Musk said that they feel confident to achieve the implant of the link in under an hour and without general anesthesia. Is their any difference between anesthesia and general anesthesia when working on the brain?
What do you mean by the qualifier 'when working on the brain'?
Typically avoiding GA is a laudable goal -- it's expensive (even in countries with public health cover), there's a lot more risk, and it would usually involve an overnight stay in a hospital (which might just come under the cost and added risk categories).
In the case of this process, it would also involve a human (anaesthesiologist), so on top of risk and cost, you then have resource constraint issues compared to avoiding GA and letting a robot do application of LA and the operation.
Open brain surgery often involves keeping the patient conscious as a good way of verifying nothing wrong and/or something right is happening during the operation -- this is probably less of an issue with this kind of repetitive, relatively low-risk, procedure.
> Open brain surgery often involves keeping the patient conscious
Many times they aren't fully conscious but still heavily drugged, just in a state of "not asleep" enough for basic tasks/communication needed to perform the surgery.
