The future is now.In what was once considered the realm of science fiction, a paralyzed 29-year old played the first game of online chess using Elon Musk’s Neuralink implant and live streamed it on Twitter (“X”).Nolan Arbaugh was paralyzed below the shoulders after a diving accident and received the implant in January. Yesterday he was controlling his laptop and moving the cursor using only the Neuralink device, dubbed ‘Telepathy’.Arbaugh said he was able to play the game Civilization IV for eight hours straight. “I had basically given up playing that game,” he said. “You all (Neuralink) gave me the ability to do that again and played for eight hours straight.”.Neuralink's device, which is about the size of a coin, is inserted into the skull with microscopic wires which can read neuron activity and beam back a wireless signal to a receiving unit.The company has run trials in pigs and claims that monkeys can play a basic version of the video game Pong. It received Food and Drug Administration approval to proceed in humans last May.Kip Ludwig, the former program director for neural engineering at the US National Institutes of Health, said what Neuralink showed was not a “breakthrough,” but said the initial results were positive.“It is still in the very early days post-implantation and there is a lot of learning on both the Neuralink side and the subject’s side to maximize the amount of information for control that can be achieved,” he added..“Even if someone has never had vision ever, like they were born blind, we believe that we can still restore vision using Neuralink,”Elon Musk.Although it sounds scary, Arbaugh said the procedure went smoothly and he was released from hospital the next day without cognitive impairment.The human brain is home to around 86 billion neurons, nerve cells connected to one another by synapses. Researchers have been using so-called brain-computer interfaces to try to help paralyzed people to walk.On Thursday, Musk announced its next Neuralink product called ‘Blindsight’ which aimed at restoring vision in blind people. “Even if someone has never had vision ever, like they were born blind, we believe that we can still restore vision using Neuralink,” Musk said. Although the chip is still in development the company is presently seeking regulatory approvals.
