Jeff Miller / University of Wisconsin-Madison
Neuralink, the brain-machine interface company founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has posted a video on YouTube of a macaque monkey named Pager who plays the video game Pong with the mind.
The 3-minute, 27-second video, shared by Musk on Twitter late Thursday, he seems to show the monkey controlling a computer with the activity of his brain.
“A monkey literally plays a telepathic video game using a brain chip,” Musk wrote on Twitter.
In the video, a narrator tries to explain how Pager can play Pong with his mind.
The nine-year-old monkey, who had two Neuralink devices placed on each side of his brain about six weeks ago, learned how to use a joystick to move a cursor to targets on a screen in exchange for a banana smoothie delivered through -a straw, says the narrator.
He goes on to explain that the company’s “Link” devices recorded the activity of Pager’s neuron as it interacted with the computer. This was made possible by the more than 2,000 small wires implanted in the regions of his motor cortex that coordinate the movements of his hands and arms, the narrator said.
This data was then entered into a “decoder algorithm” to predict the intentional movements of Pager’s hands in real time.
Once the decoder was calibrated, Neuralink said the monkey managed to use it to move the cursor where it wanted to go, instead of relying on the joystick.
Indeed, the YouTube video shows Pager controlling a paddle in the arcade game Pong while the joystick is disconnected.
Pigs to monkeys
In August, Neuralink led a live demonstration of its technology on three pigs. An audience was shown real-time neural signals from one of the pigs, whom Musk named Gertrude.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Neuralink ultimately wants to increase the rate at which information can flow from the human brain to a car.
While the technology is still in its infancy, Neuralink hopes its devices will soon allow paralyzed people to use their minds to operate machines.
On Thursday, Musk said that the first Neuralink product will allow a paralyzed person to use a smartphone with his mind faster than someone who uses his thumbs.
AI will only become smarter, and Neuralink technology could one day allow people to “go for a walk,” Musk said in a January interview with Clubhouse.
To illustrate the pace of progress in AI, the innovator – who believes that machine intelligence will eventually surpass human intelligence – pointed to discoveries made in research labs such as OpenAI, which he co-founded, and DeepMind, an AI lab. from London which was acquired by Google in 2014. DeepMind “ran out of games to practically win,” said Musk, who was an early investor in the company.
People are actually “cyborgs” because they have a tertiary “digital layer” thanks to phones, computers and applications, according to Musk.
“With a direct neural interface, we can improve the bandwidth between your cortex and the digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude,” he said. “I’d probably say at least 1,000, or maybe 10,000, or more.”
The digital layer he was referring to could be anything from a person’s iPhone to his Twitter account.
In the long run, Musk argues that Neuralink could allow people to send concepts to each other using telepathy and exist in a “saved state” after they die, which could then be introduced into a robot or other human. . He acknowledged that he was entering SF territory.