Neuralink’s commercial application scenarios are still in the medical field.
Musk revealed the latest progress of his brain-computer company Neuralink in an online interview on Sunday local time.
He said that Neuralink has succeeded in allowing a monkey to play video games through brainwave connections.
The Neuralink team implanted a computer chip into the monkey’s skull and connected the monkey’s brain through a very small antenna to complete the experiment.
Next, the team will test whether the same operation can enable two monkeys to play a simple duel electronic game Pong (table tennis arcade game) through brain waves.
Neuralink was founded in 2016, is headquartered in San Francisco, and currently has about 100 employees. The company aims to research implantable brain-computer interaction devices to increase the amount of information transmitted from the human brain to the machine.
In August last year, Neuralink demonstrated for the first time a brain-computer device LINK V0.9 with a certain degree of completion, and demonstrated on-site brain signals read by a device implanted in a pig brain in real time.
After the pig’s brain is implanted with a chip developed by Neuralink, scientists can observe the brain’s internal activities and read relevant information through the pig’s brainwave changes. For example, when a piglet smells food, the brain will produce obvious fluctuations.
As for the future of Neuralink, Musk has a science fiction-style “rhapsody.” That is to realize the storage of memory through brain-computer interface technology, turning the human body into a computer terminal, thus realizing “digital immortality”.
But in the foreseeable time, Neuralink’s commercial application scenarios are still in the medical field. That is to solve brain damage diseases such as stroke and paralysis from the biomedical aspect.
Musk once claimed to implant the brain-computer excuse device into the human brain within 8-10 years. But he also said that this project also depends on the regulatory approval time and the adaptation of the equipment to people with brain injuries.