Neuralink’s monkey playing Pong with “thought” thanks to a chip implanted in the brain. – YOUTUBE / NEURALINK CAPTURE
- Elon Musk’s start-up Neuralink posted a video on Twitter on Friday in which a monkey can be seen playing Pong with its mind.
- Elon Musk hopes the Neuralink chips will be used to help people who are paralyzed or suffering from neurological diseases. But the long-term goal is to make implants so safe, reliable and simple that they would qualify for elective (comfort) surgery.
- With this chip, has Neuralink really achieved a feat? We take stock.
Is Elon Musk realizing his dream of merging man with machine? The last
Neuralink announcements, the start-up of Elon Musk which works on brain implants, suggests that a simple chip the size of a coin could one day increase human intellectual capacities. In
video posted this friday by the billionaire, a monkey managed to play the game Pong without a controller thanks to the technological device in his brain. The Pager macaque controls the movements of the racket with its eyes, as one could with a joystick.
“A monkey is literally playing a video game telepathically thanks to a chip in its brain,” said tweeted Elon Musk. For its part, Neuralink welcomes this breakthrough, which allows it to get closer to its first objective: “to enable paralyzed people to directly use their neural activity to control computers and mobile devices easily and in real time”. Announcement effect or technological prowess? We take stock of the progress of Neuralink, one of the most futuristic projects of the serial entrepreneur, also behind SpaceX, OpenAI, Hyperloop …
An operation of less than an hour
Elon Musk might be a bit too enthusiastic about it. If the monkey does not need to move its hand to play Pong, we are not witnessing telepathy per se. “The chip is implanted on the motor cortex and we recover a copy of the command which goes towards the wrist or the hand,” explains Claude Touzet, teacher-researcher in cognitive sciences and founder of the company Neurosoundsleep. Whether the monkey moves its hand or not, in the end, we have equivalents ”. There is a thought at the start – that of moving the hand or the finger – “but we are not at the moment when the thought is born, we are at the moment of the motor action”, he specifies. The implant transmits neurological signals.
The idea of implanting electrodes to help people with very reduced motor skills such as quadriplegics is not new. Interfaces like this have been around for about 15 years, but they don’t work very well. “The feat of Neuralink is to have made a chip with enough electrodes [1.024 en forme de fils plus fins qu’un cheveu] to have a good mesh of the cortical zone where it is implanted ”, continues the researcher. And, the second achievement is to succeed in implanting these electrodes quickly. Neuralink has designed an extremely sophisticated robot to install the various electronic components in the skull. “The tests carried out on the brain of rats with the electrode implanter robot developed by the company show that the latter is able to install a little more than 96 multi-electrodes of 1.6 millimeters in less than 20 minutes, while avoiding blood vessels ”, described Claude Touzet in an article by The Conversation published in 2019.
At a press conference in August 2020, Elon Musk assured that the operation, without general anesthesia, would take no more than an hour and would not leave a mark, except for a small scar under the hair.
A chip in the brain for everyone?
This video-event of the Pager monkey is above all proof that the implant works and that its algorithms are efficient. It is biocompatible and the data transmitted can be used. “The notion of real time is important,” resumes Claude Touzet. The chip and its thousand electrodes continuously send thousands of information and we manage to output the useful signal fast enough for the performance of the Pong game to be credible ”.
The marketing coup may lie in the choice of the animal. Neuralink could have shown a pig playing a video game, but the human identifies more easily with the monkey, especially if he plays Pong, one of the first arcade video games. It is easier to say that humans are next on the list of implant candidates. However, nothing guarantees that the future will look like the one imagined by Elon Musk.
For now, the goal is to let the individual with implants control a smartphone by thought. But the long-term goal, as Elon Musk said during his press conference, is to make implants so safe, reliable and simple that they could fit into the field of comfort surgery for individuals who dream. to increase their intellectual capacities. The real question is: should we hope so?