He has already revolutionised the worlds of space rockets and electric cars. Now, via a clip of a monkey playing Pong with just its mind, Elon Musk has offered a glimpse of his next project.
The billionaire’s start-up company Neuralink has released footage showing a monkey playing the 1970s video game through a wireless chip implanted in the animal’s brain.
Neuralink’s aim is to design a chip that can be implanted in human brains, enabling people to control computers or prosthetic limbs with their minds. It is hoped that this could transform the lives of people who are paralysed.
Musk, who is also the chief executive of the rocket company SpaceX and electric car manufacturer Tesla, has grander plans for Neuralink, however — signalling that it could carry out his greatest trick of all. He hopes the chips will help fuse mankind with artificial intelligence and counter the “existential threat” of humanity being overtaken by hyper-intelligent machines.
The experiment with the monkey is an update from Neuralink’s demonstration last year, when it presented a pig named Gertrude that had a computer chip the size of a fingernail implanted in her brain.
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Neuralink has now published a video of a nine-year-old macaque monkey that has had two computer chips planted in the left and right motor cortex of its brain, the part that controls our body movements.
The monkey, called Pager, was taught to play a simple video game controlled by a joystick, with the reward of a banana smoothie delivered through a straw when he succeeded in hitting a target. During this time, the brain implants monitored what neurons were firing when Pager moved his arm and hands, and transmitted its recordings wirelessly to a computer.
Neuralink said that “within minutes”, the computer had learnt to predict what movements the monkey wanted to make just by scanning the activity of the relevant neurons that control movement in the animal’s hands and arms. The joystick was then disconnected from the computer, but the monkey was able to still successfully play the game, with the implants predicting what movements he wanted to make. The monkey then played Pong without a joystick at all, controlling the paddle by thinking about moving his hand up or down.
Musk tweeted that the first Neuralink product eventually to be released for humans would “enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs”. He added that later versions would enable “paraplegics to walk again”.
Scientists are being cautious in their praise as Neuralink did not release any data or peer-reviewed studies. Also a monkey has been able to control a computer with its brain before. However, Andrew Jackson, professor of neural interfaces at Newcastle University, who did not work on the study, said that the wireless element was new.
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“There are no cables coming through the skin of the monkey, with the brain signals being sent wirelessly through the skin from the Neuralink device,” he said. “This to me is the advance here, and is important both for improving the safety of human applications, as wires through the skin are a potential route for infection.”