The video has already been viewed more than 300,000 times. On Friday, the American billionaire Elon Musk posted a video on his Twitter account of a monkey playing the video game Pong with no controller other than the power of its brain, thanks to a connected chip implanted in its skull by the start-up Neuralink.
"A monkey plays a video game telepathically thanks to a chip in its brain", tweeted the futuristic entrepreneur, boss of Neuralink and founder of Tesla and SpaceX. "Soon our monkeys will be on Twitch and Discord haha", he added.
In the video, Pager the macaque can be seen using his eyes to control the movements of a racket to prevent the ball from falling into the void, as you might do with a joystick, a touch screen or the arrows on a keyboard.
"Helping people who are paralysed or suffer from neurological diseases".
The aim of the operation is to unveil Neuralink's potential to the general public. "The first Neuralink products will enable a paralysed person to use their smartphone by thought faster than someone using their fingers," said Elon Musk. He hopes that Neuralink's chips will initially be used to help people who are paralysed or suffering from neurological diseases. But the long-term goal is to make the implants so safe, reliable and simple that they would be elective (comfort) surgery.
Other brain-machine interfaces are currently being developed. Facebook is funding a project to translate brain activity into words, using algorithms, to enable people rendered mute by neurodegenerative diseases to speak again.
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