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Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

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Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#141
post #114

BAM - 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.

This 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".

Only 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.

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#142

The [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

Surprised you didn't mention the Westworld series which is related to AI and virtual reality and ironically Musk's ex-wife plays a minor character in it.

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#143

Everyone 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 c…

More realistically I think will be genetically selecting super smart babies. Most likely this is already being done today. As it proves to be effective people will get better and better at it until we start genetically selecting and even engineering superminds.

These ideas aren't mutually exclusive.

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#144

Musk 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 aro…

Imagine 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?

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#145
post #114

BAM - 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.

This 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".

> Do we really want to create monster human species.

1. Many humans today are already "monsters" compared to what was considered normal a few hundred years ago. You could spin a simple hip replacement or bone marrow transfer as "Frankenstein-ian" if you wanted to.

2. If AI becomes vastly more intelligent than non-"monsterified" humans, then the question may become: "Do you really want the human race to be enslaved / extinct instead of creating a monster human species?"

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#146

Musk 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 aro…

I think you're saying a few different things. But I do agree with your very first statement about bandwidth vs intelligence. As a matter of fact, intelligence itself is not nearly the limiting factor of human societies. If one cannot control the influence of what has accumulated in one's consciousness from the past they cannot see anything as it really is. People hear what they want to hear. Even given the constant firehose of truth that we are being sent through everything that exists around us, people remain blind through the simple fact that they don't want to know.

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in the subject and appreciated your post, thanks. A couple of questions: How does the brain adapt to having the electrodes in there, how long before the probes are accepted as being "part of" the brain? Do you envision we need lots more sensors than in your example above, or is said number enough for precision input (say, text/words, or navigation in a 3 dimensional position & rotation plus a temporal…

It depends! For most electrodes, the brain doesn't really incorporate the implant. When a single electrode is inserted, you can start recording as soon as the contacts are inside the brain (in practice, you wait a few minutes since the brain is slightly elastic and stuff moves around). In humans, this is how deep brain stimulation is done--the surgeons use the neural activity to figure out when the electrode is in th…

Assuming that the 1 GB/min figure is because you're saving broadband (back of the envelope math assuming you have two Utah arrays with 32 bits/sample at 30 kHz), you can get enormous space savings with compression. Field potentials are highly correlated across channels, as you no doubt know. Depending on your amplifier you may be able to pack everything into 16 bits/sample too.

Re: Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI

#150

Everyone 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 c…

Predictions 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".

Well 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.

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