I woke up this morning and watched a video from Neuralink of a monkey playing a computer game with its brain. How on God’s green Earth do they do that!?

The thing is, I know what’s going in that video - or at least many parts of the story. And I suspect many of you readers do too. I could never have done it, but I can explain many aspects to a high schooler.

I propose an open source wiki-curriculum challenge where contributors add content (videos, articles, or interactive activities) to help a 15 year old student learn about everything happening in that video. It’s rich territory to introduce topics. I can imagine lessons on:

• Neuralink technology
  • Neural networks and the foundational topics to understand how they work
  • Brain anatomy
  • Biomedical engineering of the device
• How we came to be testing on monkeys
  • History of how humans understand monkeys and other intelligent species
  • Ethics of animal testing
  • Biologically, why do we choose pigs and monkeys for testing?
• The society that engendered this moment
  • Why would you start a company?
  • Why work for a startup vs a corporation?
  • Impacts of immigration (Musk is South African)
  • Why is the company in Silicon Valley?
• The tech that brought this video to your screen
  • How is video created?
  • How the internet brings it to your screen?

I’m going to try creating a few lessons. I hope you’ll help!