Elon Musk’s company Neuralink has already implanted a chip into a monkey’s brain that enables it to “play video games using his mind.”Musk claimed as much in a wide-ranging interview conducted on Clubhouse on Sunday nightNeuralink is focused on human-computer interfaces for artificial intelligence in people.
Elon Musk’s human-computer interface company, Neuralink, is seemingly off to a strong start.
“We’ve already got a monkey with a wireless implant in their skull, and the tiny wires, who can play video games using his mind,” Musk said in a new interview.
“One of the things we’re trying to figure out is can we have the monkeys play mind ‘Pong’ with each other,” he told the hosts of the Good Time Show, a Clubhouse-hosted talk show. “That would be pretty cool.”
Neuralink has been testing neural interfaces on animals for years at this point. In a video released last year, Neuralink demonstrated its work on a pig named Gertrude.
In that video, Neuralink demonstrated its ability to record and potentially predict actions based on a wired chip implanted in Gertrude’s brain.
But according to Musk, the video game-playing monkey was implanted with a wireless chip that enabled it to control an electronic interface with its mind only.
“He’s not uncomfortable and he doesn’t look weird,” Musk said, “And you can’t even see where the neural implant went in.”
The wireless bit is particularly important, as it could eliminate the potential for infection that comes with wires protruding from organic material.
“If you can do experiments with something that doesn’t involve wires coming through the skin, that’s going to improve the welfare of animals,” neuroscience Professor Andrew Jackson of the University of Newcastle told Insider last year.
