Jeff Miller / University of Wisconsin-Madison
Neuralink, the brain machine interface company founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has posted a YouTube video of a macaque monkey named Pager playing the video game Pong with his mind.
The 3-minute, 27-second video, shared by Musk on Twitter On Thursday afternoon, he appears to be showing the monkey controlling a computer with his brain activity.
“A monkey is literally playing a video game telepathically with 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 to use a joystick to move a cursor to targets on a screen in exchange for a banana smoothie being delivered. through a straw. , says the narrator.
He goes on to explain that the company’s “Link” devices recorded Pager’s neural activity while interacting with the computer. This was made possible because of the more than 2,000 small wires implanted in the regions of their motor cortex that coordinate hand and arm movements, the narrator said.
This data was then introduced into a “decoding algorithm” to predict the hand movements predicted by Pager in real time.
Once the decoder was calibrated, Neuralink said the monkey could use it to move the cursor where he wanted it to go, instead of relying on the joystick.
In fact, the YouTube video shows Pager controlling a palette in the arcade game Pong while the joystick is disconnected.
Pigs to monkeys
In August, Neuralink directed a live demonstration of its technology in three pigs. A public was shown real-time neural signals from one of the pigs, which Musk named Gertrude.
Based in San Francisco, Neuralink wants to increase the speed at which information can flow from the human brain to a machine.
While the technology is still in its infancy, Neuralink hopes its devices will soon allow paralyzed humans to use their minds to run machines.
On Thursday, Musk said the first Neuralink product will allow a paralyzed human to use a smartphone with the mind faster than someone using their thumbs.
Artificial intelligence will only get smarter and Neuralink technology could one day allow humans to “follow the journey,” Musk said in an interview with Clubhouse in January.
To illustrate the pace of progress in AI, the innovator – who believes that machine intelligence will eventually surpass human intelligence – noted the advances made in research labs such as OpenAI, which he co-founded, and DeepMind, a London-based AI lab acquired by Google in 2014. DeepMind “has run out of games basically to win,” said Musk, who was the company’s first investor.
According to Musk, people are already “cyborgs” because they have a tertiary “digital layer” thanks to phones, computers, and apps.
“With a direct neural interface, we can improve the bandwidth between the cortex and the digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude,” he said. “I’d say probably at least 1,000, or maybe 10,000, or more.”
The digital layer it refers to can be anything from a person’s iPhone to their Twitter account.
In the long run, Musk claims that Neuralink could allow humans to send concepts to each other through telepathy and exist in a “saved state” after death that could then be put into a robot or other human being. He acknowledged that he was entering a territory of science fiction.