Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has admitted that his startup company Neuralink has wired up a monkey to play video games with its mind.  

A computer chip was placed into the monkey’s skull, and the team used “tiny wires” to connect it to its brain, he added.  

“You can’t even see where the neural implant was put in, except that he’s got a slight like dark mohawk,” Musk said during a talk over the weekend on Clubhouse, a new social media app that has been gaining popularity.  

“He’s a happy monkey.”  

Musk, currently the world’s richest individual with a net worth of $190 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, noted that the San Francisco-based Neuralink is in the process of trying to figure out if it can use its chips to get the monkeys to play “mind pong” with each other. 

“That would be pretty cool,” he said.  

Musk added that artificial intelligence (AI) will only continue to get smarter, and he is hoping that Neuralink’s burgeoning technology will one day allow humans to “go along for the ride.”

He went on to say that people today are in effect already like “cyborgs” because they possess a tertiary “digital layer” thanks to smartphones, computers, and applications.  

“With a direct neural interface, we can improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude,” Musk said.  

“I’d say probably at least a thousand, or maybe ten thousand, or more.”  

He also claimed that the company could one day help humans tap into telepathy and exist in a “saved state” after they die—then be put into another human or a type of robot.  

For years, Musk, who co-founded the artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI in 2015 and was an early investor in DeepMind, has sounded the alarm that there is a strong possibility that humans will be overtaken by advanced AI within the next five years.  

In 2016, he warned that human beings could become the equivalent of “house cats” amid the rise of new AI rulers. He has since repeatedly called for more stringent regulations when it comes to next-generation AI technology.  

Musk had previously noted that his “top concern” is DeepMind, the highly secretive London-based lab run by Demis Hassabis and owned by Google.  

“Just the nature of the AI that they’re building is one that crushes all humans at all games,” he said. “I mean, it’s basically the plotline in WarGames.” 

In the 1983 film WarGames, a teen hacker played by Matthew Broderick unwittingly connects to an AI-controlled government supercomputer that is used to run war simulations. After starting a game titled Global Thermonuclear War, the computer activates the nation’s nuclear arsenal in response to his simulated threat as the Soviet Union.  

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Minneapolis-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.  

Image: Reuters