China's Unexpected Advantage in the Global Competition Over Brain-Computer Interfaces

Pager was feverishly moving a joystick as he played his favorite game, Pong, but it was merely a force of habit--the joystick itself was not actually connected to anything. Yet the ball moved from paddle to paddle. He was using his thoughts to play, through use of his direct neural connections from his newly implanted Neuralink device. Pager isn't your typical 9-year-old, though: He is a macaque monkey and will provide valuable information to the company owned by Elon Musk, so it may eventually move forward with human testing for this invasive medical device. In fact, his gaming performance was at a live Neuralink event, in which people were first introduced to a working implanted model.