Neuralink, Elon Musk’s start off-up that is creating implantable brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computer systems, has released a video which shows a monkey playing a video game utilizing only its thoughts. Elon Musk shared the video of the monkey playing Pong on Twitter this morning.
Pager, a nine-year-old macaque monkey, had a Neuralink implanted about six weeks ahead of the video was filmed. He was initially taught to play an on-screen game with a joystick. The video shows Pager initially utilizing the joystick to move a coloured square in the video game. Neuralink was capable to use machine understanding to anticipate exactly where the monkey would move the square and predict its hand movements.
Eventually, the joystick was disconnected from the laptop or computer, but the monkey seems to continue playing Pong utilizing only his thoughts. “We are pleased to reveal the Link’s capability to enable a macaque monkey, named Pager, to move a cursor on a computer screen with neural activity using a 1,024 electrode fully-implanted neural recording and data transmission device,” Neuralink mentioned in a statement.
“Monkey plays Pong with his mind,” wrote Elon Musk whilst sharing the hyperlink to the YouTube video on Twitter. “A monkey is literally playing a video game telepathically using a brain chip!!” he added. The tweet has racked up more than 60,000 ‘likes’ and hundreds of stunned reactions.
Monkey plays Pong with his thoughts https://t.co/35NIFm4C7T
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2021
“This is insane,” wrote one Twitter user, whilst yet another mentioned, “We don’t even know what we’re going to achieve with technology in a few years, I’m so exited!!”
In a separate tweet, Elon Musk mentioned that the initially Neuralink item would let “someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs.”
“Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again,” the billionaire entrepreneur added.
Later versions will be capable to shunt signals from Neuralinks in brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, as a result enabling, for instance, paraplegics to stroll once more
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2021
According to Neuralink, by modeling the connection in between distinctive patterns of neural activity and intended movement directions, they have been capable to predict an intended movement. “We can go further than simply predicting the most likely intended movement given the current pattern of brain activity: we can use these predictions to control, in real time, the movements of a computer cursor, or in the video, a MindPong paddle,” they mentioned.