Neuralink now has a mind-bending monkey that can play games with its thoughts

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is known for his moonshot companies, aiming for the betterment of the human species through technology. One of those companies is called Neuralink, and it apparently now has a monkey that can play games, with no physical controller.

Yes, they wired some test monkeys up to an early model of Neuralink’s eventual computer-brain interface. Talking on Clubhouse, Musk characterized its test subjects as “not an unhappy monkey,” while going on to say that “you can’t even see where the neural implant was put in, except that he’s got a slight like dark mohawk.”

Neuralink is currently trying to see if it can use its chip-implanted monkeys to play “mind Pong” with each other, without any physical controls. If so, that would “be pretty cool,” according to Musk, to say nothing about the technological advancements.

Musk’s eventual goal is to implant these devices in humans, to increase the rate of data that can flow from the human brain to a machine. That might be a one-way flow, as human consciousness hits a “Shannon Limit” of less than 50 bits per second. To compare, your senses each send thousands or millions of bits per second to your brain for processing, which are filtered by your brain into the most important pieces for any given moment.

Musk also mentioned releasing some video evidence of Neuralink’s progress in the next month or so, “probably.” We look forward to seeing the first “Monkey Pong” game in the world.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.