4 ms·

imagine being able to talk to GPT-3 in your brain. It would make you superintelligent although without being completely sure that anything it said to you was ac

imagine being able to talk to GPT-3 in your brain. It would make you superintelligent although without being completely sure that anything it said to you was actually true.

caddemon 6y ago
Obviously this isn't going to happen, but imagining it from a scifi perspective - honestly that sounds kind of horrifying to me? This is a step further, but say we could interface directly with auditory areas to have access to a massive internal library of different sounds. You could play songs on demand, verbatim recall anything that was said to you in the past, etc. Sounds pretty dope at first, but this kind of thing would likely be developed before future researchers fully understand the entire human brain. So that means they would not really understand how the brain would interface with it, especially across long time scales and a heterogeneous population. Forget any sort of malicious action, and still God only knows the potential side effects. It could massively fuck with ability to learn over time, cause terrible rumination issues, maybe it could trigger psychosis in high risk individuals, maybe it would fuck up your dreams. Like seriously, for anybody that is trying to cut back phone usage, just imagine if you could check your feed purely by thinking about it. How freaking hard would it be to control yourself then? And that is an obvious immediate consequence type thing, not a deep consideration of potential problems. Anyway, this mostly reminded me of that Black Mirror episode about the parent watching the kid via a brain implant, which I thought was too heavy handed. There are a ton of ways brain implants could be scary without using the super obvious surveillance angle. Honestly just the "blurring out of bad things" feature would have made for a cooler episode IMO.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Like seriously, for anybody that is trying to cut back phone usage, just imagine if you could check your feed purely by thinking about it. How freaking hard would it be to control yourself then? And that is an obvious immediate consequence type thing, not a deep consideration of potential problems. We'd definitely have to regulate the shit out of tech then. Going to example of phones - the root problem there isn't that phones are addictive, it's that every aspect of them is controlled by commercial interests that benefit from making them addictive and user-hostile. If we were to create BCI the way smartphones where - where the Googles and Apples of BCI will release a consumption-oriented platform you don't own ("because security!"), that serves primarily to access the Facebooks and Twitters of BCI, in the way the platforms tell you to (again, "because security!") - then it's game over for humanity. If, however, we allow control over devices and their operations to be held by the user (to the extent it's unprecedented in this industry), and regulate social media like tobacco, alcohol and gambling, then we can reduce this problem to something comparable with alcoholism. Not ideal, but much closer to optimally balancing individual freedom with preventing fully predictable individual failure modes.
  - caddemon 6y ago
    Cigarettes used to be a huge problem too, the regulation came after more people started to realize what was going on. Hopefully some regulation of social media companies is coming soon.
- throwaways885 6y ago
  Bi-directional interfaces are not necessary for BCI to be useful - I would pay good money for a digital copy of my memories. Just think about how that could be used to treat patients with Alzheimer's if they had a library of memories on-demand.
  - dwighttk 6y ago
    If it isn’t bi-directional what good is taking a copy of your memories out? Are you envisioning playback on a computer screen?
extropy 6y ago
Haha, reminds me of the Intelligence Dampening Sphere https://theportalwiki.com/wiki/Wheatley https://theportalwiki.com/wiki/Wheatley
fourthark 6y ago
The ultimate bullshitter.
dwighttk 6y ago
Gross

imagine being able to talk to GPT-3 in your brain. It would make you superintelligent although without being completely sure that anything it said to you was actually true.

caddemon 6y ago

Obviously this isn't going to happen, but imagining it from a scifi perspective - honestly that sounds kind of horrifying to me? This is a step further, but say we could interface directly with auditory areas to have access to a massive internal library of different sounds. You could play songs on demand, verbatim recall anything that was said to you in the past, etc. Sounds pretty dope at first, but this kind of thing would likely be developed before future researchers fully understand the entire human brain. So that means they would not really understand how the brain would interface with it, especially across long time scales and a heterogeneous population. Forget any sort of malicious action, and still God only knows the potential side effects. It could massively fuck with ability to learn over time, cause terrible rumination issues, maybe it could trigger psychosis in high risk individuals, maybe it would fuck up your dreams. Like seriously, for anybody that is trying to cut back phone usage, just imagine if you could check your feed purely by thinking about it. How freaking hard would it be to control yourself then? And that is an obvious immediate consequence type thing, not a deep consideration of potential problems. Anyway, this mostly reminded me of that Black Mirror episode about the parent watching the kid via a brain implant, which I thought was too heavy handed. There are a ton of ways brain implants could be scary without using the super obvious surveillance angle. Honestly just the "blurring out of bad things" feature would have made for a cooler episode IMO.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Like seriously, for anybody that is trying to cut back phone usage, just imagine if you could check your feed purely by thinking about it. How freaking hard would it be to control yourself then? And that is an obvious immediate consequence type thing, not a deep consideration of potential problems. We'd definitely have to regulate the shit out of tech then. Going to example of phones - the root problem there isn't that phones are addictive, it's that every aspect of them is controlled by commercial interests that benefit from making them addictive and user-hostile. If we were to create BCI the way smartphones where - where the Googles and Apples of BCI will release a consumption-oriented platform you don't own ("because security!"), that serves primarily to access the Facebooks and Twitters of BCI, in the way the platforms tell you to (again, "because security!") - then it's game over for humanity. If, however, we allow control over devices and their operations to be held by the user (to the extent it's unprecedented in this industry), and regulate social media like tobacco, alcohol and gambling, then we can reduce this problem to something comparable with alcoholism. Not ideal, but much closer to optimally balancing individual freedom with preventing fully predictable individual failure modes.
- caddemon 6y ago
  Cigarettes used to be a huge problem too, the regulation came after more people started to realize what was going on. Hopefully some regulation of social media companies is coming soon.
throwaways885 6y ago
Bi-directional interfaces are not necessary for BCI to be useful - I would pay good money for a digital copy of my memories. Just think about how that could be used to treat patients with Alzheimer's if they had a library of memories on-demand.
- dwighttk 6y ago
  If it isn’t bi-directional what good is taking a copy of your memories out? Are you envisioning playback on a computer screen?

extropy 6y ago

Haha, reminds me of the Intelligence Dampening Sphere https://theportalwiki.com/wiki/Wheatley https://theportalwiki.com/wiki/Wheatley

fourthark 6y ago

The ultimate bullshitter.

dwighttk 6y ago

Gross