Elon Musk's Neuralink Company Shares Video of Monkey Playing Pong With Just Its Mind
Co-founder Max Hodak also claims they could probably build Jurassic Park if they wanted to.
In a new blog post, Elon Musk‘s brain-computer interface company Neuralink shared its amazing progress of a macaque named “Pager” playing Pong with the help of Link chips. The incredible video of Pager comes after Neuralink successfully implanted its Link chips into the brain of a pig.
At first, Pager is shown playing the classic video game with a traditional joystick before moving to playing with just its mind through a wireless connection. “Today 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, termed the N1 Link. We have implanted the Link in the hand and arm areas of the motor cortex, a part of the brain that is involved in planning and executing movements. We placed Links bilaterally: one in the left motor cortex (which controls movements of the right side of the body) and another in the right motor cortex (which controls the left side of the body),” Neuralink said in the blog post.
Elon Musk took to Twitter to share his thoughts on the developments, optimistically noting that the first Neuralink product will look to aid paraplegics in a variety of ways including helping them walk again. While Musk’s Neuralink partner, Max Hodak, revealed that the two are thinking far beyond what they are working on by claiming that they could probably build Jurassic Park if they wanted to. It’s not exactly clear why, but Hodak notes that it could be achieved through just 15 years of breeding and engineering to get “super exotic novel species.”
Head over to Neuralink’s website to learn more about its latest development.
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
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2021
we could probably build jurassic park if we wanted to. wouldn’t be genetically authentic dinosaurs but 🤷♂️. maybe 15 years of breeding + engineering to get super exotic novel species
— Max Hodak (@max_hodak) April 4, 2021
Biodiversity (antifragility) is definitely valuable; conservation is important and makes sense. But why do we stop there? Why don’t we more intentionally try to generate novel diversity?
— Max Hodak (@max_hodak) April 4, 2021
In case you missed it, resurfaced video shows a South Korean professor testing a self-driving car in the 1990s.
