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Imagine if we could connect your brain directly to a computer. Imagine if you could do things like instantly and precisely recall any Wikipedia article, any new

Imagine if we could connect your brain directly to a computer. Imagine if you could do things like instantly and precisely recall any Wikipedia article, any news story, any mathematical formula. Imagine if arithmetic goes from a skill you learn to a thing your brain does with 100% accuracy. Now imagine if your need for speech goes away: why bother using it when you can just “text” from your brain directly to mine and I instantly know what you said without me having to “read” anything. Instant communication. Instant connection to anyone. Instant ads beamed directly into your brain by Google and Facebook. Now take it a step further: your mind is now a part of a collective globally connected network. The boundary of where “you” exist and where the rest of the world exists is erased. You can feel what other people feel. You can see through the eyes of an Oscar winner, a surgeon, a head of state, a porn star. Police body cams become police mind cams: what was the cop thinking when they took any given action? What we currently have as YouTube celebrities and Instagram influencers become Mindgram stars. You can see and perceive as them. Now take it a step further. Death isn’t death. Like the paradox of rebuilding a ship one plank at a time, your mind stops existing in your body and occupies a collection of other bodies. Artificial intelligence mixed in with real intelligence mixed in with remnant intelligence. We can’t imagine what this feels like but we are marching towards it getting ever closer every year. Now take it a step further. People want to get away from this hive mind concept. They disconnect. They play games. They make games where all NPCs are now simulated to the point where they believe they are real. They are here for the benefit of the players but even the players can’t tell the difference when they are in the game. Now take it a step further. Inside the simulation someone introduces Hard Seltzer. The in game year is 2021 and a player just read that some NPC somewhere had just created a brain/computer interface. He rips off his headset and goes to unplug the computer because fuck this game, all the DLC clearly ruined it.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Now take it a step further. People want to get away from this hive mind concept. Why would they? All the preceding paragraphs sound like Borg collective, but hey, if it's voluntary, it actually doesn't sound bad. As long as we can keep adtech away.
- bserge 6y ago
  Yeah... if it's voluntary. Working is voluntary. Sure, you want to move to a farm far away from all the madness or you want to sit in a workshop designing robots all day, but you need money, so you "volunteer" to work some job you barely tolerate in or near a city for all of your best years. The ads are just constant slaps in the face.
Elof 6y ago
You should check out the Nexus series :)
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Or watch Forbidden Planet - "Monsters from the Id"
blisterpeanuts 6y ago
The notion of a neurally connected Facebook or Google scares the heck out of me. Apart from the countless petabytes of data they would collect, just imagine a world where the powers that be can actually tap into your thoughts, perhaps even implant ideas that they think you should have. At a certain point, we lose our individuality and become subsumed by the global AI, game over. But before that distant dystopian point is reached, I do hope we develop ways for paralyzed people to regain sensory control and live normal lives.
- badjeans 6y ago
  What's so dsytopian about that?
- ElFitz 6y ago
  > At a certain point, we lose our individuality and become subsumed by the global AI, game over. In a way, we already have. Each and every one of us is constantly influenced by and influencing untold numbers of people, and most beliefs and knowledge are more or less "standardised". Most people follow the school -> (college ->) 9 to 5 -> retire consensus, and even those who believe themselves to be outliers actually behave how outliers are expected to behave, all of us furthering the goals set by others, some of which died have even died long ago. Actual individuality is quite rare and usually expressed at a very small scale.
  - hypertele-Xii 6y ago
    How would individuality be expressed at large scale, anyhow? Funny thought.
    - ElFitz 6y ago
      By figuring and trying out new ways of being instead of seeking to conform to archetypes. By trying out new ways out of repeating situations and creating new behaviours instead of either repeating the same habits or trying to adopt someone else’s response to them. At an individual’s scale, those would be large and have big impacts. Much more so than the colour of my living room’s wall, my type of car or defining myself by wearing either shirts or T-shirts and trying to impose on everyone else what I consider to be professional or unprofessional.
goldsteinq 6y ago
> Imagine if we could connect your brain directly to a computer. Imagine if you could do things like instantly and precisely recall any Wikipedia article, any news story, any mathematical formula. Imagine if arithmetic goes from a skill you learn to a thing your brain does with 100% accuracy. You're talking about transferring information FROM computer TO brain. We have no idea how to do it. Transferring information FROM brain TO computer is achievable with modern tech (and that's what this link shows), but not vice versa.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  Yes that’s true. But I think two way communication is a goal for a lot of research and whole orders of magnitude more difficult, likely not impossible.
  - codebolt 6y ago
    But much more speculative. Just because we can imagine something doesn't mean science can/will achieve it. Brain-to-computer communication seems much more straightforward to achieve from a technical perspective, and has enough potential to revolutionize aspects of our lives on it's own.
  - greenwich26 6y ago
    Actually, and fortunately, it is impossible. This sort of brain model was preemptively debunked by Kant in Critique of Pure Reason and other works.
    - eggsmediumrare 6y ago
      I think it's pretty hard to argue that any philosophical work, regardless of how important or impactful or insightful it is, can "debunk" anything.
- sigg3 6y ago
  Transferring information TO BRAIN is sort of the raison d'être of computers. This comment FROM brain TO computer, FROM computer TO computer, FROM computer TO your brain. It's awesome.
ElFitz 6y ago
> Imagine if we could connect your brain directly to a computer. Please, no. I’d just get even more frustrated at how slow the damn thing is.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  There is so much about it that I think would be wrong, difficult, bad and we as a species can’t even imagine what it would be like. How do you install an ad blocker on an interface like that?
  - ElFitz 6y ago
    Very good question. Regarding the ad blocker, one thing I definitely can’t wait for are true AR glasses that could act as a real-life ad blocker. Being out in the street doesn’t mean I have in any way agreed to being constantly drowned in and have my attention stolen away by all this bloody noise.
- katzgrau 6y ago
  I'd argue we already connected ourselves to computers, and we're just using the safest but slowest adapters available right now.
  - ElFitz 6y ago
    We could argue on "safest", but definitely the compromise on speed, ease of use and safety that I can think of that I’m the most comfortable with
    - qayxc 6y ago
      I'm curious, what would a solution look like that's even safer than a touch interface (mouse, keyboard, screen) or voice?
      - ElFitz 6y ago
        Well, removing audio and images, leaving only text, would make it safer. I, and probably many others, wouldn’t have stumbled upon some of the things I have. They thankfully are now only blurry memories to me, even though merely evoking them still is nauseating. It would also dramatically reduce the impact of much of the bullshit content out there, since words appear to have much less emotional impact than images (and appear to be much less appealing), and thus be safer to society as a whole. A text-only interface would also be much less useful and much more annoying to use.
MetalGuru 6y ago
> Now take it a step further. Inside the simulation someone introduces Hard Seltzer. The in game year is 2021 and a player just read that some NPC somewhere had just created a brain/computer interface. He rips off his headset and goes to unplug the computer because fuck this game, all the DLC clearly ruined it. Lmao. Hard seltzer isn’t that bad
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  It’s proof we are in a simulation. What else but a random item generator could have come up with it?
  - astrange 6y ago
    Other countries had it for years. It's called alcopop in the UK and chuhai in Japan (except theirs goes up to 9%.) "Alcopop" always sounded like a fake word to me but they also insist on calling vaccines "jabs".
PartiallyTyped 6y ago
> Now take it a step further. Death isn’t death. Like the paradox of rebuilding a ship one plank at a time, your mind stops existing in your body and occupies a collection of other bodies. Douglas Hofstadter talks about this in "I am a Strange Loop" [1], but he argues that our 'soul fragments' as he calls them are a representation of ourselves in others. Depending on how large of a fragment they hold in our brain, we can perceive the world as they do, and think as the other person. They get to experience the world through us, in a sense, given that we 'allow them to'. It is an interesting idea, and helps reconcile the death of our loved ones. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/0465030793 https://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp...
phreack 6y ago
This reads like an Asimov story! He really did have some very well informed predictions that seem accurate even nowadays.
cercatrova 6y ago
> He rips off his headset and goes to unplug the computer because fuck this game, all the DLC clearly ruined it. > The most poignant scene I can think of: in 2001 A Space Odyssey, the character flies on a Pan-Am spaceship to the moon, and then goes into a phone booth to make a phone call. Interesting that you commit the same fallacy as the parent talks about: you talk about all this complexity in biotech but then assume that there's going to be a headset with a computer in order to connect to the simulation, rather than it being directly implanted into one's brain.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  I added that for a bit of color :)
jcul 6y ago
Great post, I enjoyed reading it. To take these ideas further, Permutation City, by Greg Egan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
- EarthLaunch 6y ago
  I read Permutation City recently and found it in line with what we talk about now, which is so impressive for its time (1994). From OP: > Now take it a step further: your mind is now a part of a collective globally connected network. The boundary of where “you” exist and where the rest of the world exists is erased. You can feel what other people feel. This reminded me more of a book I've read online [1]. The synopsis doesn't do it justice, but shows the concept: > All minds are networked together. Everyone collectively votes to punish or promote anyone for the slightest thought. Cater to your orbiters, and they'll vote to give you candy or slaves or even governorship of a metropolis. Challenge or defy your orbiters and ... well, good luck with that. You'll be down-voted until you die. [1] https://www.wattpad.com/story/84753330-city-of-slaves-sff-complete-ooorahs2017-1 https://www.wattpad.com/story/84753330-city-of-slaves-sff-co...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bserge 6y ago
eXistenZ (1999 film) was a mindfuck when I saw it. But yeah, I think we're getting closer and closer to a true hivemind. It would have to suppress the individual personality, otherwise a lot of people will likely go insane. Of course, it could be that's acceptable losses or they're cut off from the "advanced civilization" and left to live somewhere far from the cities. That is, of course, if half the planet isn't flooded and turned into desert by then.
- spiralx 6y ago
  Stephen Baxter's book Coalescent shows how a human hive mind could form via an set of circumstances that could be enforced or simply arise due to the environment. His "eusocial evolution" is a pretty damn creepy idea! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent
Aerroon 6y ago
>Imagine if you could do things like instantly and precisely recall any Wikipedia article, any news story, any mathematical formula. Imagine if arithmetic goes from a skill you learn to a thing your brain does with 100% accuracy. I don't think this will be that big of an advantage. I know the first 20 digits of PI off the top of my head, but if you ask me to do something with this information it will still take some time. Having to look up the first 20 digits online would probably be a small portion of that time. You can have instant access to information, but processing can still take time. I think the arithmetic part is actually more interesting. Being able to look at a table of numbers and running a statistical analysis on it would be very useful. At the same time though, I think all of this is way harder than we think. Look at programming via voice. The current best UI for it is still pretty lackluster.
- k_ 6y ago
  > You can have instant access to information, but processing can still take time. You likely have processing power in your pocket. With efficient brain-to-computer and computer-to-brain interfaces, the processing part could be taken care of too; just externalized. We would probably end up being a lot _worse_ at things like arithmetic though, since we'd use external processing for even more things (I do believe we're already loosing in things like memory and simple processing by having access to a smartphone at all times).
prossercj 6y ago
> Now take it a step further: your mind is now a part of a collective globally connected network. I think you just described the Borg from Star Trek

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> Now take it a step further. People want to get away from this hive mind concept. Why would they? All the preceding paragraphs sound like Borg collective, but hey, if it's voluntary, it actually doesn't sound bad. As long as we can keep adtech away.

bserge 6y ago
Yeah... if it's voluntary. Working is voluntary. Sure, you want to move to a farm far away from all the madness or you want to sit in a workshop designing robots all day, but you need money, so you "volunteer" to work some job you barely tolerate in or near a city for all of your best years. The ads are just constant slaps in the face.

Elof 6y ago

You should check out the Nexus series :)

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Or watch Forbidden Planet - "Monsters from the Id"

blisterpeanuts 6y ago

The notion of a neurally connected Facebook or Google scares the heck out of me. Apart from the countless petabytes of data they would collect, just imagine a world where the powers that be can actually tap into your thoughts, perhaps even implant ideas that they think you should have. At a certain point, we lose our individuality and become subsumed by the global AI, game over. But before that distant dystopian point is reached, I do hope we develop ways for paralyzed people to regain sensory control and live normal lives.

badjeans 6y ago
What's so dsytopian about that?
ElFitz 6y ago
> At a certain point, we lose our individuality and become subsumed by the global AI, game over. In a way, we already have. Each and every one of us is constantly influenced by and influencing untold numbers of people, and most beliefs and knowledge are more or less "standardised". Most people follow the school -> (college ->) 9 to 5 -> retire consensus, and even those who believe themselves to be outliers actually behave how outliers are expected to behave, all of us furthering the goals set by others, some of which died have even died long ago. Actual individuality is quite rare and usually expressed at a very small scale.
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  How would individuality be expressed at large scale, anyhow? Funny thought.
  - ElFitz 6y ago
    By figuring and trying out new ways of being instead of seeking to conform to archetypes. By trying out new ways out of repeating situations and creating new behaviours instead of either repeating the same habits or trying to adopt someone else’s response to them. At an individual’s scale, those would be large and have big impacts. Much more so than the colour of my living room’s wall, my type of car or defining myself by wearing either shirts or T-shirts and trying to impose on everyone else what I consider to be professional or unprofessional.

goldsteinq 6y ago

> Imagine if we could connect your brain directly to a computer. Imagine if you could do things like instantly and precisely recall any Wikipedia article, any news story, any mathematical formula. Imagine if arithmetic goes from a skill you learn to a thing your brain does with 100% accuracy. You're talking about transferring information FROM computer TO brain. We have no idea how to do it. Transferring information FROM brain TO computer is achievable with modern tech (and that's what this link shows), but not vice versa.

IgorPartola 6y ago
Yes that’s true. But I think two way communication is a goal for a lot of research and whole orders of magnitude more difficult, likely not impossible.
- codebolt 6y ago
  But much more speculative. Just because we can imagine something doesn't mean science can/will achieve it. Brain-to-computer communication seems much more straightforward to achieve from a technical perspective, and has enough potential to revolutionize aspects of our lives on it's own.
- greenwich26 6y ago
  Actually, and fortunately, it is impossible. This sort of brain model was preemptively debunked by Kant in Critique of Pure Reason and other works.
  - eggsmediumrare 6y ago
    I think it's pretty hard to argue that any philosophical work, regardless of how important or impactful or insightful it is, can "debunk" anything.
sigg3 6y ago
Transferring information TO BRAIN is sort of the raison d'être of computers. This comment FROM brain TO computer, FROM computer TO computer, FROM computer TO your brain. It's awesome.

ElFitz 6y ago

> Imagine if we could connect your brain directly to a computer. Please, no. I’d just get even more frustrated at how slow the damn thing is.

IgorPartola 6y ago
There is so much about it that I think would be wrong, difficult, bad and we as a species can’t even imagine what it would be like. How do you install an ad blocker on an interface like that?
- ElFitz 6y ago
  Very good question. Regarding the ad blocker, one thing I definitely can’t wait for are true AR glasses that could act as a real-life ad blocker. Being out in the street doesn’t mean I have in any way agreed to being constantly drowned in and have my attention stolen away by all this bloody noise.
katzgrau 6y ago
I'd argue we already connected ourselves to computers, and we're just using the safest but slowest adapters available right now.
- ElFitz 6y ago
  We could argue on "safest", but definitely the compromise on speed, ease of use and safety that I can think of that I’m the most comfortable with
  - qayxc 6y ago
    I'm curious, what would a solution look like that's even safer than a touch interface (mouse, keyboard, screen) or voice?
    - ElFitz 6y ago
      Well, removing audio and images, leaving only text, would make it safer. I, and probably many others, wouldn’t have stumbled upon some of the things I have. They thankfully are now only blurry memories to me, even though merely evoking them still is nauseating. It would also dramatically reduce the impact of much of the bullshit content out there, since words appear to have much less emotional impact than images (and appear to be much less appealing), and thus be safer to society as a whole. A text-only interface would also be much less useful and much more annoying to use.

MetalGuru 6y ago

> Now take it a step further. Inside the simulation someone introduces Hard Seltzer. The in game year is 2021 and a player just read that some NPC somewhere had just created a brain/computer interface. He rips off his headset and goes to unplug the computer because fuck this game, all the DLC clearly ruined it. Lmao. Hard seltzer isn’t that bad

IgorPartola 6y ago
It’s proof we are in a simulation. What else but a random item generator could have come up with it?
- astrange 6y ago
  Other countries had it for years. It's called alcopop in the UK and chuhai in Japan (except theirs goes up to 9%.) "Alcopop" always sounded like a fake word to me but they also insist on calling vaccines "jabs".

PartiallyTyped 6y ago

> Now take it a step further. Death isn’t death. Like the paradox of rebuilding a ship one plank at a time, your mind stops existing in your body and occupies a collection of other bodies. Douglas Hofstadter talks about this in "I am a Strange Loop" [1], but he argues that our 'soul fragments' as he calls them are a representation of ourselves in others. Depending on how large of a fragment they hold in our brain, we can perceive the world as they do, and think as the other person. They get to experience the world through us, in a sense, given that we 'allow them to'. It is an interesting idea, and helps reconcile the death of our loved ones. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/0465030793 https://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp...

phreack 6y ago

This reads like an Asimov story! He really did have some very well informed predictions that seem accurate even nowadays.

cercatrova 6y ago

> He rips off his headset and goes to unplug the computer because fuck this game, all the DLC clearly ruined it. > The most poignant scene I can think of: in 2001 A Space Odyssey, the character flies on a Pan-Am spaceship to the moon, and then goes into a phone booth to make a phone call. Interesting that you commit the same fallacy as the parent talks about: you talk about all this complexity in biotech but then assume that there's going to be a headset with a computer in order to connect to the simulation, rather than it being directly implanted into one's brain.

IgorPartola 6y ago
I added that for a bit of color :)

jcul 6y ago

Great post, I enjoyed reading it. To take these ideas further, Permutation City, by Greg Egan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

EarthLaunch 6y ago
I read Permutation City recently and found it in line with what we talk about now, which is so impressive for its time (1994). From OP: > Now take it a step further: your mind is now a part of a collective globally connected network. The boundary of where “you” exist and where the rest of the world exists is erased. You can feel what other people feel. This reminded me more of a book I've read online [1]. The synopsis doesn't do it justice, but shows the concept: > All minds are networked together. Everyone collectively votes to punish or promote anyone for the slightest thought. Cater to your orbiters, and they'll vote to give you candy or slaves or even governorship of a metropolis. Challenge or defy your orbiters and ... well, good luck with that. You'll be down-voted until you die. [1] https://www.wattpad.com/story/84753330-city-of-slaves-sff-complete-ooorahs2017-1 https://www.wattpad.com/story/84753330-city-of-slaves-sff-co...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bserge 6y ago

eXistenZ (1999 film) was a mindfuck when I saw it. But yeah, I think we're getting closer and closer to a true hivemind. It would have to suppress the individual personality, otherwise a lot of people will likely go insane. Of course, it could be that's acceptable losses or they're cut off from the "advanced civilization" and left to live somewhere far from the cities. That is, of course, if half the planet isn't flooded and turned into desert by then.

spiralx 6y ago
Stephen Baxter's book Coalescent shows how a human hive mind could form via an set of circumstances that could be enforced or simply arise due to the environment. His "eusocial evolution" is a pretty damn creepy idea! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent

Aerroon 6y ago

>Imagine if you could do things like instantly and precisely recall any Wikipedia article, any news story, any mathematical formula. Imagine if arithmetic goes from a skill you learn to a thing your brain does with 100% accuracy. I don't think this will be that big of an advantage. I know the first 20 digits of PI off the top of my head, but if you ask me to do something with this information it will still take some time. Having to look up the first 20 digits online would probably be a small portion of that time. You can have instant access to information, but processing can still take time. I think the arithmetic part is actually more interesting. Being able to look at a table of numbers and running a statistical analysis on it would be very useful. At the same time though, I think all of this is way harder than we think. Look at programming via voice. The current best UI for it is still pretty lackluster.

k_ 6y ago
> You can have instant access to information, but processing can still take time. You likely have processing power in your pocket. With efficient brain-to-computer and computer-to-brain interfaces, the processing part could be taken care of too; just externalized. We would probably end up being a lot _worse_ at things like arithmetic though, since we'd use external processing for even more things (I do believe we're already loosing in things like memory and simple processing by having access to a smartphone at all times).

prossercj 6y ago

> Now take it a step further: your mind is now a part of a collective globally connected network. I think you just described the Borg from Star Trek