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Personally what I worry about is that there are too many conflicting, adaptive, self-correcting systems that we don't understand from first principles. The bod

Personally what I worry about is that there are too many conflicting, adaptive, self-correcting systems that we don't understand from first principles. The body has it's own internal "AI" that also responds and adapts to these incoming pulses over time. You could probably snort some speed and get the same effect described here ... but if you keep doing it, it won't keep working. Now replace the Speed with AI that generates the pulses and can adapt the dosage in response to the bodies AI... we just don't know what it would do long-term. The real problem IMO is that the AI prescribing the dosage doesn't have any of the sensory inputs the human brain does. So it might boost working memory in a way that is maladaptive to the situation. All in all -- I think these technologies could be quite interesting for allowing us to hyper-evolve out of our mental limitations that are still over-fitted to living in the jungle... but might make us weak as a species in the long run by forcing us to have sensory stimulations that are overfitted to a particular prescribed state that we label as "good".

davidgu 9y ago
It seems that almost every technological development will cause us to become "weak as a species," for the simple reason that these developments remove difficulties we have faced in the past. Cars and bicycles damaged our endurance. Shoes softened our soles. If these technologies disappeared overnight, yes we would be worse off as a species, but that says nothing about the benefits of these technologies. If these technologies improve our mental effectiveness, even if only within a specific type of sensory stimulation, it's likely that we would adapt our sensory perceptions to deliver these "optimized states," possibly through new technology, for an overall net gain in efficacy.
- Corvus 9y ago
  “If men learn this ... they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written” - Plato on literacy, ca. 350 BCE.
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    He was right to some extent.
    - davidgu 9y ago
      He was absolutely right. It's just that the benefits of written language massively outweigh the small loss in memory performance we experience. If your computer's OS and all your files were stored on a 64gb ramdisk, it would be fast, yes, but not very useful.

davidgu 9y ago

It seems that almost every technological development will cause us to become "weak as a species," for the simple reason that these developments remove difficulties we have faced in the past. Cars and bicycles damaged our endurance. Shoes softened our soles. If these technologies disappeared overnight, yes we would be worse off as a species, but that says nothing about the benefits of these technologies. If these technologies improve our mental effectiveness, even if only within a specific type of sensory stimulation, it's likely that we would adapt our sensory perceptions to deliver these "optimized states," possibly through new technology, for an overall net gain in efficacy.

Corvus 9y ago
“If men learn this ... they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written” - Plato on literacy, ca. 350 BCE.
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  He was right to some extent.
  - davidgu 9y ago
    He was absolutely right. It's just that the benefits of written language massively outweigh the small loss in memory performance we experience. If your computer's OS and all your files were stored on a 64gb ramdisk, it would be fast, yes, but not very useful.