Elon Musk said his brain chip startup Neuralink aims to have its artificial visual prosthesis, Blindsight, implanted in a human for the first time by the end of 2025.
“We’re hoping, later this year, to have a first device implant for humans, enabling someone who is completely blind to see,” the tech billionaire said in response to a question by an audience member at his Town Hall held in Wisconsin, US, Sunday night.
Musk expressed caution in setting expectations for the implant and said that initially, Blindsight would only be capable of providing low-resolution vision, “like Atari Graphics”, in blind people.
“It’ll start off with very low-resolution but then over time, the implant would eventually enable vision that is superhuman…” Musk said onstage.
He also said the device had been working well in monkeys for a few years now.
Blindsight is designed to “enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see,” according to a post on X by Musk. “[I]t will even enable those who have been blind from birth to see for the first time,” he had said.
Blindsight comprises a microelectrode array that is embedded in the visual cortex, the part of the brain responsible for processing visual data. It is reportedly capable of stimulating neurons or nerve cells located in the visual cortex based on patterns relayed from a camera.
The experimental device was granted ‘breakthrough’ status by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in September last year. The FDA’s breakthrough tag is given to medical devices that provide treatment or diagnosis of life-threatening conditions.
However, experts have warned that the designation does not mean the company has developed a cure for blindness. Instead, it is aimed at speeding up the development and review of devices currently under development, according to a report by Reuters.
In the past, Musk’s claims about the device have been criticised as misleading by experts. “At best, we’re talking about something that’s augmentative to a cane and a guide dog; not something that replaces a cane and a guide dog,” Philip Troyk, a biomedical engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was quoted as saying by IEEE Spectrum.