Elon Musk's Neuralink shows a monkey playing video games through a brain chip!
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's brain-chip startup posted a video of a monkey playing a simple video game.
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| Pager playing Mind Pong via Neuralink's brain chip (Screen captured from Neuralink's YouTube video) |
This tech aims to help people with paralysis in the future
Co-founded by Musk in 2016, San Francisco-based Neuralink aims to implant wireless brain-computer chips to help cure neurological conditions like Alzheimer's, dementia, and spinal cord injuries and fuse humankind with artificial intelligence.
During a 2019 presentation, Musk proudly announced that they are successful in making a monkey "control a computer with its brain." Then in August last year, Neuralink did live testing in a pig named Gertrude.
This time, a macaque is using the tech to play video games, including Mind Pong. He controls the paddle simply by thinking about moving his hand up or down.
According to the company, they implanted the chip in Pager, a male macaque six weeks before the demo. The video shows that they gave him a joystick at first so he can move a cursor to the colored square. When he is successful in doing so, they reward him with some banana smoothie through a tube.
Elon Musk's Neuralink shows a monkey playing video games through a brain chip!
The chip implanted in Pager's brain does the recording of his brain activity then sends it back to a computer for analysis of his hand movement. After that, they unplug the joystick from the machine but Pager can still play the game through the brain signals from the chip.
In a tweet, Elon Musk said that the first Neuralink product would let people with paralysis control a smartphone, "with their mind faster than someone using thumbs".
Furthermore, he said that future iterations of the product would be able to enable communication between Neuralinks in different parts of a patient’s body. For example, the transmission between an in-brain node and neural pathways in the legs can make it possible for paraplegics to walk again.
Do you think Neuralink can achieve this in the future?
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