Elon Musk ’s research team is teaching monkeys to play video games with their brains

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Originally published at: Elon Musk 's research team is teaching monkeys to play video games with their brains | Boing Boing

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You know, I wonder what Grimes thinks of all of this

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What the fuck? We’re still inflicting this kind of shit on chimpanzees? For some reason I’d thought we progressed past othering the great apes and left the Dr. Mengele stuff to the “lesser” primates.

Yeah, I’m sure that’s what Musk has in mind for this technology. /s

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Remember “Lost In Space?” The villain, Dr. Smith wasn’t a real doctor,
that was a nickname given to him by a mining company after he invented a drug which caused the miners to work 24 hours a day without noticing.

Elon Musk IS the real life Dr. Smith!

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Using primates for research is seeming more and more anachronistic every year. I’m not exactly a bleeding heart, but seeing an ape with wires coming out of its skull in 2021 makes my soul cringe.

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Can we please stop treating Elon Musk like some kind of genius?

He’s an idiot who got lucky with Paypal. He has a lot of engineers and money backing his idiocy, but that doesn’t make him a genius.

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I should have been clear, that was Musk’s words, not my assessment.

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Oh, yeah, I figured. No worries!

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So Vaporware is cool now?

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BTW, this is not even novel research. Similar work was done yearsu ago.

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Despite the promotional video showing a chimp and several squirrel monkeys, I’d be amazed if the animal implanted isn’t a rhesus macaque.

Musk is a remarkable PR man. Everday I work 15 feet from monkeys with chronic brain implants. For decades this has been common in many labs with continually improving electrode arrays (and thankfully fewer monkeys are used for this kind of research each year). The only thing new here is that this implant is Musk’s brain implant.

Can I get a BB write up everytime I use a new electrode for my grasshopper brain recordings? That’d be cool

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I hope you’re right that this is just misrepresentation on the part of the video.

This is a significant distinction, though - I very much doubt that Musk is holding himself to the same level of ethical consideration that most actual scientific and medical research is held to.

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Big deal. I use my brain nearly all the time.

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I’ve been training a clone of Oliver the Humanzee for the next StarCraft comp.

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I would, in fact, be interested in posting more about cyborg grasshoppers.

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This is how you get Ack-Ack Macaque.

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It would be great if Boingboing learned the difference between monkeys and apes. It seems the commentators here are on top of things. I hate seeing this kind of animal research since ethical guidelines are somewhat lax. I hope that it can improve the lives of humans, but I know that primate infant separation studies have been ongoing for the last 40 years and there’s not much more to learn. But it does help grad students get their Ph.Ds and new scientists get publications, so it must be ok, right?

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first we traumatize your brain, then we aid you

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If the Tesla self-driving feature doesn’t work out they will fall back to the trunk monkey.