Jeff Miller/College of Wisconsin-Madison
Neuralink, the mind machine interface firm based by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has revealed a YouTube video of a macaque monkey known as Pager enjoying the online game Pong with its thoughts.
The three minute 27 second video, shared by Musk on Twitter late Thursday, seems to point out the monkey controlling a pc with its mind exercise.
“A monkey is actually enjoying a online game telepathically utilizing a mind chip,” Musk wrote on Twitter.
Within the video, a narrator makes an attempt to elucidate how Pager is ready to play Pong along with his thoughts.
The nine-year-old monkey, which had two Neuralink gadgets placed on either side of his mind about six weeks in the past, discovered methods to use a joystick to maneuver a cursor to targets on a display screen in alternate for a banana smoothie delivered by way of a straw, the narrator says.
He goes on to elucidate that the corporate’s “Hyperlink” gadgets recorded Pager’s neuron exercise whereas he interacted with the pc. This was attainable as a result of greater than 2,000 tiny wires implanted within the areas of his motor cortex that co-ordinate hand and arm actions, the narrator mentioned.
This information was then fed right into a “decoder algorithm” to foretell Pager’s supposed hand actions in actual time.
As soon as the decoder had been calibrated, Neuralink mentioned the monkey was ready to make use of it to maneuver the cursor the place he needed it to go, as an alternative of counting on the joystick.
Certainly, the YouTube video reveals Pager controlling a paddle within the arcade recreation Pong whereas the joystick is unplugged.
Pigs to monkeys
In August, Neuralink performed a live demo of its technology on three pigs. An audience was shown real-time neural signals from one of the pigs, which 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 machine.
While the technology is still in its infancy, Neuralink hopes that its devices will soon allow paralyzed humans to use their minds to operate machines.
On Thursday, Musk said the first Neuralink product will allow a paralyzed human to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using their thumbs.
AI is only going to get smarter and Neuralink’s technology could one day allow humans to “go along for the ride,” Musk said in an interview on Clubhouse in January.
To illustrate the pace of progress in AI, the innovator — who believes that machine intelligence will eventually surpass human intelligence — pointed to breakthroughs made at research labs like OpenAI, which he co-founded, and DeepMind, a London AI lab that was acquired by Google in 2014. DeepMind has “run out of games to win at basically,” said Musk, who was an early investor in the company.
People are in effect already “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 your 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 he refers to could be anything from a person’s iPhone to their Twitter account.
Long term, Musk claims that Neuralink could allow humans to send concepts to one another using telepathy and exist in a “saved state” after they die that could then be put into a robot or another human. He acknowledged that he was delving into sci-fi territory.