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Elon Musk is famous and infamous for his mind-blowing ideas and ventures, but one that is almost literally like that is the idea of connecting brains to computers to allow control of other computers using only brain power. To show he’s serious, Musk even founded the startup Neuralink to research and develop the technology to make that happen. That startup has reportedly reached a major milestone, according to Musk, an accomplishment that includes implanting a chip into a “not unhappy” monkey so it can play a video game using mind control.
Musk and Neuralink’s real goal is to cut out the middle man when it comes to interacting with external computers. Musk says that humans today are practically like cyborgs due to their use and dependence on devices like phones and computers. That being said, the connection between humans and computers – that is, fingers or voice – are slow and low-bandwidth. Neuralink, therefore, wants to create a brain-machine neural interface that would do it almost as fast as a thought, literally too.
That, of course, would require some kind of implant, and the Neuralink design involves a chip that uses tiny wires to connect to the brain itself. Naturally, the company’s early experiments involved animals, from pigs to monkeys, and its CEO, none other than Musk, was proud to reveal his latest achievement.
On the nascent social media platform Clubhouse, Musk recounted how they successfully installed an implant in a monkey to allow him to play “Mind Pong” with other monkeys. He didn’t go into much detail about the success of the last part, but he assured listeners that he is not an unhappy monkey. We are likely to hear a more formal and public press release on this achievement soon.
The applications of Neuralink technologies could be very broad, including quasi-telepathic communication that is the stuff of science fiction. More immediately, however, the brain-machine interface could give physically disabled people like quadriplegics the ability to control machines, computers, and other devices just by thinking about it rather than having to rely on some alternative physical interface.
