Today in telepathic monkey pong:

Pictured: the classic family board game about
the societal death spiral of end-stage capitalism.

I have complicated feelings about billionaires in general and Elon Musk in specific. I believe that billionaires shouldn't be a thing in a world where people have to work like three jobs and still can't afford rent. It's like, so you know how when you're playing Monopoly and you're in the end game phase where one person has all the railroads and built hotels on Park Avenue and Boardwalk and everyone else is basically just going around the board, slowly getting drained of whatever money they have left? America is like that. And we're just a couple more laps away from our own Bastille Day.

They know computers have trackpads, right?

Which brings me to telepathic monkeys. Noted billionaire and former world's richest human Elon Musk owns like, a ton of companies and one of them is called Neuralink. Musk and some other rich people founded the company to develop implantable brain-computer interface technology. That is, devices that all people to interact with computers using their brains instead of their fingers or whatever. And they've succeeded. Sort of. They posted a video today on Youtube showing a nine year old macaque monkey playing a game with its mind.

They know Pong has those dial things, right?

The video's narrator explains that the macaque, called Pager, has had devices implanted in his skull. These devices read and then transmit the impulses in his brain to a computer while he controls the game--which, preposterously, they call mind-pong--using a joystick. By recording the impulses between Pager's brain and hand, the computer learns which neurons firing controls which movements. Sort of like when you flick light switches on and off to see what does what? I don't know, I'm not a cyber-monkey specialist, the point is once the computer can read the monkey's mind, they unplug the joystick and he keeps controlling the game using only the implants.

Resistance is adorable! 

A not unreasonable question would be why? Why have these Bay Area gentrifying tech goons shoved wires into some poor macaque's head only to teach a glorified Pong machine how to read its primitive monkey brain? What's wrong with these psychos? And on the one hand, you're not wrong. Lots is wrong with them. And it's highly unlikely that this monkey consented to being assimilated into a one-macaque Borg collective. But on the other hand, why do you hate science? 

The possibilities are endless: telepathic monkey
Frogger, or telepathic monkey Ms. Pacman.
Perhaps, one day, telepathic monkey Galaga.

This William Gibsonian nightmare actually does have applications beyond telepathic monkey Pong. The hope here is that humans with paralysis could use similar devices to interact with computers. They could operate a phone or a motorized wheel chair or maybe even a car. People with neurological damage might be able to use this technology to communicate, and amputees could use it to control prosthetic limbs with these things. The implications are actually really exciting and mean a higher quality of life for million. I just, I don't know. I'm suspicious of the people developing it. Like, what are they really up to?

Maybe it's my mistrust of the criminally wealthy (it's definitely that), I just question the motivations of a guy who once launched an electric roadster at Mars just 'cuz. Like, is Elon Musk developing this technology because of all the good it could do, or does he just want to watch a monkey play mind-pong? 

"Yeah, but what I'm asking is: can't it be both?"

-The 21st century's 

broey, stoner Edison