Last month, I discussed a Melbourne research lab, Cortical Labs, growing human brain cells and training them to play the 90’s video game Doom.
The race to build a hybrid Human/Computer is on. Human cell computers use 20 watts of energy, a fraction of standard computers. They are slow to train, and I mentioned that researchers would benefit from volunteers to have an implant in their skulls to increase learning speed. Well, no need. The search is over.
Neuralink recently demonstrated a brain implant helping a man with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) speak again without moving his mouth. ALS is a disease that gradually shuts down the muscles used for movement and speech, while leaving thinking mostly intact.
The technology works by decoding “neural intent,” which is the brain’s built-in signals for what you’re about to say. The chip picks up activity in speech-related brain areas, matches it to learned patterns of sounds (phonemes), and turns it into full sentences spoken by a computer in a reconstructed version of the patient’s voice.
In testing, the patient went from speaking normally, to silently mouthing words, to eventually just thinking the sentence while the system still produced speech. It’s imperfect for now, and delayed, but it is improving.
On the surface, this is a medical tool for restoring communication. But it also fits into a bigger transhumanist trend: the steady push to turn human biology into something upgradeable, readable, and replaceable. Figures like Elon Musk and other tech billionaires backing brain-computer interfaces often frame these systems as early steps toward overcoming biological limits—whether that’s disability, aging, or even death itself.
There is some serious money being directed towards such endeavours!
For the full article visit https://au.pcmag.com/news/116712/neuralinks-brain-chip-can-now-translate-brain-activity-into-audible-words
By Frank Ian Stine Jr.
Chitchat Newspaper – May 2026