Tesla boss Elon Musk said in an interview late Sunday that a monkey has been wired up to play video games with its mind by a company he founded called Neuralink.
Neuralink put a computer chip into the monkey’s skull and used “tiny wires” to connect it to its brain, Musk said.
“It’s not an unhappy monkey,” he said during a talk on Clubhouse. “You can’t even see where the neural implant was put in, except that he’s got a slight like dark mohawk.”
The billionaire — who also spoke about space travel, crypto, artificial intelligence and Covid-19 vaccines — said Neuralink is trying to figure out if it can use its chips to get monkeys to play “mind Pong” with each other.
The cortex is a part of the brain that plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language, and consciousness.
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. In the near term, Musk wants to implant Neuralink chips into quadriplegics who have brain or spinal injuries so that they can “control a computer mouse, or their phone, or really any device just by thinking.”
Musk said Neuralink will “probably” be releasing some videos that show the company’s progress in the next month or so.