Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 290 posts

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

#201

Post by ExactoKnight »

hprotagonist wrote: post #112
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. OTOH, if something does come out of this, it could have extremely far-reaching consequences. Forget interfacing with AI. Think - locked-in syndrome, or people with various disabilities (blindness, etc). This is the kind of moonshot that ought to be encouraged.

I worked on some locked-in stuff. There was recently a bit of a furor when a researcher snuck off to venezuela and had an electrode array implanted in his own brain: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/543246/to-study-the-brain... . It, um. didn't go over well in the research community. We had tried external BCI for locked-in patients based on visually evoked potentials -- thought being that even if you lose the abili…

How did it not go over well?! When you hear other researchers attack the work this guy is doing, you begin to suspect more of them are politicians looking to protect their own grants than actual scientists looking to make bold advancements themselves.

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

#202

Post by ExactoKnight »

cing wrote: post #30

There'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)

I saw a professor demolish one of these devices by simply instructing his students using it to "think" without moving their eyes or eyebrows. At that point the device stopped working, because not surprisingly the action potential in our faces muscle movements far exceed anything the brain produces in terms of EEG signals when measured from our skin.

Trying to read brain signals from a skin-based EEG device is like trying to listen in on a conversation being had inside a packed sports stadium while you fly over it in a helicopter.

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

#203

Post by ExactoKnight »

pippy wrote: post #62
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #5

I 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 k…

Sadly it's a quirk of human nature that we get more defensive over our things when work gets tough. It tends to push us to more neoliberal policies. If work gets hard to find; Gen Z and the baby boomer generation would rather keep millennials renting, as opposed to massive social spending. Unless there's a massive shift towards the left we'll only see widening inequality due to the insurgence of AI on the job market.…

Yeah it's not like Ben Sanders almost beat Hillary Clinton, and did better with millennials than she did...

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

#205

Post by erkkie »

fsloth wrote: post #160
erkkie wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is/was going to be used for control since the start of times, what's the alternative?

Legislation that protects citizen from abuses of power. There are governing bodies that actually do this

Lemme know when legislation catches up with state of art technology.

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

#206

Post by tremon »

bpizzi wrote: post #188
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #124

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…

Looks like the vast majority of people calling themselves 'hackers' are digusted at the idea of merely hacking their brain. Shouldn't that be one of our main goal in life, as 'hackers'?

Hackers are intimately familiar with the fallibity of technology. If hackers shun something, maybe it's because they have reason to.

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

#207

Post by Tosh108 »

donlzx wrote: post #114
RangerScience wrote: post #106

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".

I don't think there's a big difference from what we do now. Right now we use our hands or speech combined with phone/glasses/watches/computer as tools to communicate with the internet/information. This technology would just cut out the middleman. It would create a lot of interesting opportunities and combined with VR would create extraordinary worlds.

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

#208

Post by mdahlstrand »

mattkrause wrote: post #132
mdahlstrand wrote: post #113

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…

Thanks for your answer! I'm afraid I'm not a fabricator of platinum electrodes... I hope you find someone who is!

I'm thinking about the immune response from the brain, and whether implementing this array of sensors can be done elsewhere than the actual brain, connecting to nerves instead of neurons, essentially creating a virtual limb. I guess it kind of misses the point of this whole thing, and can't reach as far as brain-implementations, but with the advantage of being more feasible as a solution. I think what I'm getting at is whether we need lots and lots of sensors with very high resolution data, or if we instead can ensure the computer interface is consistent enough that a "muscle memory" can be formed for controlling the virtual limb. I guess I don't have a question really haha, thanks for your time and replies!

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

#209

Post by Tepix »

blazespin wrote: post #136
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #124

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.

According to Kurzweil (and I don't see anything wrong in his logic), improvements due to genetic selection will pale in comparison to exponentially growing intelligence that's outside our biologic brains (but may be interconnected).

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

#210

Post by JumpCrisscross »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #124

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…

> How is this not an obvious eventuality for everyone here?

I remember immersing myself in the Guggenheim's exhibition of Italian Futurism, 1909-1944 [1]. It was a rich display of the future course of humanity, per Italy's interwar and war-era fascists. F.T. Marinetti's Electric War: a Futurist Visionary Hypothesis [2], which I read in the Guggenheim's upstairs reading area, comes to mind:

"Up there, in their monoplanes, using cordless phones, they control the breathtaking speed of the seed trains which, two or three times a year, cross the plains for a frenetic sowing. ––Each wagon has a huge iron arm on its roof which swings horizontally, spreading the fertile seeds everywhere."

I remember the Aeropittura paintings, putting the fascists' obsession with planes front and centre [3] [4].

What still stands out is how certain they were in their airplane-based civilization and "abnormal growth of plants, as a direct result of artificial, high-voltage electric power" [2] future. Spending a few hours in that reading room, I could suspend disbelief and start convincing myself that this future was not only possible, it was inevitable.

They were wrong. Linear extrapolations are a good starting point. They're bad for long-term predictions. Don't put too much faith in what you think is obvious in the long run.

[1] http://exhibitions.guggenheim.org/futurism/

[2] https://books.google.no/books?id=c-B9EJGYbAMC&pg=PT210&lpg=P...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeropittura

[4] https://www.pinterest.com/salvador_vico/aeropittura/

Post reply on HN