Musk’s superhuman vision promise is dangerous: researchers

PARIS: Researchers have criticised billionaire Elon Musk for promising that his brain implant technology could eventually provide patients with vision superior to normal human sight.

Musk has long promised that his Neuralink company was working on implants that could restore sight to blind people, telling his 190 million followers on X in March that the product would be called “Blindsight”.

He said the product was already working in monkeys, adding: “Resolution will be low at first, like early Nintendo graphics, but ultimately may exceed normal human vision.”

But Ione Fine, psychology professor at the University of Washington, said it was “a dangerous thing to say”.

Fine co-authored a paper published Monday in the journal Scientific Reports that used models known as “virtual patients” to simulate how such implants could work.

The article argues that the impact of novel implants including Musk´s are likely to be limited by human biology.

Fine said Musk´s idea rested on a flawed premise that high-resolution vision could be created by implanting millions of tiny electrodes into the visual cortex, the region of the brain that processes information received from the eye.

Creating an image in the brain involves not only stimulating individual cells in the way an implant can do, but also then generating a “neural code” that fires across thousands of cells.