In January this year, Elon Musk's Neuralink shared that it had successfully implanted its brain chip in a human being for the first time. The person to receive this brain chip is a 29-year-old man who was left paralysed from below his shoulders after an accident. Named Noland Arbaugh, the man received the brain chip on January 28 and was reported to be recovering well after two days of his surgery. As Arbaugh's surgery completed 100 days, Neuralink had also shared a detailed report about his progress in a blog post. Musk had also shared the patient's recovery as well as progress in various tweets. And now, the Neuralink chief says that the future will not have any phones but will be dominated by Neuralink users.
While responding to a parody account of himself on X, Musk wrote, "In the future, there will be no phones, just Neuralinks." The account that Musk responded to had shared an image of Musk holding a phone in his hand. The image shows a neural network-like design on Musk's forehead and seems to be generated using AI.
"Would you install a Neuralink interface on your brain to allow you to control your new X phone by thinking?" the user captioned the image.
Meanwhile, Neuralink is looking for a second participant who wants to get the brain chip to control their computer as well as phone just by their mind.
"Neuralink is accepting applications for the second participant. This is our Telepathy cybernetic brain implant that allows you to control your phone and computer just by thinking. No one better than Noland (@ModdedQuad) himself to tell you about the first," Musk wrote in a tweet earlier. Neuralink also shared a video of its first patient on X and in the caption, mentioned that they are looking for participants for their clinical trials.
"Redefining the boundaries of human capability requires pioneers. If you have quadriplegia and want to explore new ways of controlling your computer, we invite you to participate in our clinical trial," the company's tweet read.
In March this year, Neuralink's official handle live-streamed a video showcasing its first patient's progress. The video showed a Neuralink engineer introducing the company's first human trial patient Noland Arbaugh. The 29-year-old revealed in the video that he was left paralysed from below shoulders after an accident that happened about 8 years back. Arbaugh then added that Neuralink has enabled him to play chess, something that he loves but was unable to do on his own till now.
Talking about how he was feeling after receiving the Neuralink chip and being able to play chess just by thinking, he had said, "It's crazy, so cool. I am lucky to be a part of this. It seems every day I am learning something new. I can't describe how cool it is to be able to do this."
He then talked about how Neuralink has enabled him to "play to his heart's content" as he doesn't have to rely on anyone. "The only way I could play was through an iPad and I couldn't play without the help of my parents. I couldn't keep them up all night (to help me play the game). I could only play for a few hours. It wasn't feasible to play a full game. And now I can just lie in bed and play to my heart's content. The biggest restriction was having to wait for the implant to charge but it has been awesome," he had said at the time.
