8 ms·

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 wor

by 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.

by arcanus 10y ago

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.