Okay, this is definitely one of the weirdest things we’ve written up in all our years running the website. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and a man you’d definitely invite to a single dinner party and then never talk to again, has announced that his start-up company Neuralink has successfully attached a computer chip implant to the brain of a monkey. Moreover, that chip is allowing the monkey to play simple video games with its mind alone.
Which sounds like the embarrassing first draft of a Planet of the Apes reboot but apparently it’s actually a thing that’s happening. Neuralink is a company that’s dedicated to making life easier through neural chip implants which sounds scary and ominous until they clarify that they just want to help people with paralysis better control their devices with just their thoughts. Sure, and they have absolutely no plans to implement this widely.
Please consider working at Neuralink!
Short-term: solve brain/spine injuries
Long-term: human/AI symbiosisLatter will be species-level important
Work at either at our Bay Area or Austin locations https://t.co/LPzDrWO8h3
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 31, 2021
Neuralink wants to get in your head
Elon Musk made an appearance on Clubhouse, a new social media app in the process of taking off, and clarified some more details on what Neuralink is and what the company has been developing. It’s then that he said the seemingly ludicrous line, “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.” Musk also mentioned that the actual implant is like a “Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires that go to your brain,” if that helps clear up any confusion you might have had.
He also described the monkey as being “happy”. Which of course he’d say but we do hope this turns out to be true.
Musk, who recently overtook Jeff Bezos as the richest man in the world, has made a load of claims about what could be possible through Neuralink’s technology. On Sunday’s stream he said, “If two people had a Neuralink, you could do conceptual telepathy, where you have a complex series of concepts and you can just transfer them directly, uncompressed to the other person. This would massively improve the quality of communication and the speed of it.”
He also speculated that one could download their consciousness into one of these implants and then install themselves into another body. Consider us very sceptical about that one.
Musk stated that Neuralink will probably start showing off their tech and processes soon but didn’t provide any solid dates for that.
(Source: TNW)