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

This is an interesting story, especially considering the new Ghost in The Shell movie is coming out this week. It really makes me think that something like this might be possible. As we've discussed here before, technology moves really, really quickly and things that we never thought of 20 years ago are pretty common now. Even full on auto-drive cars are on the horizon in a very realistic way. Sure, we thought it would probably happen at some point but we are now within a couple of years of actually being able to purchase such a thing. And we all have pretty powerful supercomputers in our pockets. Is brain augmentation that weird.

Also, I've been thinking that we will need a new interface for our cell phones. The screens can't get much bigger without being uncomfortable, yet we need to interact with them more and more. I was thinking that a contact lens display would probably be within reach soon but maybe we'll just skip the physical stuff and go directly to injecting signals into the brain stem.

The problem with personal perspective is its inherently myopic...

What Nassim describes can be considered a luxury event similar to going to a Renaissance fair to some. Your daily life is far more amazing than it was even 20 years ago. Here is my day:

wake up to the sound of an alarm synchronized to a global satellite network with ~100 nanoseconds of GMT. turn on a light source powered by nuclear energy produced hundreds of miles away. put on clothing made of synthetic fibers that keep me warm and dry on a winter morning. heat up a food source, processed and irradiated of bacteria, enriched with extra nutrients and vitamins, using microwave energy. sit in front of a bank of liquid crystal displays showing 18+ million colors at 4k resolution. Read 20 different news articles from around the world while drinking my coffee, which was shipped and processed in a global trade market. made using water that was pumped to my house, going through ~10 different filters to remove toxins. Now that I'm done with my coffee I'm preparing for a weekly HD video conference with 20+ people around the world to discuss new technologies we have to prepare the network infrastructure for. I'll then spend time analyzing TeraBytes of data stored in a cloud database that is updated in realtime. The meeting was about how that dataset will be PetaBytes by next year and ExaBytes soon after.

If predicting the future 200 years from now is arrogance, then saying nothing has changed is hubris. We are still trying to convince some people that evolution is real. That makes it hard to even consider the idea that we can predict the path evolution and technology will take.

prediction and evolution rely on one thing, probability. Someone else in this thread brought up the Fermi paradox, the ultimate 50/50 split. After accepting that, you are either an optimist or a pessimist. A pessimist will never accept odds better than 50/50 cause failure happens. So be it.

The probability that your, or ANY individual's, prediction of successful technological evolution is very low. If you are an optimist though, the probability of SOMEONE's vision of the future out of EVERYONE's ideas being a winner is near 100%. THAT is the power of survival of the fittest. THAT is why trans-humanists call this inevitable. We are optimistic of our chances. But we have to be open to new perspectives and adapt.

I will embrace these technologies when they are available to me. I will even attempt to contribute.

But I will also still enjoy drinking from Phoenician meal technology with friends. And paddling across a lake in a native American river craft. And chopping wood for a campfire in the forest. I like camping during my vacation. My daily life will continue advancing forward. You don't have to forget the past to live in the future.

That's not substantially better then "easier" technology - i.e. something non-invasive but advanced, like contact lenses with a lightfield display and wireless power.

But if you're going to be interfacing with the brain, then there's a lot we can do probabilistically - i.e. deliberately inducing different parts of the memory centers of the brain to promote recall, targeted to the patterns of activation at previous times.

Modifying the production of neurotransmitters or being able to deliberately dampen some would also lead to some interesting possibilities.

> we only use it for serial input.

Consciously. Unconsciously, your mind is always looking for threats - big movements - in the periphery of your view. It's a co-processor which runs through a lot of data in order to direct your conscious mind.

> Perhaps it would require too much energy

I think that the problem of energy could be overcome. I think that instead of getting too hot, it would simply produce too much waste, and since the waste evacuation system for your brain only really operates when you sleep (at least, last I heard), this would be the main limiting factor.

Immortality doesn't exist in nature for any complex organism. Geneticists can prevent certain diseases caused by a small number of genes but that doesn't enhance human capabilities beyond the current baseline. AGI researchers might eventually succeed in understanding the human mind well enough to build an equivalent machine but there's no evidence to suggest that such a device will be smarter (or more rational or less insane) than humans. For all we know, current humans could represent the maximum intelligence possible due to undiscovered fundamental physical limits. A human level AGI would still be a huge step forward but it won't bring about a Singularity (geek rapture) as the transhumanists seem to expect.

All of these are far from being engineering problems yet. We're still solidly in the basic science phase.