Elon Musk says Neuralink monkey can play video games with its mind

 

By Noah Manskar

This technology is bananas. Elon Musk says his brain-implant firm Neuralink has equipped a monkey to play video games with its mind.

The world’s richest man touted the achievement in an early-morning interview on the audio-streaming app Clubhouse, where he talked up Neuralink’s efforts to build a high-tech brain implant that would let humans control computers just by thinking.

“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,” the billionaire Tesla CEO said during his roughly one-hour, 37-minute appearance.

“One of the things we’re trying to figure out is, can we have the monkeys play mind-Pong with each other?” he added. “That would be pretty cool.”

Neuralink is designing the so-called brain-machine interface with the goal of helping paralyzed patients easily interact with their cellphones or computers, Musk said.

The monkey isn’t the only animal to receive an early version of the implant, which Musk described as “like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires.” He revealed in an August presentation that Neuralink had installed a prototype in a pig named Gertrude, an experiment that drew criticism from PETA.