For those who don’t know much about this field, this seems incredible. The reality is that this a tech demo that Neuralink is using to practice the basics. For other research groups in this field, this is tech from 20 years ago.

The current state of the art is humans, mostly quadriplegic people, with chips which let them control robot arms with enough accuracy to pick up small delicate objects, play games, and type by thinking words. Current state of the art implants let people get tactile feedback too - they can intuitively know the position of the arm they’re controlling and feel the amount of pressure on each finger tip.

I had the pleasure of meeting a man with an implant in 2016 and the technology he was using was incredible. He could pick up a grape with his arm without crushing it and then eat it. If the arm was in another room, he could feel around with it to find objects. He described how the arm just felt like a part of his body when it’s turned on.

To use SpaceX as an analogy: this isn’t a first flight. This is more like a static test fire. If Neuralink follows the SpaceX trajectory of driving down cost/increasing innovation, it results will be really out of this world. Stuff that would just sound bonkers right now.