Last week entrepreneur Elon Musk announced that his company Neuralink — which is attempting to develop brain implants to mediate connections between the brain and technology — has implanted a product in a human test subject.

A new poll from YouGov suggests that interest in such devices will be limited by skepticism about their potential, but that the technology does have a healthy contingent of fans among the science fiction fan set.

The poll was conducted January 30 - February 1, 2024, with 1,000 respondents and a margin of errors of ±3.9, and found that, if the technology moved past the experimental stage and is commercially sold, only 8% of respondents would consider getting a computer chip implanted in their brain.

The poll found 82% of respondents probably or definitely would not, and 10% were undecided.

Interest from potential test subjects is rather slim, as is: just 2% would "definitely" consider getting a computer chip implanted in their brain "within the next year," below the margin of error for the poll. Overall, just 5% of respondents would at all consider getting a chip in the next year.

Men were more than three times as likely as women (13% vs 4%) to be down for a commercially produced brain chip eventually. Democrats and Independents were twice as likely as Republicans (10% vs 5%) to consider such a piece of tech.

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