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Elon Musk: Humans must merge with machines or become irrelevant in AI age

• arcanus 10y ago
  I'm sitting in a coffee shop where no one is interacting with each other, and are all staring at glowing screens of varying sizes. I'm ssh'ed into both my workstation and one of the ten most powerful supercomputers ever constructed, where I am running scientific simulations, essentially to model and probe reality. At night, my wife and I communicate in real time with our family despite massive geographic distances. The merger has already happened, people.
  • M_Grey 10y ago
    Exactly. People are going to slowly merge with non-human elements from biological and machine systems, assuming that we don't wipe ourselves out or go back to banging the rocks together. It's going to be a while before it's at the level of an external interface though.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • Arizhel 10y ago
      I don't think so; I think we're just going to wipe ourselves out, or go back to banging rocks together after devolving, as in the ending of Vonnegut's novel "Galapagos".
      • M_Grey 10y ago
        I agree that the bad outcomes are more likely and numerous than the good ones.
  • nojvek 10y ago
    I take a bus in the morning. Everyone is staring at screens. I don't see why another version of Google Glass isn't going to make a come back. Something less invasive and dorkier. We just want the info right in front of our eyes. Something that augments us as a human directly.
    • jp555 10y ago
      My hope is Magic Leap will be the beginning of that.
      • LeifCarrotson 10y ago
        My fear is that Magic Leap is getting all those investment dollars from big names like Google, Qualcomm, Alibaba, Andreessen Horowitz because the investors are ignoring the realistic difficulties of actually building it and buying into the idea. My hope, like yours, is that they actually succeed in building it.
    • grey-area 10y ago
      Neural lace + Retinal implant, brought to you by Musk industries.
      • shiftoutbox 10y ago
        you spelled rectal wrong .
    • akerro 10y ago
      Newspapers also destroyed human interactions, before radios, TV, mobile phones and tablets did. http://thefuturebuzz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/train.jpg http://thefuturebuzz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/train.jp...
      • kordless 10y ago
        I've never liked this counter argument to screen engagement. Newspapers have a very small footprint of data available to the reader. I'd be willing to bet that photo that is paraded around every time this argument is made was taken shortly after the paperboy came through the car, or the car was just loaded at a station. Within 20 minutes, everyone is going to have set down their paper and moved onto doing something else.
      • u_wot_m8 10y ago
        this, alway laugh when people try and act like everybody in the past was conversing with each other on public transport. People haven't changed in the last 50 years.
  • hashkb 10y ago
    The high bandwidth bit Musk was focussing on has not. And when it does, our cheeky observations about how "merged" we are today will seem trite.
    • jncraton 10y ago
      I'm not convinced that bandwidth is the main issue. The fact that we interact with supercomputers over SSH today rather than a live video stream like we could in terms of bandwidth hints at the larger problem. We really struggle to get computers to understand what we mean. We still largely have to program computers rather than just interact with them to do the sorts of things the GP is talking about. If AGI advances to the point that computers will easily be able to do our bidding using voice, video, or a neural lace, I'm not sure that there will be much need for computers to be directed by humans at all.
      • hashkb 10y ago
        Musk is talking about a direct brain to computer interface. Video/typing/etc cannot be compared, even remotely. You're missing Musk's point if you argue down that path.
        • gajomi 10y ago
          >Musk is talking about a direct brain to computer interface. Video/typing/etc cannot be compared, even remotely. You're missing Musk's point if you argue down that path. While I think its clear the direct to brain interfaces are not even remotely similar to video/typing, I don't think that is relevant to the GP's point vis a vis: >We really struggle to get computers to understand what we mean. What I mean is that even if we had the rich interaction of a direct brain to compute interface available, it might not be worth much of anything for programming computers, where the problem is about clarifying concepts rather than expressing information. Having said that, one has to imagine that these kind of interfaces could do a lot for artistic projects that can make direct use of information in the brain.
        • lambdadmitry 10y ago
  • kalal 10y ago
    Sure, we are able to work/communicate remotely. But the problem is that even remote work on super-computer is limiting and reduces the iteration cycle. I prefer to run small and fast experiments on local machine, fine-tune for significant time and after this send them to big cluster. Once in this stage, observing the progress from coffee shop is more like a "gradient addiction" for me. Why? On local machine I get much faster iterations and find errors quickly. In Elon's words, the "bandwidth" between me and machine is higher. The merge started, but there is still a lot to be discovered in order to broaden the information flow.
    • devoply 10y ago
      Optimizing for this sort of thing will end up with your brain in a vat. It's a fool's errand and Elon is an idiot for trying to open up this avenue for economic competition, as it's a race to the bottom. And it ends with human being as merely components to a machine utilized by those with capital to make more money. We need to rethink a lot of things about being human outside of one-dimensional economic man.
  • shiftoutbox 10y ago
    Coffee sucks all the kool kids are drinking kool-aide .
  • localhost 10y ago
    Agree! Machines can already see better than blind people. Machines can already hear better than deaf people. Machines can already move better than an invalid. The low hanging fruit will be prosthesis for people missing that function. Then for people with impaired function. Then for people with full function (would you like a better memory/vision/hearing than you ever had before?)
    • monk_e_boy 10y ago
      We already have better memory than before. Images, video, facebook timeline (I can go back 5 years and see a conversation between me and 20 other people)
      • blacksmith_tb 10y ago
        If you haven't read Ted Chiang's [1] 'Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling' you should, it may make you think differently about how much technology has improved your memory (our memory). 1: http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of...
  • monk_e_boy 10y ago
    I think the interesting point is that he has a fleet of cars that are all driving around coming across new situations. These are fed into the big AI that figures out new rules, these rules are sent to the cars to see how they work. So the AI is learning way faster than any human could, it is learning in parallel. We can only drive on car at a time. And this is version 1.0 of AI, I do wonder how relevant humans will be when AI is learning everything in parallel . Robots, rovers, the internet, cars, factories, humans, weather stations, satellites, everything hooked up to these AIs who learn and learn and learn. Just like a parent can watch a child and predict their mood, what they want, what will make them happy, how to control and manipulate them... won't the AIs do the same thing. Sometimes with our blessing. How useful will it be to have an AI keep an eye on paedophiles, monitor them, maybe with tactics to distract them and to engage them in some other way. Society likes that. Now how far will we push that? Will we allow the AI to almost re-program them? To make them better? The AI will understand the human brain, it will understand how to change triggers and behaviours (don't we already have therapists who do this?) ... do we allow this to happen? Fake news ... wouldn't an AI be able to perform mass experiments on the population to see how to change the popular vote. Say a Trump supporter dislikes muslims, then some gentle persuasion by showing a more pro-muslim news feed .... would the government want to alter this behaviour. We currently try to do this with terrorists, with illegal activity by blocking pro-<insert illegal activity here> websites ... when do we move from blocking a site to actively promoting the other point of view? An AI that is reading what we read, simulating what we think (are we so unique? Could a population be simulated with a few thousand different personality types?) ... simulate how we respond to certain news stories, what are triggers are.
    • JetSpiegel 10y ago
      > So the AI is learning way faster than any human could, it is learning in parallel. We can only drive on car at a time. Humans can already learn in parallel. It's called The Scientific Method and Teaching.
  • krmboya 10y ago
    > and are all staring at glowing screens of varying sizes I don't know.. whenever I peek most of the times it happens to be facebook/whatsapp/instagram/email. To me it seems to be more of an addiction of some kind, perhaps I'm wired differently because I like deep focus and totally abhor random notifications and alerts and don't peek as much into my devices
    • mrspeaker 10y ago
      You should go to the coffee shops I go to... I'm constantly amazed at the amount of cool-looking shit people are doing: everyone is either in Matlab, or Photoshop editing some weird looking - advertisement? maybe? or a complicated spreadsheet with lots of charts, or some video or audio editing software, or what looks like a movie script writer, or something that looks like Jupyter notebooks... always makes me guilty when I habitually tab over to HN then look around.
      • tinkerdol 10y ago
        Perhaps off-topic but can anyone recommend coffee shops in central Europe that have this type of atmosphere? Right now I live in a smaller city (not far from Frankfurt, Germany), and the majority of places here are not laptop/work friendly. Instead, they have waiters serving tables and most people are meeting and talking with friends. I'm from the northeast US so I miss the cafe culture and general workaholism there. If someone could recommend cafes and cities in general that have this and are within a 6 hour train ride from Frankfurt, you'll help me find my next vacation location.
        • germanier 10y ago
          Berlin definitely has such places. A few years back people would recommend the cafe "St. Oberholz", I'm not sure it's still the place to be (probably not). It's no problem to find cafes that allow to work here.
    • alex_duf 10y ago
      Yet you're reading and writing comments on Hacker news :) You may just have a _different_ addiction
  • proactivesvcs 10y ago
    The last cafe I was at, last week, I had an engaging conversation with the cashier, shared a smile with a mother about her ungainly, teetering toddler's excitable wanderings and commented with a guy at the neighbouring table about how nice it was to hear kids playing outside in the courtyard. When not chatting to people around me, I read a book and ate the delicious chocolate cake. The merger has already happened for some people.
  • Metsuryu 10y ago
    The "merger" that musk has in mind is on another level though. You are describing what we already have, and yes, it's amazing, but it's not nearly enough to compete with the AI of the future. If we want to be competitive, we'll need a larger bandwidth in input and output for our brains to get and put out larger amounts of data, and possibly a speed upgrade to make the necessary calculations faster. If we don't, then we will have no chance to keep up with artificial intelligence, and if our goals don't align with the goals of the AI, then there is nothing we'll be able to do, that could be potentially very dangerous, and it's the reason Musk is saying that we need a neural lace to make this merger.
• siculars 10y ago
  Tl;dr humans communicate at 10 bits per second. Machines communicate at a trillion bps. We don't communicate or synthesize information fast enough and this will, of course, be a problem. Also, ai autonomous driving will leave 12-15% of the world's population unemployed... so, uh, get ready for that.
  • wavefunction 10y ago
    10bps sounds like a very naive estimation by someone with an agenda body posture or tone of voice alone must be many magnitudes higher
  • CuriouslyC 10y ago
    We might only communicate via words at 10 bits per second. We're constantly leaking _way_ more information than that in the form of cranial electromagnetic waves, gestures/body position, muscle tonus, facial expression, heart rate, blood flow, etc.
    • pavelmelnichuk 10y ago
      Yes, we process data visually much faster than the ten bits per second example
  • visarga 10y ago
    > 10 bits per second In a space of millions of words and countless meaningful combinations, not just raw data without meaning. Computers communicate raw data. Humans communicate meaning. We don't know how to represent or compute meaning yet, that is the domain of deep learning (NLP and vision).
  • cLeEOGPw 10y ago
    > humans communicate at 10 bits per second. This premise is false.
• M_Grey 10y ago
  I have to admire Elon Musk's ability to tap into the zeitgeist of the intelligent, technical community. Mars, AI... he hits all of the big hopeful/scary notes as though he were somehow riding astride them; truly, a master of PR.
  • Robotbeat 10y ago
    PR? I think Musk just likes those things. I don't get this idea. I mean, what is he trying to do other than what he says??? If I were a multibillionaire, I'd do the same thing: build really cool stuff and solve problems I think are important that no one else is really addressing appropriately. I'd be building spaceships and flying cars and things like that, just what Musk is doing (well, not flying cars, but close).
    • RodericDay 10y ago
      I'd solve poverty, fight corruption, and whatnot. The whole techno-futurism stuff feels like really obnoxious nerdbait to me.
      • Robotbeat 10y ago
        And Musk is a nerd. Why wouldn't he like to do those techno-futuristic things? Occam's Razor: he likes the same kind of stuff that a lot of other nerds like.
        • M_Grey 10y ago
          Occam's Razor... he's a smart man who's primary interests are power and money, maybe or maybe not in that order. Look at what he actually does, not the pseudo-visionary crap he claims to support. Look at where most of his money and effort is spent... is it Mars? Is it human-AI integration?
          • Robotbeat 10y ago
            Money to do what? Why is it so absurd to think that Musk might not be interested in money just for its own sake? I mean, he's a billionaire, there's not much practical point in getting more of it. Most of Musk's money is spent on Mars, from what I can tell. Human-AI integration a side project.
• CuriouslyC 10y ago
  The thing most singularity proponents are missing is that the human brain produces its amazing computational abilities with a power consumption of about 20 watts. We're starting to bump up against the limits of industrial semiconductor fabrication processes and we're probably still about four orders of magnitude away from that in terms of efficiency. AI won't take over the world, but I agree with Elon that we are in the process of becoming a cyborg hive mind. We're already hyperconnected, and as computer interfaces become more frictionless, they will start to resemble prosthetic extensions of ourselves. Due to their invasive nature and the difficulty of security, I doubt neural implants will ever be a thing outside of curing disabilities. That being said, if we combined data from extremely sensitive EEG style headwear with gesture and expression analysis we could probably make something nearly as useful.
  • ageofwant 10y ago
    Of course AI will take over the world. It's just that edge between then and now will likely be fractal. There won't be an enormous battle in the sky, there will just be a people living in meat and a few generations later most 'people' will live in another computational matrix. Those people will be the people of their time and will watch and ponder over our shared cultural heritage just as people do today.
    • CuriouslyC 10y ago
      Why would we spend a bunch of energy creating lots of artificial people if for a lot of tasks biological people are far more efficient? Many engineers think biology is "stupid" and "poorly designed" but I think that viewpoint is the result of ignorance.
      • mmirate 10y ago
        Aside from the various recognition+analytical+creative tasks that are only tractable on the human brain ... biology doesn't have much going for it. It uses carbon, yes, but only in the structurally-weaker forms; e.g. no nanotubes (ergo flimsy skin+muscle, brittle bones, flimsy cell structure in general) and no diamond (ergo weak fingernails and teeth). And it makes no use whatsoever of carbon's heavier quadruple-bonding cousin, silicon. Oh, and without a nonbiological computer, a human brain has no coprocessor to turn-to for tasks which are intractable for the human brain. (e.g. nontrivial arithmetic computation) Energy efficiency? That hasn't been a concern at all ever since the Western world got good enough at food production^W^W calorie production to turn obesity into an epidemic (from a status symbol).
• mtgx 10y ago
  I just hope it happens in a subtler way than "implant chip in brain" or "install bionic eyes", or even "plug cable in the back of the head". I don't think the vast majority of people would go for things like that. Non-invasive procedures would be much more preferable, if this is to happen. Maybe something like wireless communication between the brain and machines, but without implanting receivers in our heads.
• mlmlmasd 10y ago
  > Musk explained what he meant by saying that computers can communicate at "a trillion bits per second", while humans, whose main communication method is typing with their fingers via a mobile device, can do about 10 bits per second. Humans communicate in much more complex ways than computers. Facial expressions, intonation, language, body language, etc. All things we do not quite understand. Elon Musk is a little arrogant due to his success in business and likes to make 'fun' predictions based on his very limited understanding of whatever field he happens to be talking about. He sounds like an eager undergrad student that tries to demonstrate his genius to his professors and the class. I don't understand how anyone can take him seriously in technical fields.
  • pixie_ 10y ago
    They take him seriously because his next move is to often start a company like CyborgX. In which he'll hire the best people in whatever technical field is relevant and have them figure out the details. Space, solar, cars, tunnels, etc..
  • LeifCarrotson 10y ago
    > Humans communicate in much more complex ways than computers. Facial expressions, intonation, language, body language, etc. All things we do not quite understand. That's the medium - but how many bits of information, after compression, are exchanged in a conversation between humans? It's true that facial expressions and body language are difficult to measure with a camera, that intonation and speech are difficult to measure with a microphone, and that duplicating them with an artificial face on a monitor, a robot, or a speaker are all very difficult programs for humans to write. But this isn't what Musk was trying to communicate. He's saying that the amount of information contained in the combination of these human communication mechanisms can be compressed to about 10 bits per second. Imagine us talking for a minute, compressed to a movie script. Your wetware could easily use my expressions to come up with an estimate of my happiness, sincerity, confidence, truthfulness, sarcasm (and so on) on a scale of 1-10. These values might change from sentence to sentence. If you're very observant, in 60 seconds you might get 10 estimates for each of a dozen emotions with 3-bit fidelity from these observations - only a few bits per second of actual information transferred. And I might be creating sound waves that could be recorded at very high bit rates digitally, but aside from a one-time characterization of my voice, I would perhaps speak 200 English words in that minute. 200 words, averaging 4.5 characters each, with a 20% compression ratio, is only on the order of 4 bytes per second. And most of that is overhead for grammar. Or imagine meeting two aliens in a wormhole/portal that's only going to be open for 60 seconds. You attempt to convey as much about our society to them as possible vocally, while I'll attempt to use a computer. Afterwards, you might be able to have politely (to a human) said "Hello, we come in peace" and smiled, be able to describe the sound of their unintelligible speech, and be able to make a sketch of their appearance. I'd have recorded the entire exchange in 4k/60 fps video, from which we could probably reconstruct the anatomy under their equivalent of skin, and my only communication lag would have been gesturing that I want to give them computer equipment containing Wikipedia and Archive.org and whatever else I can download, transferring it at a few pounds of multi-terabyte hard drives a second, and get computer equipment back at the same rate. Or if you want to remove the sneakernet exploit, fine, we can hook up a Thunderbolt cable and send it across, or even just play individual frames of text or images on high-resolution monitors and record that video. From that, we could learn an incalculable amount about each others' species. From a minute of talking, we would learn next to nothing. The medium is irrelevant. The question is how much information can be exchanged. And computers win that with no contest.
• 1propionyl 10y ago
  We already are cyborgs. We just haven't implanted our augments yet, and haven't come up with a direct neural bus. We communicate with them via touch and sight instead. Which of the following transitions is more world-shaking? 1) Going from being a plain old human to a human with a smartphone, internet access practically anywhere. 2) Implanting the functionality of that phone in our bodies.
  • akerro 10y ago
    >2) Implanting the functionality of that phone in our bodies. For everyone! For free!* * Sponsored by Google, Facebook, NSA, Twitter, Bayern. Terms and conditions apply ask your local dealer for more info.
  • rubber_duck 10y ago
    1 is easily reversible and isolated, 2 not so much. It's realistic and highly probably that someone with a little effort could hack my phone and cause it to malfunction in various ways. I account for that in the way I use it. There is no chance in hell I'm implanting something like that in my body. And that's not even touching on bugs, regular malfunction and shitty standards we have in SW industry for reliability and maintenance - good luck being stuck with an implant from corp X that got acquired and is no longer supporting it.
    • ageofwant 10y ago
      The pervasive nanite cloud that you breathe and drink and eat will take care of dissidents like you. Not that that is likely as NET integration starts moments after conception in the sea of nanobots that permeates your mothers's womb.
    • K0SM0S 10y ago
      > someone with a little effort could hack my phone and cause it to malfunction in various ways Even with the best of intents, the actual makers of said phone (and apps) sometimes end up causing it to malfunction in various ways... Let that sink in for a minute. Admittedly, bio-implants would probably fall under much higher reliability standards than mere external electronics, including user control of the hardware and software. But things like infrastructure (e.g. networks), everything "ambient" to the end device that's required for a true AR paradigm to exist, cannot be accelerated by wishful thinking (e.g. bandwidth, business model of currently leading companies, etc.) While it's crucial that we begin these ethical debates early on, preferably before it actually happens let alone scales, I think we're still a decently big "last-mile"away from an actual consumer-tsunami the likes of PCs or smartphones. Thinking 5 years for early adopter/high end devices, twice that for infra to follow and enable consumer-grade scaling. By that time, 2020-25-ish, we should have some medically-informed (in physical expertise and centennial empirical experience) ethically-decent legal/engineering framework to work with when it comes to intrusive implants. My personal guess is that we'll limit those to tiny <1mm devices that act as mere interfaces with external nodes.
• CodeSheikh 10y ago
  I think the symbiotic relationship b/w humans and machines is more on the lines of interaction based rather than a stereotypical sci-fi chip implant one.
• rl3 10y ago
  >"Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem ... At least he qualified that with a "maybe". Going by the headline alone, it almost sounded as if Musk was squarely in Kurzweil's camp.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• cLeEOGPw 10y ago
  At the point where merge is possible, human + machine will probably already be inferior to machine only, in other words human would only make machine worse. Or at the very best, the human+machine period will last for very short time. Example is chess - there was a brief moment, where human using computer would outperform computer alone. That moment passed and that's it, humans can only weaken AI.
• holydude 10y ago
  I see the opposite. I do not advocate hippie kumbaya lifestyle but I see a lot of people around me wanting to disconnect from internet. People are sick of endless stream of irrelevant or relevant data.
  • ashark 10y ago
    In the late 90s/early 2000s I couldn't wait to hardwire the 'net into my brain. Now, after watching advertising companies and black-hats (state sponsored and otherwise) eat the Web and shit it back out as something horrifying and creepy, I'm expecting to one day be part of some kind of weird 'net-free community. When Moloch[1] inevitably makes everyone wire in (permanently) to keep participating in the ordinary economy, count me out. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
  • davidivadavid 10y ago
    And I think it is completely foolish to ignore that trend. Just like new threats naturally generate counter-measures (e.g. computer viruses and bugs drive the emergence of security software), things that are perceived to have negative consequences will give birth to counter-measures of some kind, and the net result will be a much less extremist future, a boring, middle-of-the-road thing, where people can access the "hive mind" much more freely. Which makes you wonder, why are people who are proponents of such things use such terribly connoted words words to market them? Who the fuck wants to be part of a "hive mind"? Or is it just FUD?
• vitro 10y ago
  Have you noticed, how smartphones vacuum tangible reality? How many of you have real alarm clock sitting on the table, for example. It lives on, but as more intangible presence, in each and every phone. Alarm clock has died, but lives. It is present, but not present at the same time, just the spirit continues, I would say. Soon it will happen or is happening to other items as well, and perhaps one day our spirits will live in the machine the same way alarm clock lives now. I wholeheartedly recommend watching Japanese anime Ghost in the shell movies as a nice peek to the future.
  • ageofwant 10y ago
    This is a beautiful analogy. It captures the essence of it. The clock has transcended from wood and steel gears into flowing electrons on a generic computational matrix. It will be the same for humans. I'm stealing it, it's mine now. Thanks.
  • lightbyte 10y ago
    >How many of you have real alarm clock sitting on the table, for example. Is this really THAT unusual? I still use a normal alarm clock next to my bed every day because I don't like to bring my phone into my bedroom.
  • lithos 10y ago
    It'll become pretty funny if humans become so addicted to alt-reality that future generations view leaving the planet's atmosphere as stuff of nightmares. Since they'll no longer have instant access any more.
    • yazaddaruvala 10y ago
      There will always be "rebels". The outsides, the outcasts, ... <you know the rest>
  • JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    For a real peak at the future, study Roman history.
• baq 10y ago
  the problem is there's only so much information you can process in meat computers using 20W of power no matter the bandwidth. the best we can hope for is to design the AIs to treat us as very interesting pets.
• martin1b 10y ago
  While this makes a great story, in reality, technology evolves much slower than it is conceived. I understand we've made progress. However, direct neural integration is very difficult. I would understand bio-integration for very good limb prosthetics in 20 years, better than we have today. Perhaps even indistinguishable from the real thing to the wearer. However, integration directly into the brain without detrimental psychological effects is going to be very difficult. 20 years is a very short time.
• spaceboy 10y ago
  Can't help but bring up the notion of envy these people (technocrats specifically) have for the biological miracle that is the human body. They can simulate the human brain all they want, but they'll never match it, as it's orders of magnitude more complex than any supercomputer they can dream of. And it has free will, which AI does not. AI is impotent at making free decisions because it's deliberately constrained by the programmers to think rigidly and inside their own custom black box. There's no room to roam unless we get to Mars where we can unleash AI and watch it make free decisions, which I suspect Musk is trying to do...Turning planets into giant labs where AI can be less constrained.
  • solipsism 10y ago
    AI is impotent at making free decisions because it's deliberately constrained by the programmers to think rigidly and inside their own custom black box That's a strange assertion to make. And false. AI cannot make what you would call "free decisions" because it lacks the level of complexity necessary to trick you into thinking it can, the way your brain tricks you into thinking you make "free decisions". The idea that we're intentionally crippling AI because we have no room for it both overstates our ability to create intelligence and understates the financial incentives for anyone who creates it. mars where we can unleash AI and watch it make free decisions, which I suspect Musk is trying to do So, the real reasons he's given for wanting to go to Mars.. I guess those are just a smoke screen?
    • spaceboy 10y ago
      > the way your brain tricks you into thinking you make "free decisions" It's my own experience that I have Free Will[1] without my brain tricking me. The idea of free will is not without controversy, though, and we could argue at length of whether it's truly free in the classical sense, or a mix of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
      • solipsism 10y ago
        and we could argue at length of whether it's truly free in the classical sense, or a mix of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition No we couldn't because I don't entertain false choices. It's as deterministic as a game of billiards and you have no power to argue otherwise.
• nudpiedo 10y ago
  It seems that Elon Musk used to read the ghost in the shell (攻殻機動隊) as well... which very soon will have a Hollywood version in every cinema. The problem I find on Elon words is that everything he says tends to be oversimplified and put in a dichotomy without much fundamental basis (just because something is plausible is not more closed to happen) this is in one hand great to create a vision, but I would say that at the same doesn't play well with the scientific method...
• saalweachter 10y ago
  I can't help but feel like, best case, all of these people warning about the Singularity are like Arrhenius warning about global warming a century or two early and no one caring.
  • hashkb 10y ago
    What? The world is round? Let's start tying nooses.
• Neliquat 10y ago
  Human might as well mean part machine. We are a product of our tools and structures more than any other. We have always been on this evolutionary path.
• tmsldd 10y ago
  "... as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone... they no longer build spaceships. They were spaceships." Arthur C. Clarke. It seems clear that this biological implementation is going to be obsolete some time soon..
• tmsldd 10y ago
  "... as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone... they no longer build spaceships. They were spaceships." Arthur C. Clarke. It seems clear that this biological implementation is going to be obsolete some time soon..
• gerbilly 10y ago
  Eyeroll, I have no desire to merge with a calculator. Humans, and even the 'lower' animals for that matter, out compute computers even today.
• coldcode 10y ago
  Let me know where people plug directly in machines, I will look forward watching a brain being hacked.
  • logfromblammo 10y ago
    You think a brain has to be connected to a machine to be hacked? Ask a cult deprogrammer if you need a computer to hack a brain. Ask an "enhanced interrogator" if you really need anything more sophisticated than a pair of pliers or a rag and a bucket of water. We have always been able to hack each others' brains by manipulating sensory inputs, and by using conditioning. And we have more recently been able to use drugs to target particular classes of neuroreceptor. Does taking a dose of LSD or Salvia divinorum count as hacking a brain? How about heroin or cocaine? Even if you have a computer wired directly into your brain, it will likely be a long time until anyone can do anything more complicated than reading out from or injecting into one of the sensory inputs. And so guess what? No one will be typing "these aren't the droids you're looking for" into a console window and piping it into your brain. Instead, they will yank out just one fingernail, save the sensory stream to a file, and hit the "replay" button until you decide to cooperate. Hopefully, no one will be so foolish as to connect their brain directly to the Internet, without some sort of firewall.
• samfisher83 10y ago
  According to musk: In an age when AI threatens to become widespread, humans would be useless, so there's a need to merge with machines, according to Musk. Then why won't the machines just kill the humans and take over?
  • m3talsmith 10y ago
    It is a threat to our system, and the fallout of our system is a threat to our life, but the AI aren't intentionally threatening us; our lack of foresight and stubborn desire to live under a wage earning system will eventually hurt us because our efficiency is always going to lag behind a digital intelligence. This isn't Skynet, this is the logical conclusion of capitalism.
• bpyne 10y ago
  Prediction or self-fulfilling prophecy? Sounds like he's determined to force it to happen whether or not the average person wants it. I was disturbed by the notion of an RFID in my dog. I am even more disturbed by having one in my daughter. Having a brain implant so billionaires can maximize my profitability (for their own gain) - take a hike! I'll go back to hunting and growing before participating in that economy. I wish we'd spend more time trying to get software to work right rather than creating cyborgs. The idea of having a "blue screen of death" happen in my head is terrifying.
  • solipsism 10y ago
    And you'll die one day. No one is talking about the merging of bpyne and machine, no one cares about that. We're talking about the human race as a whole.
    • bpyne 10y ago
      Actually, EM was very much talking about the merging of individuals with machines. I can't take the following quote in any other way. "Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem," Musk explained. I find it terrifying that people are out there who are so myopically focused on merging machines and people. The major issues facing humanity aren't going to be solved by quicker analysis of data as EM seems to desire. I'm not saying they won't be helped by data analysis. I am saying that quicker analysis of terabytes more data isn't going to do it.
      • devopsproject 10y ago
        > The major issues facing humanity aren't going to be solved by quicker analysis of data as EM seems to desire You can already see the results of a society where data comes in too quick for the "average" citizen to process. Fake news, hoaxes, Trump, climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, etc. This technology cannot come soon enough.
• l3m0ndr0p 10y ago
  LOL - Sorry, this is another form of enslavement that he is proposing. Nobody should be allowed to determine the destiny of another Human Being. It is in our very own nature to be free, to explore and not be shackled by any mechanism imposed by another human.
• nepotism2016 10y ago
  So tesla is leading the very thing that Elon is warning will cause chaos...brilliant
• shmerl 10y ago
  So he is into cyberpunk now?
• swayvil 10y ago
  A divine, golden, glowing but somewhat wretchedly obsessive unicorn has fallen into obsession with an end-table. "How symmetric, how uniform, how efficient. If only I could be like you!" He proceeds to plane his back flat, saw off his legs to replace them with painted oak, trim that awkward horn... His friends, appalled, have him committed.
• arca_vorago 10y ago
  Once again why FOSS is so important, either the user controls the program (AI), or the program (AI) controls the user. I told a former boss once while he would eventually be plugging into his iBrain, I won't be touching anything not GPLesque that I haven't reviewed personally. RMS was right, and those of you embracing proprietary ecosystems are going to suffer for it.
• inertial 10y ago
  Less catchy version : "machines will augment human capabilities". But, we've been doing that for decades.
• AIMunchkin 10y ago
  As someone who has early adopted technology since childhood, I'm surprisingly contrarian on this. And it's not the tech, it's the state of society and industry that's making me feel this way. For I want said technology to all but disappear Avatar-style except when I need it(1). Along the way I don't want craptastic screendoor VR, I want BSG-reboot Cylon VR. I don't see that coming anytime soon. I don't want to be bombarded by the outputs of conv nets, SVMs, and other assorted RainMan-level ML models that are occasionally helpful but mostly just distracting factoid spam (see Google Now for a perfect example of this). I'd love a self-driving car (for real), but I'd love a life where I didn't have to drive everywhere even more. I don't need AI for that, I just need to move to a city. And honestly, driving my sportscar is fun when it's on nearly abandoned mountain roads and highways (see craptastic VR bit about why VR is not a good surrogate). Why would I want to give that up to run with the cool kids(tm)? I'd even love a brain computer interface, in fact MIT Neuroscience turned me down for admission despite my GPA and GRE scores specifically for saying I wanted to work on this a couple decades ago, but the mobile web is godawful enough already without giving silicon demons like Google and Facebook a direct feed to my brain. I don't trust industry 1 QBit here. Finally, to quote RadioHead, "I want a perfect body, I want a perfect soul(tm)." If that makes me a creep, I'm OK with that. If AI (and tech in general) doesn't improve me or my life, I don't want it around me anymore and we're just a few years into this. 1. I work in AI. And I'm trying to make it work behind the scenes rather than in your face. To that end, I focus on pull, and I despise any sort of push short of protecting me from harm or keeping me on my schedule.
• mirimir 10y ago
  That seems pretty obvious to me. But then, it's an old trope in SF, and I've read lots of SF. I highly recommend Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture & Technology in the Twentieth Century by O.B. Hardison Jr. (1989).
• losteverything 10y ago
  To me this <He said the disruption to people whose job it is to drive will take place over the next 20 years, after which 12 to 15 percent of the global workforce will be unemployed. "The most near term impact from a technology standpoint is autonomous cars … That is going to happen much faster than people realize and it's going to be a great convenience," Was more important.
• JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Self serving comments more than anything. I mean of course he is going to say things like this, he owns companies that are investing in ML/AI.
• baursak 10y ago
  > "In an age when AI threatens to become widespread, humans would be useless, so there's a need to merge with machines, according to Musk." Useless for what? Working their jobs and feeding families? Sure, if we assume that current capitalistic structure is going to persist, many humans will either need to be eliminated or otherwise sustained through some of form of welfare. But why must we assume that?
  • ivm 10y ago
    "Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost." – Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator (1940)
• baccheion 10y ago
  Any merging with machines (which I'm very much against) would have to be "wireless." That is, injecting or implanting chips or bots is a bad idea. The AI age is overblown. The only fallout would be the automation of repetitive jobs.
• trumbitta2 10y ago
  Resistance is futile, I guess?
• TeeWEE 10y ago
  I think, what most people here are missing in the discussion, is that Elon Musk mainly points out there is a mismatch in INPUT vs OUTPUT bandwidth between a computer and a human. We only communicate to computer via toch, button clicks, keyboard and mouse. The bandwidth is low here. However we can already "read" from a computer using vision which is a high bandwidth connection. If you think about it, from first principles (like Elon Musk often advocates), this gap can probably be solved by a better interface with computers. Thing about a Brain-Computer cable. Or we could computers learn to recognize human voice, human facial expression etc. That would increase the bandwidth. However it would be a lot cooler to send our "thinking" to a computer. This would allows us to program faster, too lookup wikipedia articles faster etc. Thats the merger he is pointing to. I think its a valid point.
  • gnoim 10y ago
    I think you and Elon are missing the point as to how a computational system works.. There will always be a mismatch between input and output bandwidth. If output matched input, you effectively have a pass-through system. If output exceeds input.. yeah, explain to me how that works in any place in our universe.. Structuring information isn't 'free'. It takes time. It takes lots of information. What comes out the other end is less information via (a relatively small number of intelligent actions). Try taking your hand off the keyboard and mouse and speaking 'internally' without activating output. Now, try speaking 'really.. really' fast about a thought. You can't can you? There's a fundamental reason why you can't. There are also fundamental truths that will restrict what can be interfaced. This fundamental reason is understood by those who actually have a grasp of the human brain as a system. It is not grasped by those who make uninformed comments about input/output bandwidth. NLP tech exists. You can draw pictures (picture speaks 1000 words). Human facial expression processing software exists. We don't exploit half the capabilities of what we have today in realized technology. Yet people won't to go further down the rabbit hole without a flashlight... 'Sending thinking to a computer' sounds cool .. I recall an anime named 'Ghost in the shell' that did a way better job at exampling it. The manga was serialized in 1989. Where the rubber meets the road in reality is where engineering and science take over.. Engineering nor information theory are with this proposal. I think this is what most people are missing on this hype train.
• EdSharkey 10y ago
  I predict that augmented minds will perform spectacular feats and then quickly burn out. Either vegetative state or depression and suicide. We're far too moody and fragile to have our thoughts accelerated to compute speeds without mental collapse. That is, unless we can somehow lose our humanity in the process. But then, we're no longer being augmented. We're being replaced. The happy medium we will obtain will be replacing the video, audio, touch input and keyboards with mental equivalents. Therefore, one's 'bandwidth' to the computer/network will still necessarily be limited to that of an observer of the compute functions of the computer rather than one who has integrated their mind and consciousness with the computer. One of the most treasured features of these systems will be the off button. And a sizeable subset of the populace will run primarily in offline-mode but with regular access to some huge local data trove curated from online data.
  • devopsproject 10y ago
    > Either vegetative state or depression and suicide They will make a drug for that
    • mirimir 10y ago
      Maybe. But mostly, they'll just hack neurotransmitters.
      • devopsproject 10y ago
        so a digital pill?
        • mirimir 10y ago
          Just readjust neurotransmitter stuff.
  • mirimir 10y ago
    I doubt that burn-out will be that serious an issue. I used to get depressed a lot, until I learned how to hack the mechanism. With deep hooks into brain function, I see no reason why people would be depressed, unless they wanted to be. Some will argue that heavily augmented people are no longer human. Back in the day, I'm sure that some considered the use of stone tools in the same way. But they apparently didn't have many descendants ;)
• nashashmi 10y ago
  I did not come across that quote anywhere in the link. And everyone here seems to take it ... oddly. My interpretation of the quote is not literal. Instead as machines take over greater and greater portions of our day to day tasks, we will need to utilize them better and more significantly. They have incredible power and capability in performing tasks of more complex, large-scale, or annoying nature, and the tighter we merge with them, the more useful they will be to us, and the more relevant we will be to them. And I believe he is right. Put it this way, there are a million tasks for humanity to do in the world. Yet, we can only find the time, resource, manpower to do 10% of them. How can we allow for more people to do more of those million things? By automating the mundane. What do we automate first? The stuff that is unhealthy, then the stuff that is a tax on the ecology of the planet, then the stuff that is too boring to do. So what does humanity focus on then? Health, Elderly care, Animal protection, community development, child development, recreation, religion. Maybe the economics of these industries have not fully developed yet. But when they do, that is what we can focus on. I hate this gloom & doom talk about when AI will take over. Have we lost all imagination about what greater things there is left to do?
• AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  I'm glad that Musk is speaking out here on this topic because there aren't enough people doing it, and it's the most important thing (in my opinion) humanity can work on. The challenge is: How do you get people to engage with the idea and not just write them off as crazy? Well, best to have good spokespersons. Besides that, Transhumanism isn't new. For anyone in the "Singularity" camp (including myself) this isn't news, it's a basic maxim of how we expect the future will play out.
• deleted 10y ago
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• alexro 10y ago
  Humans must unmerge with machines and make AI irrelevant
  • grzm 10y ago
    Is this coming from a general Luddite-type stance or something more interesting? Care to dig into this more?
• ksec 10y ago
  And for anyone who think Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs, or thinking Apple should buy Tesla so Elon could be CEO of Apple, you should think again.
• reddog 10y ago
  When I am watching a Netflix movie my (download) bandwidth between me and whatever computer is serving it is much higher than 10bps. By 5 to 6 orders of magnitude. And that bandwidth has been matched perfectly by evolution to my processing speed. Speeding it up so I can binge watch all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 40 seconds doesn't do me much good. I guess Musk is talking about upload speed. I can't think of a whole lot of good reasons to increase my upload speed to anything much faster than typing and talking other than turning myself into a sensor for the hive mind.
• projektir 10y ago
  To be clear, I'm a transhumanist, and I'm very much OK with things like merging with machines. But I really hope Musk himself is not framing things this way: that humans will have to merge with machines because they'll be useless otherwise. I can't separate the inflammatory headline and text from what Musk himself said, though... I guess it's not too out of character given Musk's apparent treatment of his own employees, though. Merging with machines and other similar things should happen because it benefits humans, not because it's necessary to make someone money or because someone decided that humans are "useless".
  • devopsproject 10y ago
    It would be a competitive advantage which would make some people more valuable than others. As far as profit and motives, I think it may be similar to tractors: Someone will make money on the equipment and service, farmers will be more productive which will kill farming jobs, and more food will be produced. I don't see an altruistic path.
• deleted 10y ago
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• jimmytucson 10y ago
  To me, there is essentially no difference between AI completely merging with humans and conquering us. Consider what a complete merger might look like. Which pieces of humanity remain? I suppose we'll have replaced some or all of our mental faculties with AI, we'll no longer procreate or degrade biologically -- hell, why even retain a human-like body? Mount a case on one of those dog-bots from Boston Dynamics. AI will conquer humanity by slowly replacing each of its components with perfect, "artificial" ones. And then? I'm sure it will eventually calculate the only logical course of action is to turn itself off since its existence serves no purpose other than to threaten the existence of all organic life on the planet. Such great heights!
• mrfusion 10y ago
  What could musk possibly be building for this neural lace? I just can't think of any modern technology that's up to the task. Any ideas?
• AmIFirstToThink 10y ago
  I think eye glasses or contact lens are marriage of man and machine. A car or bicycle is a marriage of man and machine. So, is a sword. Marriage of man and machine has been happening ever since humans started using tools... stone age or stick age tools. We are increasing the accessibility and intimacy of the tools. I don't know, I am conflicted about this. Should we make it super easy for everyone to access and link and build upon vast knowledge at moments notice at the service of individual whims and wishes that are susceptible to greed, lust, jealously and pure evil, and just environmental hiccups, Or, should we let our AI overlords control how far we go as individuals? Age of AI is arriving, but has humanity of humans arrived?
• castle-bravo 10y ago
  Most human beings have been working in the service of some 'other' since the agrarian revolution got into full swing 6000 years ago. First it was the raiders, slavers, and tyrants of city states. The priesthoods of hydraulic empires. Churches, guilds, and kings. Then there was an emergent capitalist class, machinery, and national states. Now human beings are being framed as competitors with machines for livelihoods in a money economy that is increasingly inappropriate for our social, environmental, and economic needs. The unfortunate insistence that human beings serve technology and the powerful people who use it as a tool to facilitate the extraction of wealth from an increasingly complacent domesticated human population will result in our extinction as Elon Musk predicts - unless we can collectively insist MORE INSISTENTLY that technology be made to serve us: human beings whose lives have intrinsic value. Technology can be used to build a paradise in the physical world for us, but instead we are being shuffled into brightly lit slaughterhouse chutes of virtuality. Fuck that.
• pmarreck 10y ago
  SOMEone got the "synthesis" ending of Mass Effect 3, Elon ;)
• throwaway_aibot 10y ago
  long time passive reader. just came here to say that i am tired of Elon Musk and his version of the future_of_humanity. There is an opportunity cost here. Like one of the comments said, we are trying to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• known 10y ago
  AKA http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
• kaaree 10y ago
  The problem with this type of AI development is that decisions are made based on wrong assumptions. "AI" as in "fast computing" is no match for a bio based sentient human. The "AI" does not know of dreams, of love, of inspiration, of introversion, osmosis, compassion, biodiversity or other fundamental archetypes. As a computer it can only make decisions based on logic. But we surely can agree that our day to day experience of life is much more than only "logic". Based on logic only the human will become irrelevant. . true. It is up to us to agree we are much more that a small part in our brain that can be used for computation.
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