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Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI
- LeanderK 10y agoforgive me if i am wrong, i don't know much about these matters. Just a quick thought. For me Elon Musks ventures seem a bit like angel-investors. Every company he founds has probability of making billions (car-company, rockets, tunnelling etc.), though they are also high risk. Of course he can't spread his risk as broad as a investor. But while risky, every venture seems to be very calculated, the opposite of crazy. I mean he could focus everything on Tesla, but if Tesla bites the dust he would loose everything. But cause != correlation, maybe he just likes founding stuff.
- baq 10y agohe needs the money, but he doesn't want it. he's not playing the business game for the game's sake, he wants to advance civilization and the best way to do it is via billion dollar disruptive businesses, so that's what he's doing. i applaud him for keeping true to this after however many years of having access to that much assets.
- komali2 10y agoWe should be so lucky he's not purely profit-driven. Even on /r/futurology, supposedly a place of boundless imagination and hope for the future, I get attacked for suggesting that maybe it's not a bad idea to at least investigate the potential behind solar roads. Nope, those are stupid and a waste of money, fuck me for being an idealist. My point is most of society is self-limiting for whatever reason (obsessed with profit, obsessed with status quo, etc). Luckily we've got folks like Musk who don't seem to give a shit and do what they think is right for humans. I'd love some other examples of people like this. Another example: Zuckerberg took flak for his Internet.org idea, because clearly he's an evil Capitalist that just wants to profit off the advertising clicks of Indian goat farmers.
- taneq 10y agoSolar roads are stupid because they're a terrible use of resources. You could literally build a roof of solar panels over the road for cheaper than you could build a 'solar roadway', and it would be more efficient to boot. It's nothing to do with idealism - if you were being an idealist you'd be backing a less inherently handicapped proposal.
- komali2 10y ago>inherently handicapped With today's assumptions, sure. Who's to say some material scientist with a trickle of funding doesn't find a way to mix in some cheap leftover metal into an asphalt mix and wouldyalookathat, for some reason you can now plus a USB cable into the road and it'll charge your phone. I'm being silly, but my point is exactly that: we just assume it won't work because yea duh, it won't work if we don't investigate it beyond "huh, if you put a car on a solar panel, it breaks. This is impossible, clearly."
- ImSkeptical 10y agoThe problem with solar panels is not that we lack a place to put them. Solar roads don't offer anything other than a bad place to put solar panels (under the tires of our cars).
- dracht 10y agoIdealism is a belief in something unrealistic. It doesn't deserve a place on the stage of solutions. Dave Jones from the EEVBlog [0] channel did a bunch of videos explaining why solar roadways are a bad idea. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/EEVblog/search?query=roadways https://www.youtube.com/user/EEVblog/search?query=roadways
- catenthusiast 10y agoWhy is everyone so certain his motivations are noble?
- baq 10y agowouldn't say noble, just consistent and different from your usual businessmen who treat amassed capital and/or net worth as a measure of success.
- Quenz 10y agoTo me he seems like a genuinely noble guy, especially among many other successful capitalists.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoBecause so far he's staying true to the motivations as he described them; he's using business to help solve big problems - as opposed to other entrepreneurs, who use big problems to help their businesses. He's done nothing so far to make me personally doubt that his motivations are as noble as he says they are. I'm not saying that he won't eventually turn into yet another selfish business baron. That would be a very sad day, though. We need more people with noble intentions and means to execute on them - and such people need to be encouraged, not constantly doubted.
- neurotech1 10y agoRelated WSJ article (Facebook non-paywalled): https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-launches-neuralink-to-connect-brains-with-computers-1490642652 https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/article... Another non-paywalled news article: http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/27/15077864/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-computer-interface-ai-cyborgs http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/27/15077864/elon-musk-neurali...
- jasonwilk 10y agoCongrats to Max and team.
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- bhouston 10y agoSounds like an Exocortex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocortex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocortex
- drzaiusapelord 10y agoI don't want to compete with AI. I want AI to create efficiency and wealth so I can relax and have a leisure lifestyle. This shows that work-a-holic CEO culture is only about margins and gains and not improving lifestyle and quality of life. Automation should be improving our lives not adding anxiety to compete with it, which we will ultimately lose. We're probably in for another 1880's labor movement as automation keeps eating jobs. We either decide to benefit from it via strict regulation or we somehow try to compete with it which is greatly lower the value of our labor and only enrich the owners of automation.
- AndrewKemendo 10y agoI don't want to compete with AI. You don't have an option. Said another way, in the long run you either merge with AGI or go extinct.
- drzaiusapelord 10y agoDid 1880s people have to merge with assembly lines? I think you're being fairly dramatic and too "/r/futurology" here. The whole point of technology is to create tools to make our lives easier, not to become tools. People won't desire this and pushing this kind of pressure on people seems like a recipe for revolt against the capitalist system that has thus far provided so much wealth. The assembly line works for us, we don't want to become an assembly line ourselves and its ludicrous to think such reasoning will lead to extinction. This is a bit like saying that the Olympics will be nothing but a steroids showcase event because everyone will take steroids. If anything, dissuading people from standing up for their liberty and basic humanity seems to be the best route toward extinction to me.
- dogma1138 10y agoNo, but like with any other performance enchanting utility it's going to be effectively peer pressure. If AI+human will be better than just AI people will "merge" with it at that point if it's a true AI you might as well be a different species to them as you'll likely won't be able to even communicate with them after a while.
- hprotagonist 10y agoHave fun with that. Cochleas are tricky enough!
- aerovistae 10y agoPretty much what they said about reusable rockets and electric cars.
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- AnimalMuppet 10y agoTrue. But not every idea that is labeled as "too hard" is in fact useful (or even doable) idea.
- aerovistae 10y agoYou don't think being able to communicate with a computer by thought is useful?
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoIf it's not doable, no. It's just a nice dream. If it's doable but the computer can't tell the difference between my attempts to command it and my daydreams, maybe still no.
- aerovistae 10y agoClearly you think this is an impossible task. I strongly disagree, given the fullness of time.....tens and hundreds and thousands of years lie ahead of us, eons for engineers and scientists to fill with research and experimentation. Your perspective on this seems very shortsighted to me.
- tormeh 10y agoThey said that about electric cars? They had electric buses before they had petrol ones. In most ways electric is actually simpler. We've just been waiting for the batteries, and Tesla didn't do anything revolutionary there. Tesla saw the batteries were finally there and found a way to hype, market and sell electric cars successfully. That's praiseworthy. The self-driving stuff and over-the-air software updates are also cool. Lots of innovation there. But making electric cars has never been that hard per se.
- keithwhor 10y agoHello, Cookie.
- sarreph 10y agoSeems like Tony Stark isn't a character necessarily bound to a fictional world, after all.
- DennisAleynikov 10y agoElon Musk announces new company, wants faster brain so he can take serial entrepreneurship lifestyle to the max. sky's the limit
- Quenz 10y agoThe 2008 Iron Man film's Tony Stark was influenced by Elon Musk.
- marktam264 10y agoWe will need to prevent malicious brainhacks.
- pizza 10y agoWonder if we'll ever see "Humans as AI-ASICs" type services..? (I mean, apart from the movie "the Matrix".)
- scotth 10y agoBizarrely, humans weren't used for computation in the Matrix. They were batteries...somehow.
- astrange 10y agoIIRC it started out as computation, but was changed to batteries because they thought cluster computing was too hard to explain in a movie script.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoThere's the one camp that decries how this flies in the face of basic thermodynamics (human body temperature vs. ambient gives abysmally low Carnot efficiency), and the other camp that claims thermodynamics is just invented by the machines to make stuff work inside the Matrix.
- jp555 10y agoWell, a resting human body generates 4x more heat per volume than the fusion reaction at the core of the Sun. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Astrophysical_reaction_chains https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Astrophysical... But why didn't the machines just build geothermal generators? I guess it's not much of a story then?
- zzzzzzzza 10y agopretty sure the volume of available humans was way smaller than the volume of the core of the sun
- cing 10y agoThere's a "non-invasive" brain-computer interface on the market. It's a little less ambitious; targeted towards people who practice meditation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_(headband) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_(headband)
- kruhft 10y agoThere is also Emotiv: www.emotiv.com
- nylonstrung 10y agoThis just EEG which has been around forever. I wouldn't call that a brain-computer interface
- iamcreasy 10y agoEEG is a brain computer interface. There has been many BCI projects that uses EEG.
- nylonstrung 10y agoThis just EEG which has been around forever. I wouldn't call that a brain-computer interface
- nylonstrung 10y agoThis just EEG which has been around forever. I wouldn't call that a brain-computer interface
- komali2 10y agoWhat's the point of this thing? See if you're meditating right? Anybody know if it works? Could be cool if I could meditate "good" or "not good" in order to turn a light on and off, or turn on my cat feeder or whatever lol
- jdpigeon 10y agoTheir app does a fairly impressive job of giving feedback to help you stay on track during meditation. However, the cool thing about Muse, IMO, is that it's cheap, comfortable (moreso than the Emotiv), gives reasonable signal quality, and has a free SDK for developers. Brain-connecting devices even if they just use EEG open up a lot of doors for interesting products. Assisting in meditation is a great idea, but there's got to be a lot of good BCI ideas that we probably just haven't thought of yet.
- jameslk 10y agoI've had a casual curiosity on why these billionaires like Musk who seem to care about world wide problems such as AI aren't working to solve the imminent issues with global warming. I'm not talking about reducing fossil fuels, but perhaps coming up with solutions with their resources that addresses a world that isn't so habitable by life in the future. I don't know enough about global warming to know why this might be the case (hence why it's a casual curiosity). Or perhaps there are grand efforts and I just haven't heard about them yet. Edit: I'm not condemning Elon Musk or downplaying his efforts. This was just an honest question I was hoping someone more knowledgeable than me might comment on.
- andrewclunn 10y agoLogistics. Can the problem be solved with engineering and invention alone, or do they need to get governments and political movements involved in order to accomplish anything? Why would anyone with any real ability or drive want to bother with that shit?
- JabavuAdams 10y agoIt's empirically easier to start an orbital rocket company than to convince hundreds of millions of people to do things they don't want to.
- 20100thibault 10y agoHe's founded tesla and SolarCity with that objective in mind and almost went bankrupt in the process...
- jameslk 10y agoMy point was more around addressing global warming from the perspective of mitigation rather than prevention. There seems to be a lot of reports that indicate our opportunity for preventing global warming has passed or will soon pass[0][1][2]. So if that's the case, it seems like it would be pretty important to work on solutions to survive the effects of global warming instead. 0. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99888903 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9988890... 1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/climate-change-may-be-irreversible-2016-9 https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/climate... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change#Current_risk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change#Current...
- QuantumRoar 10y agoIf I remember correctly, there are needle-like implants with around a thousand contacts and it is quite a difficult task to get the signals out of the brain. Either you have the ADCs directly at the contacts, which means you can't get your density of contacts up, or you have the ADCs outside which will give you a nightmare of wiring. In either case the technology to actually have an interface read out individual neurons is still quite far off, as far as I know. I'm not quite sure about all of this, so maybe someone with up to date information on the technology can help me out here?
- Balgair 10y agoYou are thinking of Ted Berger's work at USC, among MANY other researchers' efforts. Here is a link to the class: https://classes.usc.edu/term-20161/course/bme-552/ https://classes.usc.edu/term-20161/course/bme-552/ Also, the main issue with their work is glia' scarring inside the central nervous system; the body ensures the implants are time limited.
- M_Grey 10y agoIf anything you're underselling the existing hurdles. It was once thought that the brain was immunoprivileged, but now it's known to have its own immune system. As a result implants are prone to having scar tissue form around them, and after some years it starts to inhibit their ability to perform.
- mattkrause 10y agoIf I may add some details.... The most popular implant is probably Blackrock Microsystems' "Utah Array", which has 96 electrodes arranged in a 10x10 grid (minus the corners). It looks like this: http://aerobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/utah-3.jpg http://aerobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/utah-3.jpg For scale, the entire electrode grid is about 4mm on a side and the electrodes are between 0.5 and 1.5mm long (depending on the model). There are a few other models (and similar stuff from other companies), but I'd be surprised if anything with thousands of contacts is in regular in vivo use. There are some in vitro (i.e., cells or tissue slices in a dish) systems with more contacts, but the signal quality isn't nearly as good. We can read out the activity of single neurons--people have been doing it for single electrodes since the 1960s. It's slightly easier with a single (movable) electrode since you can creep up on the cell until its action potentials are fairly large and well-isolated from the background noise (here, large means about ±150 µV). You can't move the array or its individual electrodes, so you're stuck hoping that the individual shanks end up in good positions. Then, data is recorded at a fairly high sampling rate (say, 30 kHz) and the "spikes" are clustered based on their shapes to get individual neurons' responses. The ADCs aren't directly at the contacts, but you want the amplifiers and ADCs as close to electrode as possible to avoid all sorts of weird EMI from the mains, other equipment, etc. Getting the grounding and shielding right is a bit of a black art and eats up tons of researcher time. (You'd think "throw it all in a Faraday cage" would work, but...it doesn't). What else do you want to know? :-)
- ajobaccount2017 10y ago8.2 A Master Programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The Master noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game. "Excuse me," he said, "may I examine it?" The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the Master. "I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium, and Hard," said the Master. "Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human." "Pray, Great Master," implored the novice, "how does one find this mysterious setting?" The Master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it with his heel. Suddenly the novice was enlightened. If you want to compete with AI, don't make humans easier to hack.
- zeroxfe 10y agoHumans are typically the weak link in a security strategy... so I think this would make them harder to hack.
- M_Grey 10y agoWe're easier to socially engineer, but so far humans are monstrously hard to hack; we're as likely to break unpredictably or not at all, as be broken.
- hexagonc 10y agoI would argue that humans are quite easy to hack although perhaps not in the way you were thinking. Our perceptions are quite easily and reliably hacked even when we know it is happening, as demonstrated by the success of stage magic and optical illusions[1]. At one point, there was a great deal of fear that companies and adversaries could influence large groups of people with subliminal messages[2]. Although the efficacy of these techniques are somewhat in doubt, on a more mundane level, most people are used to attempts by advertisers and marketers to subvert our desires and preferences to buy certain products. A great deal of research and money has been spent on essentially hacking our desires and exploiting our brain's response to intermittent reward and social cues. This has brought us product placement in movies, celebrity endorsements and video games that produce changes in the brain not much different from those found in drug addicts. Scientists have engineered fast food to exploit our evolutionary desire for sugars and fats -- something that was good at one point but now serves only to make us and fast food executives' wallets fat. I would consider all of these a type of human hacking simply due to the reliability of their effect, if not on an individual level, certainly on groups of people. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli
- scardine 10y agoThe [Black Mirror][1] (British science fiction television anthology series created by Charlie Brooker) has a few episodes dealing with AI and brain-machine interfaces. It is very interesting to watch some of the emotional and social implications this kind of technology will bring. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror
- andai 10y agoUpvoted because even though that show makes me sick it does explain very important technological / cultural issues in a very, uh, visceral way.
- Namrog84 10y agoWhy or how does it make you sick? Also are you regarding a specific season? the camera work? The ideas/stories themselves?
- baq 10y agonot OP, but e.g. the very first episode was quite a bit too heavy for me.
- andai 10y agoI don't know enough about stories or reality to explain this better, but the episodes seem to have a lot in common with a bad acid trip.
- untoreh 10y agoIt has the doom and gloom vibe all over it, always, you know something bad is gonna happen eventually.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mandeepj 10y agoBritish television (or Media in general) has released some very interesting shows
- adamwi 10y agoLove how they use the terminology "neural lace" from the Culture novels by Iain Banks. But I guess it goes in line with naming the Spacex drone ships after space ships in the same series =)
- sixQuarks 10y agoElon Musk's "bold" ventures are the only things that excite me. Meaning, whenever I hear of a supposed "big idea" that's right around the corner (cough, cough - Magic Leap), I basically dismiss it. Except when it has to do with Elon Musk. He is the first to admit that his plans will probably fail, but he actually has an incredible track record over 10+ years.
- countryqt30 10y agoactually, a track record of 20+ years of burning investors money. He hasn't made any investor a single penny since over 20 years, and probably never will.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoSame here. I'm sceptical about most of the "big ideas" - most of them are marketing bullshit. Doubly so when it's a startup - the goal usually is to bullshit people so that they come on board and enable the founders to have their exit. But Elon Musk I trust. He's shown time and again that he honestly wants to realize those ideas, and not pursue them for the money. He also has a pretty good track record there. I'm hoping there will be more people like Musk though; I think we desperately need them.
- sixQuarks 10y agoYeah, unfortunately, people like Elon Musk are, in my highly imprecise estimation, 1 in a billion. Here's the sad part about this statistic: That means we should have 7 Elons alive today, but only 1 has bloomed into full potential. The rest, we will never know about due to them being born into repressed governments, and/or extreme poverty.
- nategri 10y ago"Neural lace," indeed. No such thing as too many Iain M. Banks references for Mr. Musk, eh?
- Ericson2314 10y agoI'm... more excited about digging tunnels than this. Nothing like cyborg immortality to make our societal issues permenantly unsolvable.
- JimmyAustin 10y agoOn the other hand, it might be easier to get people to care about catastrophic climate change if it goes from "I'll be dead by the time thats an issue" to "I'll be alive to watch my great grandchildren's homes get swallowed by the sea".
- Ygg2 10y agoOn the third hand, it might be easier just to upgrade your immortal body to survive in low oxygen environment.
- maverick_iceman 10y agoAm I the only one surprised (and concerned) by how many ventures Musk start at the same time?
- econner 10y agoI imagine he can get away with a certain amount of name recognition w/o running the day to day of the company himself.
- goodJobWalrus 10y agoFrom the WSJ article: > Mr. Musk has taken an active role setting up the California-based company and may play a significant leadership role, according to people briefed on Neuralink’s plans, a bold step for a father of five who already runs two technologically complex businesses.
- econner 10y agomay
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tachyonbeam 10y agoI am too. He's been successful so far, but it seems to me that at some point, he will be overextending himself, and will start to run into more failures. As a Tesla shareholder, I wish he would focus on making sure that company is successful. Just Tesla, with its car, power, and battery divisions, is a huge project for one person to manage.
- greenhatman 10y agoWell, if the Neuralink works then it will probably make everything else easier.
- 10y ago
- JabavuAdams 10y agoThe universities, companies, and individuals involved in this machine learning renaissance are a collective super-intelligence. It's amazing how fast we can learn now, fuelled by information-sharing over the internet. I'm literally forgetting the names of everyday acquaintances because I'm learning and retaining so much new stuff. The problem, from an individual's perspective is that, while you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can't easily commandeer all that brain-power. I'm imagining getting some time-slices of Terry Tao, Geoff Hinton, <insert other big brain names> 's cognition to devote to my own projects. What would that even look like? On a different note, if we really could mind-meld, could we ever truly hate or kill each other?
- transcranial 10y agoI just started reading the Nexus trilogy by Ramez Naam (http://rameznaam.com/nexus/ http://rameznaam.com/nexus/). It's quite good so far, and explores some of these concepts from a sci-fi bent.
- zzzzzzzza 10y ago"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them -" "You beat them." For a moment she was not afraid of his understanding. "No, you don't understand. I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don't exist." Ender & Valentine, Ch. 13: Valentine
- JabavuAdams 10y agoEnder's catchy and interesting, but I don't think it would play out that way. Imagine that at the moment you fully understand your adversary you also fully understand others like yourself. The hurt that lead to the desire to never be harmed again. The harm that this kind of mentality inflicts. All the victims of your proposed victory. ... I mean, it's a hell of a quote, but at a certain point he just stops the recursion for bad-ass conclusion.
- throwaway7645 10y agoNice try Elon. I've read the Avery Cates series. You aren't "monking" me!
- RangerScience 10y agoBAM - http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v10/n7/full/nnano.2015.115.html http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v10/n7/full/nnano.2015.1... AFAIK, it's the most promising technology for actually making the neural lace. TL;DR: If you put electrodes on an angled plastic mesh, you can roll it up, inject it, and it'll safely unroll. Also, brain cells like to grow into it.
- donlzx 10y agoThis scenario scare the hell out of me. Is injecting/intercepting brain signals directly really the way forward? Do we really want to create monster human species? IMHO, future AI should be used to enhance human cognitives in a noninvasive way. Never in such a dystopian way as in the movie "The Matrix".
- eeks 10y agoI'm thinking more along the lines of Deus Ex.
- Gustomaximus 10y agoAlmost all advancements come with pros/cons and teething issues. How we implement and the the rules around it are key. I like to believe having someone like Musk at the forefront will be helpful. In the same way have to fight for privacy and free speech, the fight for privacy and free thought will surely be an issue as this tech develops. So many positive and negative possibilities here.
- austenallred 10y agoWhy?
- erkkie 10y agoOnly way to have enough bandwidth (for a varying definition of enough I guess) is to interface directly with the brain. Doing that non invasively is much more difficult.
- haydenlee 10y ago
- arca_vorago 10y agoMy theory has been for a while it is human-brain interfaces that will wake people up to the issues of GPL(v3) vs BSD style licensing. No iBrain device is touching my brain.
- globuous 10y agoIt's hard to resist to a tech when everyone around you is uing it. It's not impossible, but it is hard. My mum was super anti Facebook when it first came out. Now she has one. I'm not saying you will have an iBrain, but myself for instance, hope that I will not have one. Maybe though, I won't really have a choice in a world where nearly everyone has an iBrain. Kinda like that show where everyone has smart contact lenses and only some people go against the movement and remove them.
- gambiting 10y agoI wonder if these conversations are how we ended up in 21st century with old people adamantly refusing to use computers - at some point in their 20s they decided they don't want to have anything to do with this dangerous technology, and now they are 60 year old and unable to receive email. Will it be us in 40-50 years time, with kids running neural laces with ease, and we will be refusing to use them because we were worried about certain aspects of it?
- arca_vorago 10y agoI think there is a clear distinction between what we are talking about and your example. I'm not talking about refusing to learn a new tech, such as "computers", rather insisting to only use tech that respects my freedom. For example, Linux is my daily operating system largely for this reason. Stallman knew these issues were and are important, he was simply a man so far ahead of his time most people fail to understand the level of importance of his arguments.
- AndrewKemendo 10y agoEveryone is so scared of all of this, but where do you all realistically see humanity in 200 years? Living like we do now? I mean do you realize how different things were in 1817 compared to now? Unfathomable to them [1]. I know HN hates techno groups, but this kind of thing is not new at all to folks who consider themselves "Transhumanists." How is this not an obvious eventuality for everyone here? It seems pretty clear that the whole vector of humanity is to functionally merge with our engineered system in a symbiotic way and then probably see the extinction of the human species in (relatively) short order. We're gonna go extinct anyway, so what's the alternative? edit: Used a slightly different time horizon on suggestion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1817 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1817
- inimino 10y agoPredictions that were "obvious" to small groups of people and not to anyone else have a poor track record historically. That's not an argument against, but it justifies significant skepticism, and helps explain why your "but it's obvious" argument isn't going to convince anyone to take you seriously. Poll ten transhumanists, get ten mutually incompatible futures, all "obvious".
- AndrewKemendo 10y agoWell it's not just transhumanists, or small groups. It's basically every legendary computer scientist ever that assumed this would be an outcome - Minsky, Turing, Shannon, Knuth, Von-Neumann etc... so my point is that on a technologist site like HN, most people here would have been exposed to these people and what pretty much all the greats assume is an eventuality. They didn't necessarily advocate or want it, but they saw it as an eventuality.
- inimino 10y agoFirst, I don't think any of those greats had such a specific vision as this as an inevitable future: "functionally merge with our engineered system in a symbiotic way and then probably see the extinction of the human species" You can probably find quotes that will confirm your belief, but from a neutral viewpoint there is no such consensus between these people about the future. Secondly, even if there was, we have 60+ years more experience than they did with these systems, and we should be able to make better predictions than they did. There are many potential future outcomes, and it's reasonable to think about them and to try to mitigate certain possibilities. It's not reasonable to say that a certain outcome is inevitable and you know what's going to happen. We just don't.
- du_bing 10y agoThis is great, he always concentrates on the really important problem.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoMusk is wrong that input bandwidth is a limiting factor in intelligence. We don't efficiently use the megapixel our phones show us, let alone the several megapixels on our laptops. Improving UIs will provide much more bang for the buck for many many decades to come. A neural lace is the equivalent of trying to increase the yield per square inch of the herbs in your window box when you have 100 acres of empty land around you.
- erkkie 10y agoImagine thinking about something and having it appear on your brain interface HUD vs typing a google search on your phone and reading it from the screen. How is that not a bandwidth problem?
- XorNot 10y agoWrong paradigm: imagine being able to have perfect recall of information you looked at once. Or being able to check point your active memories and recover that state of mind at will.
- erkkie 10y agoIf I'd had to guess and theorise, and it's highly likely I'm wrong, making thoughts available semantically for an computer to parse requires more bandwidth than (once command+control is figured out) recalling of information + presenting it. The latter could be directly tied to the visual nerves only perhaps? Still all part of the same paradigm to me though.
- littledouglas 10y agoWrong paradigm: Imagine your brain has the entire contents of Google. The speed of all machines connected to the network. And the creativity of all other linked minds.
- gambiting 10y agoBut it won't, unless Musk somehow figures out how to "write" information to your brain, and right now we can't even fully figure out how the information is stored, much less how to write it back - the way this will most likely work is that you will search something on google by thinking about it, and it will "appear" in your vision by stimulating your visual nerve. You still have to read it and remember it, you won't magically know Kung-Fu Matrix-style by thinking about it.
- adrianotadao 10y agoI believe that someday, this guy will save us! He is so amazing!
- Animats 10y agoThat guy needs to finish his itasks for 2017 first. - Tesla Model 3 production line (First deliveries late 2017. He said he was going to live at the factory to get the cars out the door.) - Brownsville TX launch facility (first launch scheduled for 2018, not much construction started yet) - Manned Dragon spacecraft (as of 2015, first crewed launch scheduled for late 2017) - Falcon Heavy (as of Q3 2016, supposed to launch Q1 2017. Now Q3 2017. Maybe.)
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- Joeri 10y agoMusk never delivers on time. I think he sets unrealistic deadlines deliberately to scare off competitors and motivate his staff. Yet he still does things so radical that they spawn or renew entire industries, so does it really matter whether things are delayed by a year or two?
- baq 10y agoexactly. he accelerated development of affordable electric cars by a decade. he basically rebuilt the space launch market. he's got the energy storage and production market in his sights. also don't forget he cocreated the internet payments market.
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- littledouglas 10y agoYou should read Edison's biography. You'd understand Musk much more.
- neshibble 10y agoNow that you've made this comparison, I can never unsee it. They're extremely similar! This makes me wonder whose going to be Musk's Tesla. I.e., what's the first amazing idea he's going to throw away (out of mainly hubris) that actually solves his problems.
- hyperpallium 10y agoNeural interfaces are an obvious direction to go, and we already have well established commercial nerve-interface products, like cochlear implants. But I think there'll be significant problems in interfacing with the brain in a meaningful way, if you want to bypass the existing interfaces (hearing, sight, touch etc). I think it will turn out that the internal implementation is a lot stranger than the external interface, it could vary significantly between persons. Perhaps falling into major categories for some aspects, analogous to blood types; but then varying in the details as much as our finger prints - note that even genetically identical twins have unique fingerprints, as they are highly developmentally affected, like the branches of a specific tree. Simikar for retina prints, an example closer to (some say part of) the brain. I think interoperation with the internal implementation could require actual understanding of the brain - enough to build strong AI. We might even have strong AI before. It seems very difficult, we haven't the faintest clue at this point. We may need new fields of marhematics. Could take even more than 20 years.
- imron 10y agoHow long before humans are 0wnz0red? http://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/ http://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/
- davidiach 10y agoWhat happens when my brain implants are under DDoS attacks? Or get hacked?
- littledouglas 10y agoHow do you prevent a malevolent AI from controlling armies of neurally-linked humans?
- shard972 10y agoUse nanobots to clone bigboss
- scarlac 10y agoThe proposed idea with a neural lace would be that we became the "AI". Any AI advancements would be augmenting our shared thoughts. If you accept the notion that the internet is our backbone, then we're already a super organism with shared thoughts. Or to reduce it to a catch phrase: If you can't beat [it], join [it].
- Corrado 10y agoThis is an interesting story, especially considering the new Ghost in The Shell movie is coming out this week. It really makes me think that something like this might be possible. As we've discussed here before, technology moves really, really quickly and things that we never thought of 20 years ago are pretty common now. Even full on auto-drive cars are on the horizon in a very realistic way. Sure, we thought it would probably happen at some point but we are now within a couple of years of actually being able to purchase such a thing. And we all have pretty powerful supercomputers in our pockets. Is brain augmentation that weird. Also, I've been thinking that we will need a new interface for our cell phones. The screens can't get much bigger without being uncomfortable, yet we need to interact with them more and more. I was thinking that a contact lens display would probably be within reach soon but maybe we'll just skip the physical stuff and go directly to injecting signals into the brain stem.
- norea-armozel 10y agoI'm not sure if Musk's contention makes sense because intelligence isn't a uniform attribute to systems (biological or synthetic). Specifically, what passes for intelligence is just the proper applicable, discovery, and/or refinement of algorithms which we can do easily without intelligence (as in self-awareness and raw analytical capability). Just run through all possible paths or solutions on a sufficiently fast computer and you'll eventually get all the possible solutions to any given problem. It's not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of lifespan and applicability.
- grondilu 10y agoAn efficient brain-computer interface would require a good understanding of the inner-workings of the brain. So any effort in building such interface would motivate neurobiological research to get such understanding. I personally believe that once we have an accurate model of the brain, that is one that explains how thoughts, memory, emotions, consciousness and so on arise from brain activity, we're literally done. Once we reach this point, I think humans will eventually replace their brains with artificial ones, either gradually (Moravec transfer), or in one-go. There will be various motivations : immortality, mind-performance improvements, etc. The end-result will be the same : we will turn into machines. It won't be a merger, it'll be a plain replacement. The scenario where AI robots kill us all will only be different from a subjective point of view.
- namlem 10y agoI'm not convinced that's true. There are countless innovations that we were able to get to work despite having little understanding of the underlying theory. Given how adaptable both biological and artificial neural networks are, I'd say that the hardware is far and away the primary limiting factor, not our theoretical understanding. Once we get a safe and reliable connection between brain and computer, we can figure out the rest through trial and error.
- Balgair 10y agoThe thing that gets me about this is that we all think that the brain is an understandable object in the end. This may not be the case at all. There are things that we have in our world that are going to stay fundamentally mysterious. Strictly, they will always have 'edge cases' that are logically considered to be paradoxes, yet exist all the same (Godel's Incompleteness Theorem). These things are Hurricanes, where we will only ever really be able to give probabilities of paths or the stock market, where if you canfigure it out you'll have killed the whole thing. Most importantly, the idea that we can understand the human brain and then manipulate it must be false from our everyday experience. Simply put, if we can understand our brains, then we can understand women, something we all know to be forever impossible.