In the face of technology and its outcomes, there is no room left for the impossible, and everything has become achievable. Imagine a person with a disability suffering from quadriplegia being able to play the game of chess with complete professionalism.
Neuralink, the American company affiliated with billionaire Elon Musk, published a video clip showing a quadriplegic man playing chess on the computer, controlling the game with his mind using a brain implant.
Noland Arbo (29 years old), who is quadriplegic as a result of a traffic accident, narrates in the video that he can play chess and video games or take lessons in the Japanese and French languages thanks to a brain implant that allows him to control the computer mouse on his own.
“This is crazy, this is a very wonderful thing,” the young man says, smiling, in the video clip, adding, “There are still many additional things to be done, but my life has changed since now.”
The patient narrated how this new technology gave him the ability to practice several hobbies in a simplified manner. He also described the way he was able to move the cursor on the screen, as the implant translated his thinking.
Musk, president of Tesla, SpaceX, and X Platform, announced in January that Neuralink had performed the first implantation of a brain implant in a patient in clinical trials.
Then, at the end of February, he confirmed that this patient was able to control a computer mouse by thinking.
Elon Musk aims to make his implant available to everyone, in order to enable better communication with computers and contain “the threat to our civilization” posed by artificial intelligence, according to him.