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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

#271
post #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?

Your model of cognition is off. When you are thinking about an orange, you don't have an actual orange-like terabyte structure appear in your brain. You think about individual body reactions you might have to an orange, or you think about specific things you could do with an orange. Which slivers of orangeness appear is highly context dependent.

The fact that you have control over your attention... you can direct it to arbitrary things you could do or feel with an orange... that gives you the subjective impression of seeing the whole thing all at once, but that's just a lie your brain tells you. You only actually experience tiny vignettes.

You imagine your experience of "orange" is this massive huge bandwidth cognitive experience, but you only really need a handful of neurons to maintain a weak signal signifying orange.

A crude drawing of an orange in an app can trigger exactly those same neurons. As long as your mind is busy with other things, you won't even notice the difference. This is why novels work. And it's why comics work. "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud does a great job of showing how abstract representations of things can provide richer experiences than realistic ones.

Of course, if you direct your attention to the differences between the crude drawing and a "real" orange, you can interrogate those differences. But the fact that you can explore a rich representation of an orange in your brain doesn't mean that you do when you experience one in daily use.

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

#272

An efficient brain-computer interface would require a good understanding of the inner-workings of the brain. So any effort in building such interface would motivate neurobiological research to get such understanding. I personally believe that once we have an accurate model of the brain, that is one that explains how thoughts, memory, emotions, consciousness and so on arise from brain activity, we're literally done. O…

The thing that gets me about this is that we all think that the brain is an understandable object in the end. This may not be the case at all. There are things that we have in our world that are going to stay fundamentally mysterious. Strictly, they will always have 'edge cases' that are logically considered to be paradoxes, yet exist all the same (Godel's Incompleteness Theorem). These things are Hurricanes, where we will only ever really be able to give probabilities of paths or the stock market, where if you canfigure it out you'll have killed the whole thing.

Most importantly, the idea that we can understand the human brain and then manipulate it must be false from our everyday experience. Simply put, if we can understand our brains, then we can understand women, something we all know to be forever impossible.

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

#273

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…

Life wasn't that different in 1917, 1817 or even year 17. I started writing a reply but realized Nassim Taleb does a better job at explaining this than I could. Here's an excerpt from The Future will no be cool http://www.salon.com/2012/12/01/nassim_nicholas_taleb_the_fu... I am not saying that new technologies will not emerge — something new will rule its day, for a while. What is currently fragile will be replaced…

Except that's a bullshit analogy.

Restaurant's are are completely different today than they were even 10 years ago - from the POS to the bluetooth tracking, menu printing (or maybe even e-menu on an ipad like in airports), logistics for raw food delivery, availability of food, cost, sous vide in the kitchen...I can go on.

Shoes are completely different - again, the cost, supply chain differences so you can get exotic materials, who and how made them.

Sliverware metallurgy is totally different, availability is totally different.

Point is, it is a totally myopic argument that misses what 99% of innovation is about.

It's like saying - hey we still use fire, and eat with our original teeth and see with our original eyes, so I guess pretty much everything is like it was 2Million years ago.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many potential future outcomes, and it's reasonable to think about them and to try to mitigate certain possibilities. Let me rephrase then: If you evaluate the written history of humanity, there is the unavoidable trend that humans will create tools which replicate and obviate human actions in a more optimized manner. Stone Tool > Controlled Fire > Shelter > etc... to the point that the ultimate boundaries…

There are people like you trying to cure cancer, too, and trying to make money on Wall Street, trying to solve outstanding problems in physics, trying to make it to Mars, solve global warming, win wars, and so on. The trend you identify is that there will be a breakthrough and everything will change, but we have no way of knowing what it will be. When it comes, it might make your field irrelevant. Arguing that the br…

Right, and if you look at all of those problems, they have one thing in common: They are progressing the fastest in places where they are applying machine learning. Literally, I mean really they are.

If you solve AGI you solve all of those problems. That's the whole point here. It's not a standalone technology it's really something that changes every industry.

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

#275

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…

I post this periodically, but I think this is the most compelling and intuitive vision of the future I've heard (and simultaneously a solution to the Fermi Paradox): http://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.html Read the full original paper, summaries fall short. But briefly, due to always finding use for more power/computation, primary gains coming from increasing density, and the speed of light limit…

Yes I remember coming across this in the late 90s on one of the USENET alt-compsci groups or something like it.

I find the idea of black-hole as hypercomputing environment interesting for sure.

edit: I am thinking of something different that I read in the 90's that was similar. I will have to look at this more in depth as it is different.

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

#276
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that humans are quite easy to hack although perhaps not in the way you were thinking. Our perceptions are quite easily and reliably hacked even when we know it is happening, as demonstrated by the success of stage magic and optical illusions[1]. At one point, there was a great deal of fear that companies and adversaries could influence large groups of people with subliminal messages[2]. Although the eff…

Optical illusions are neat, but I don't think it rises to the level of a "hack" in the sense that anyone is talking about here. Subliminal stimuli is, as the massive warnings on the article suggest, utterly unproven. There is a difference between being swayed or marketed to, or just too lazy to disengage from the onslaught of marketing... and "hacking". If hacking humans worked, the marketing wouldn't be necessary in…

Although some of my analogies were a stretch, I think it might be valuable to regard these types of manipulation as hacking. If nothing else, to make us aware of our own susceptibilty to con artists, fake news and government influence. The reason these techniques are effective are very similar to the reasons hacking methods of computers are effective; they take advantage of systems that evolved or were built for one purpose in order to use them for another, often to the detriment of the victim.

For example, the existence of optical illusions and stage magic are a necessary consequence of particular limitations of our visual system and attention. One could predict the existence of new, never before seen optical illusions purely from knowledge of the way the brain processes visual stimuli. For more information on this, see the works of Roger Shepard[1][2] who did a lot of research into the psychology of perception and mental representations.

This has ramifications for not just human psychology but artificial intelligence. If we want to build a computer system or robot that can process visual information quickly like humans and animals do, then we may very well have to program them with the same simplifying assumptions that humans and animals use to make rapid visual processing tractable[3][4]. A consequence of this may be that these computer systems will be subject to the same optical illusions as humans as a necessary consequence of limited attention and computational resources. Furthermore, the misperceptions that make stage magic possible may be possible to induce in any system that can only pay attention to a subset of the visual stimuli given and that must make assumptions about the intentions of the subject being viewed. These assumptions and inferences are usually accurate under ordinary circumstances when the subject is not trying to deceive the observer, but a clever subject could engineer circumstances where the observer has no choice but to be either deceived or accept that their perceptions have no logical explanation -- hence the woman appears to be sawed in half even though we know this is unlikely; there is no visual information to disprove that she was (the lack of blood is evidence that she wasn't sawed in half but this is only evidence from our past experience with people being cut by blades).

We are susceptible to influence by fake news and celebrity product endorsement due to our evolved preference for information coming from "authority figures" and sources that agree with our existing views[5]. Now, normally one may hesitate to call exploiting these systems "hacking" because the exploiter often doesn't know that that is what they are doing just as someone may stumble upon a new computer exploit without knowing exactly why it works.

Again, I would argue that it may be to our advantage to think of the targeted exploitation of these innate tendencies as a type of "hacking" if only to make it more likely that we can avoid being influenced to beliefs and behaviors that may not be in our long term best interest.

[1] - http://im-possible.info/english/art/classic/shepard.html

[2] - http://rumelhartprize.org/?page_id=110

[3] - http://ilab.usc.edu/publications/doc/Miau_etal01spie.pdf

[4] - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370202...

[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authority_bias - see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

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

#277
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine he can get away with a certain amount of name recognition w/o running the day to day of the company himself.

From the WSJ article: > Mr. Musk has taken an active role setting up the California-based company and may play a significant leadership role, according to people briefed on Neuralink’s plans, a bold step for a father of five who already runs two technologically complex businesses.

may

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

#278
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100 years ago was still an extension of the industrial revolution, where solutions were designed for the masses: mass media, mass education, mass production... there were mass produced standardized solutions that you had to adapt to. The information age or post-industrial society we live in today an inverse process: a process of decentralization and customization, where consumers want personalized solutions rather th…

The world is far from post-industrial. Industry has just self-organised into clusters that have little overlap with the industrial clusters of old.

Post-industrial society is when services have a more important role in the economy than manufacturing. Doesn't mean manufacturing doesn't exist.

Now, the world isn't uniform with respect to progress. There are still pre-industrial societies where most jobs are concentrated around agriculture, and industrial societies where all jobs concentrate in manufacturing.

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

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. Brain stem, reptile brain, mammal brain, primate brain, neocortex, cybercortex. Half my mind is already in cyberspace, why not make it half my brain, too? Edit: Dystopias don't come from technologies, they come from people being shitty.

I am fine with using computers, mobile devices, VR/AR, etc. as long as I have the ability to disconnect and walk away, fix or replace. What happens with the equivalent of drive-by ransomware on your brain? Send bitcoin to this address or we permanently give you a migraine?

Make the part that can interact with the outside world removable. Only keep the mesh and the external connection, which could (maybe?) be stateless, since (maybe) it would just be all the mesh connection points. Nothing to "hack" (without physical access), nothing to persist the hack.

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

#280

Elon Musk's "bold" ventures are the only things that excite me. Meaning, whenever I hear of a supposed "big idea" that's right around the corner (cough, cough - Magic Leap), I basically dismiss it. Except when it has to do with Elon Musk. He is the first to admit that his plans will probably fail, but he actually has an incredible track record over 10+ years.

Same here. I'm sceptical about most of the "big ideas" - most of them are marketing bullshit. Doubly so when it's a startup - the goal usually is to bullshit people so that they come on board and enable the founders to have their exit. But Elon Musk I trust. He's shown time and again that he honestly wants to realize those ideas, and not pursue them for the money. He also has a pretty good track record there. I'm hop…

Yeah, unfortunately, people like Elon Musk are, in my highly imprecise estimation, 1 in a billion. Here's the sad part about this statistic: That means we should have 7 Elons alive today, but only 1 has bloomed into full potential.

The rest, we will never know about due to them being born into repressed governments, and/or extreme poverty.

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