Neuralink Releases Videos of Monkey Playing Pong With Its Brain 25
Rei writes: Having moved from pigs to rhesus macaques in pursuit of the goal of hopefully beginning human trials by the end of the year, Neuralink has continued their recruitment drive with a pair of videos showing their latest progress. In the first video, they show how they train the macaque to control a joystick with its mind, and how after associating the neural signals with intent, they can disconnect the joystick and the macaque continues to be able to operate the training interface solely through Neuralink. They then switch it over to controlling a cursor in Pong (picture-in-picture showing synapses here). Even with the game set to high speed and with the distraction of his banana-milkshake reward, the macaque puts out an impressive gaming performance.
Musk expects the first commercial product to enable a paralyzed person to interact with a smartphone faster than a healthy person using their thumbs. ["Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again," adds Musk. "The device is implanted flush with skull & charges wirelessly, so you look & feel totally normal."]
Musk expects the first commercial product to enable a paralyzed person to interact with a smartphone faster than a healthy person using their thumbs. ["Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again," adds Musk. "The device is implanted flush with skull & charges wirelessly, so you look & feel totally normal."]
Pretty fracking cool! (Score:4, Interesting)
Gives new meaning to the phrase, Monkey see, Monkey do.
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Gives new meaning to the phrase, Monkey see, Monkey do.
Yeah, definitely, though according to researchers in the field this has been done before:
"Andrew Jackson, a neuroscience expert who is a professor at Newcastle University, told Insider that getting primates to control video games via neural interfaces was not new – comparable demonstrations were done in 2002 – but said it was a good test of the tech." link [businessinsider.com.au]
It sounds like the big advance is the packaging into a wireless system without big cables coming out of the monkey's head, so less exciti
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It's also about not driving a veritable meat tenderizer [google.is] into the brain. Utah Array is a nasty piece of work. It just gets jabbed in, with (proportionally) giant pins, and destroys any blood vessels along the way, which of course triggers an immune response in the process (plus it's only one sensor per pin). Each individual neuralink thread is vastly smaller, contains multiple sensors per thread, and is automatically targeted to avoid blood vessels. For a size comparison, here's a Utah Array next to a pen [fdncms.com]
Re: Pretty fracking cool! (Score:2)
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I would expect that playing pong with one's brain would instantly cause a concussion and terrible spasms, and probably death.
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I would expect that playing pong with one's brain would instantly cause a concussion and terrible spasms, and probably death.
I can only state confidently there was a nonzero percentage of tween- and teenagers in the 70's who left their 1st pong game, mind blown.
After that, waiting a half hour for your turn to take your quarter off the game and play Space Invaders almost seemed reasonable.
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after pavlovs dog now elons monkey - gathering data on translated alphawaves and electrical brain pulses seems to be the last barrier , as hella-cool as it is, who are the thought police so a bit more advanced now has you scanned as you enter the airport or the bus to see if you havent had any bad thoughts. "bad thoughts" defined, patented and copyrighted, trademarked and trolled by Fasc inc. Corporation. (but ofcourse they wont do that, the chosen one very like
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Cynically, it's clear to me at this point that any great leaps forward that threaten to make life better for our species might/must be perverted by those with designs on being our overlords.
We'll likely overcome them... you know how I know? Because, if we don't, there's a thousand plausible dystopian futures awaiting us.
Do not want!!! (Score:1)
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The ratio of risk vs reward on this is extremely bad... frankly I don't think it is even close to worth the risk.
That's your opinion. A quadriplegic may see things differently.
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Nobody's asking you to sign up.
But the day will eventually come (probably not in our lifetime) when people who are not so wired up are perceived as being as disadvantaged as people who lack any means of accessing the internet from their home are today.
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Re: Do not want!!! (Score:1)
1 bit of information... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Joystick Up
Joystick Down
Joystick Neutral
Joystick Right
Joystick Left
That's at least 3 bits of information.
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Re: 1 bit of information... (Score:2)
Misleading Title (Score:2)
I was expecting to see a monkey with its brain on a table bouncing it from paddle to paddle. But I guess it using its brain is just as good...sigh.
Endian wars (Score:2)
Gives new meaning to Blue Screen of Death (Score:1)
How many monkeys died first? (Score:1)
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Humanity is a torrent of death for anyone not defined as fully human.
That includes abortion of fetuses with brain activity who scream as they are torn to bits, the mashing and pulping of 4-6 billion (yes, not million, but billion) male chickens every year, the medical experimentation with monkeys, and eissection of animals with human neurons inserted into their brains.
The last part is an interesting one, and we'll see human-animal brain-hybrids be used and pulped to an increasing degree.
The best possible advert before monkey mindpong (Score:1)
was an advert for tennis streaming