCIs without revealing the primate death toll associated with its tech.
Should we take Musk's assertion at face value, it would be a pretty big deal given how short and brutish Neuralink's history is — but moving a mouse with one's mind would not be an unprecedented step, considering that others who've used brain-computer interfaces (BCI) have exhibited similar capabilities for more than a decade now.
Curiously, Neuralink itself hasn't posted any updates to its own blog since September, when it announced that it was opening up applications for human trials. We've reached out to the company to ask for on-record confirmation of what its founder is claiming, but considering the way Musk has gutted the PR departments of his other companies, we're not expecting much of a response.
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