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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

#281

Post by Animats »

littledouglas wrote: post #222
Animats wrote: post #138

That guy needs to finish his itasks for 2017 first. - Tesla Model 3 production line (First deliveries late 2017. He said he was going to live at the factory to get the cars out the door.) - Brownsville TX launch facility (first launch scheduled for 2018, not much construction started yet) - Manned Dragon spacecraft (as of 2015, first crewed launch scheduled for late 2017) - Falcon Heavy (as of Q3 2016, supposed to la…

You should read Edison's biography. You'd understand Musk much more.

Edison didn't try to run the businesses he spun off. He licensed patents and collected royalties, and had equity in the manufacturing businesses. But he didn't try to run General Electric.

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

#282

Post by komali2 »

taneq wrote: post #105
komali2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should be so lucky he's not purely profit-driven. Even on /r/futurology, supposedly a place of boundless imagination and hope for the future, I get attacked for suggesting that maybe it's not a bad idea to at least investigate the potential behind solar roads. Nope, those are stupid and a waste of money, fuck me for being an idealist. My point is most of society is self-limiting for whatever reason (obsessed with…

Solar roads are stupid because they're a terrible use of resources. You could literally build a roof of solar panels over the road for cheaper than you could build a 'solar roadway', and it would be more efficient to boot. It's nothing to do with idealism - if you were being an idealist you'd be backing a less inherently handicapped proposal.

>inherently handicapped

With today's assumptions, sure. Who's to say some material scientist with a trickle of funding doesn't find a way to mix in some cheap leftover metal into an asphalt mix and wouldyalookathat, for some reason you can now plus a USB cable into the road and it'll charge your phone. I'm being silly, but my point is exactly that: we just assume it won't work because yea duh, it won't work if we don't investigate it beyond "huh, if you put a car on a solar panel, it breaks. This is impossible, clearly."

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

#283

Post by aerovistae »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #268
aerovistae wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think being able to communicate with a computer by thought is useful?

If it's not doable, no. It's just a nice dream. If it's doable but the computer can't tell the difference between my attempts to command it and my daydreams, maybe still no.

Clearly you think this is an impossible task. I strongly disagree, given the fullness of time.....tens and hundreds and thousands of years lie ahead of us, eons for engineers and scientists to fill with research and experimentation. Your perspective on this seems very shortsighted to me.

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

#284

Post by throwaway91111 »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #241
throwaway91111 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the issue with the galaxy has more to do with general relativity than the number of stars. The issue right now isn't bottlenecked in any single place like that.

Can you elaborate? I don't think I got your point. I'm intrigued by the difference between "understanding" a population, in aggregate, and having a fine-grained view of each individual while also knowing how each individual relates to the whole. So, what might we learn about the galaxy if we knew what / where / when every single bright spot of star-ish size is, that we would not learn from an aggregated simulation? R…

Well, most of what you get is verification. When the problem is entirely local, you can verify separately calculated measurements with other measurements. This is why I think we'll be able to move much faster to work on problems of similar magnitudes locally than on relativistic scales.

While you don't know how many humans are within 5km of you, that's certainly easier to verify with confidence N than it is to verify how many humans within 5 light years.

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

#285

Post by hprotagonist »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #133
JabavuAdams wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I agree we should try. It was just an "aha" moment for me. It highlighted to me the inconsistency in answer these two questions: 1) How soon do you think we'll be able to tap every neuron? 2) How soon do you think we'll understand the galaxy in terms of each and every individual constituent star (not aggregates).

EDIT> We can hand-wave estimates for the number of constituents in each of these systems. But it's interesting that we don't really know how many neurons there are in your individual brain, or in mine, etc. We can't yet look across the scales required to e.g. count and localize every single cell in your brain. Also, at what time? It changes. Just interesting questions when you get to a fine scale...

about 80 billion. Fortunately, glial cells matter, too! (don't tell anyone)

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

#286

Post by inimino »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #274
inimino wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, yes, at the moment machine learning is scooping up low-hanging fruit in a lot of areas. Whether that will lead to AGI somehow is pure speculation.

It is of course true that solving AGI solves most other problems (while creating new ones that we are by no means ready to handle) but that doesn't mean it's likely to happen. Hopefully it doesn't anytime soon.

There are other possible breakthroughs. Just as a random example, humanoid robots with effective IQ 60 that could be trained to do all our current manual labor. That would completely transform society and we would be sorting it out for decades. Or it might become possible for someone in a garage to synthesize infectious biological agents and intentionally or accidentally wipe us all out. Or we could get cheap energy beamed down as microwaves from solar-powered satellites. While it's true that AGI changes everything, it's not the only thing that can change everything, and you can't predict what will happen once everything changes.

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

#287

Post by untoreh »

Namrog84 wrote: post #128
andai wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvoted because even though that show makes me sick it does explain very important technological / cultural issues in a very, uh, visceral way.

Why or how does it make you sick? Also are you regarding a specific season? the camera work? The ideas/stories themselves?

It has the doom and gloom vibe all over it, always, you know something bad is gonna happen eventually.

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

#288

Post by aquadrop »

griffman wrote: post #254
oskarth wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 hund…

I think that's still too low level. On the higher view, in in average people still do this: Born on the planet; eat and sleep; raised by parents; work and try to get wealthy; find partner and create family with them; get old and die;

This really hasn't changed much since the 2000 years ago. Romans had complex society with lawyers, education, citizenship, money and finances etc. Yes, big things happened: we became more mobile and information now travels much faster. But it still didn't change the most basic flow of life that much, it's some change but quantity still didn't materialized into quality. And we're now on the threshold where those things can really change. It's hard to predict how society as a whole will change because of this.

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

#289

Post by marvin »

Ygg2 wrote: post #240
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this claim would be more credible if there were the any other characteristics of a religion present. Namely: Doctrine, rituals, totems, prayer, and above all it would require that there is some credulity to a higher power/state such as heaven/nirvana that will never be seen by humans. I'd be interested to see some of those as I haven't yet and I've been in the community for a while. What I will grant is that,…

> Namely: Doctrine, rituals, totems, prayer, and above all it would require that there is some credulity to a higher power/state such as heaven/nirvana that will never be seen by humans. The Doctrine: Belief in the Singularity. The Rituals: Writing talks about Singularity. Totems: Arguably this is the lacking part. The Prayers: Their talks about Singularity.

This is a pretty strained analogy. I consider it likely that smarter-than-human (*more capable of achieving goals) AI will at some point become possible and cause very unpredictable but hopefully directable results.

So presumably that makes me a secular-religious nut by your estimation, but I don't observe any of the religious customs you specify above. Perhaps the first, if you use a wide definition.

It would be more interesting if the criticism of transhumanist ideas explained why these ideas are unlikely or impossible, rather than dismiss them with the quasi-ad hominem of comparing them to religious ideas that are either outright wrong, or completely outdated in their real-world impact.

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

#290

Post by erkkie »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #271
erkkie wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I want orange to appear on a google search, what bytes need to be sent over the wire from my brain.
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