Neuralink (Game-Changer)

Elon Musk's start-up Neuralink has unveiled a video of a monkey playing a video game with only its mind. Neuralink is creating implantable brain-machine interfaces to link the human brain to computers. This morning, Elon Musk posted the Pong monkey footage to Twitter.

A Neuralink was implanted in Pager, a nine-year-old macaque monkey, about six weeks before the footage was captured. He was initially shown how to use a controller to play an on-screen game. At the beginning of the film, Pager is seen utilizing the joystick to move a colored square in the game. Neuralink was able to forecast the monkey's hand movements and where it would place the square using machine learning.

The joystick was eventually unplugged from the computer, but the monkey still seems to be playing Pong with just his thoughts. Neuralink said in a statement that it was "pleased to reveal the Link's capability to enable a macaque monkey, named Pager, to move a cursor on a computer screen with neural activity." The Link used a 1,024-electrode fully-implanted neural recording and data transmission device.

Elon Musk shared the YouTube video link on Twitter along with the statement, "Monkey plays Pong with his mind." He continued, "A monkey is literally using a brain chip to play a video game telepathically." More than 60,000 people have liked the message, and there have been hundreds of stunned responses.

One Twitter user wrote, "This is insane," while another added, "I'm so excited!! We don't even know what we're going to achieve with technology in a few years."

Elon Musk claimed in a different tweet that the first iteration of the Neuralink technology would enable "someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs."

The wealthy businessman continued, "Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in the brain to Neuralinks in the body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thereby enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again."

Neuralink claims that they were able to anticipate an intended movement by modeling the relationship between various patterns of neural activity and intended movement directions. We can do more than just predict the movement that is most likely to be intended given the pattern of brain activity right now.

Neuralink claims that its technology could benefit people who are paralyzed due to spinal cord or brain injuries by enabling them to control electronic devices with their thoughts. This would give paraplegics, quadriplegics, and stroke sufferers the empowering opportunity to function independently once more. Prosthetic limbs might also be controlled by signals from the Link chip. A prosthetic limb would feel genuine thanks to the technology's ability to transmit signals back.

This is what cochlear implants already do, turning outside acoustic impulses into neuronal data that the brain then interprets as sound for the wearer to "hear."Additionally, Neuralink has asserted that its technology can treat a variety of neurological conditions, including addiction, blindness, deafness, and melancholy. To accomplish this, the implant would be used to stimulate the parts of the brain connected to these diseases.

Brain-machine interactions might be used for purposes other than medicine. They could provide a much quicker means of interacting with computers than methods that require the use of the hands or speech, for starters. Without being constrained by the dexterity of their thumbs, a user could write at the speed of thought. All they would need to do is imagine the message, and the implant will turn it into text. After that, the material could be read aloud using software that turns it into speech.

The potential of a brain-machine interface to link brains to the cloud and all of its resources is perhaps even more exciting. Theoretically, a person could then utilize cloud-based artificial intelligence to augment their own "native" intelligence whenever they needed it. (AI).