“Within this year we hope to implant the first device for humans who will allow those who are completely blind to see”. Elon Musk has announced the revolution from the stage of the Ki Convention Center of Green Bay (Wisconsin). Donald Trump’s bun was located there on March 30 to support the race of the Republican candidate for the office of judge of the Supreme Court of the American State. On this occasion, Musk has communicated that the Neuralink company, among the world leaders in the development of brain-computer interfaces, will try the Blindsight system for the first time on human beings. The promise: return the sight to the blind.
The announcement
In announcing the next phase of the Neuralink device, Musk also specified that at the beginning the results will not be optimal. “At the beginning, the resolution will be very low,” he said, “like the Atari graphics”, referring to a “pixing” vision, still dirty and not defined. The development, however, will continue, has guaranteed, until it reaches results that will also exceed the human possibilities: “But over time the system will allow a superhuman vision …”, he said.
How Blindsight works
Blindsight is one of the plants developed by Neuralink who has already made chips to be included in the brain to translate the electrical impulses generated in the cranial box into concrete physical actions. In September Blindsight obtained the prestigious attestation of “innovative device” from the American food and drug (FDA). The system consists in the installation of a microelectrode matrix in the visual cortex of the brain. This matrix activates neurons based on the input of an external camera, thus producing a visual image.