Jeff Miller / University of Wisconsin-Madison
Neuralink, the brain machine interface company founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has published a YouTube video of a macaque monkey named Pager playing the video game Pong with his mind.
The 3 minutes and 27 seconds video shared by Musk on Twitter It turns out on Thursday that the monkey controls a computer with its brain activity.
“A monkey literally plays a video game telepathically using a brain chip,” Musk wrote on Twitter.
In the video, a narrator tries to explain how Pager Pong can play with his mind.
The nine-year-old monkey, who had two Neuralink devices 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 turned with a straw. delivered, the narrator says.
He goes on to explain that the company’s “Link” devices recorded Pager’s neuron activity as he communicated with the computer. This was possible thanks to the more than 2,000 tiny wires implanted in the regions of his motor cortex that coordinate hand and arm movements, the narrator said.
This data was then entered into a “decoder algorithm” to predict the intended hand movements of the Pager in real time.
After the decoder was calibrated, Neuralink said the monkey could use it to move the cursor where it wanted it to go, rather than 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 performed a live demo of his technology on three pigs. An audience was shown real-time neural signals from one of the pigs, which Musk named Gertrude.
Neuralink, headquartered in San Francisco, ultimately 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 the devices will soon enable paralyzed people to use their minds to operate machines.
On Thursday, Musk said the first Neuralink product will enable a paralyzed human to use a smartphone with their mind more quickly than someone using their thumbs.
AI is only getting smarter, and Neuralink’s technology could one day allow people to “go along,” Musk said in an interview on Clubhouse in January.
To illustrate the pace of advancement in AI, the innovator – who believes that machine intelligence will eventually surpass human intelligence – pointed to breakthroughs achieved in research labs such as OpenAI, which he co-founded, and DeepMind, a London based AI lab acquired by Google in 2014. DeepMind “basically has no more games to win,” said Musk, who was an early investor in the company.
According to Musk, people are in fact already “cyborgs” because they have a tertiary “digital layer” thanks to telephones, computers and applications.
“With a direct neural interface, we can improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude,” he said. “I’d say there are probably at least 1,000, or maybe 10,000, or more.”
The digital layer he refers to can be anything from someone’s iPhone to their Twitter account.
In the long run, Musk argues that Neuralink could enable people to send concepts to each other using telepathy and exist in a “saved state” after death that can then be transformed into a robot or another human. be stopped. He acknowledged that he was venturing into sci-fi territory.