Neuralink: Elon Musk unveils pig with chip in its brain

Elon Musk has unveiled a pig called Gertrude with a coin-sized computer chip in her brain to demonstrate his ambitious plans to create a working brain-to-machine interface.

His start-up Neuralink applied to launch human trials last year.

The interface could allow people with neurological conditions to regulate phones or computers with their mind.

Mr Musk argues such chips could eventually be wont to help cure conditions like dementia, paralysis agitans and medulla spinalis injuries.

But the long-term ambition is to inaugurate an age of what Mr Musk calls "superhuman cognition", partially to combat AI so powerful he says it could destroy the humanity .

Gertrude was one among three pigs in pens that took part in Friday's webcast demo. She took a short time to urge going, but when she ate and sniffed straw, the activity showed abreast of a graph tracking her neural activity. She then mostly ignored all the eye round her .

The processor in her brain sends wireless signals, indicating neural activity in her snout when trying to find food.

Mr. Musk said the first Neuralink device, revealed just over a year ago, had been simplified and made smaller.

"It actually fits quite nicely in your skull. It might be under your hair and you would not know."

Founded in 2017, Neuralink has worked hard to recruit scientists, something Mr. Musk was still advertising for on Twitter last month and which he said was the aim of Friday's demo.

The device the corporate is developing consists of a small probe containing quite 3,000 electrodes attached to flexible threads thinner than human hair, which may monitor the activity of 1,000 brain neurons.

Ahead of the webcast, Ari Benjamin, at the University of Pennsylvania's Kording Lab, had told BBC News the important stumbling block for the technology could be the sheer complexity of the human brain.

"Once they need the recordings, Neuralink will got to decode them and can someday hit the barrier that's our lack of basic understanding of how the brain works, regardless of what percentage neurons they record from.

"Decoding goals and movement plans is tough once you don't understand the neural code during which those things are communicated."

Mr Musk's companies SpaceX and Tesla have captured the general public imagination together with his attempts to drive progress in spaceflight and electric vehicles respectively.

But both also demonstrate the entrepreneur's habit of making bold declarations about projects that end up taking much longer to complete than planned.