
Neuralink Progress Update, Summer 2020 - caiobegotti
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVvmgjBL74w
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vwat
Wow, you beat me by only a few minutes. At least I get the first comment. In
any case, this is momentous. It’s amazing to me how little attention neuralink
gets — it’s subreddit is pathetically small. This company/product will be the
most important company/product ever conceived of. People don’t understand that
they are witnessing the birth of something bigger even than the domestic
computer. It will ultimately be considered the start of a new stage of
evolution rather than something that changed how we live.

The initial products treating various low-hanging fruit neurological
injuries/diseases, or that connect motor cortex to peripherals, will not even
begin to touch the potential of these devices, even rudimentary ones.

All you have to do is extend some of those threads into the deep brain and
it’s game over — the world will forever be changed into something totally
different. It will change what we are fundamentally, and we still haven’t
touched the potential of the device.

The brain is always guessing. Your consciousness occupies a simulation of the
world that is hosted inside one part of your brain. Sensory data is translated
into primitives, sort of like video game assets, that are re-used and conform
to repeating patterns in the environment — abstractions. Be it an object, a
person, there is a neural representation of it stored in the brain. Sensory
data is taken in by parts of your brain that translate the data into the
presence or absence of these abstractions. If something is detected, it is
inserted into the simulation and you experience it. This simulation is all you
ever experience. Not all sensory data is translated directly into an
abstraction. The end result of sensory data translation is a sparse data set —
a simulation that only has a few things present within it. As an optimization,
the brain then looks at the abstractions that are present in the simulation
and then guesses what might be in the parts of the simulation that were not
populated by the sensory translation hardware. The guess is placed into the
simulation as an abstraction, the same as if it were based on sensory input.
The key here is that the brain guesses way more and way more accurately than
anyone appreciates. There’s no way to tell since all abstractions are equally
real in your experience. Most of the things you experience are guesses... what
do you get when you take away sensory input from that system? You get a dream.
Dreams are not poor simulations, they are astonishingly good guessing.

When we figure out how to interface with these abstractions, naturally it will
be totally insane. Imagine augmenting your senses so that there is no guessing
at all, every abstraction is put there deliberately and is totally accurate to
the real world. It is a way of experiencing the world that cannot be described
in words other than saying it would be totally unlike anything before. Things
will be possible like simply knowing where things are, even if they are behind
you or out of view. It gets to the level where it’s like trying to describe an
lsd trip...

And the use of abstractions is not limited to the physical world. We will
discover the neural whereabouts of many useful abstractions... it will be
trivial to augment ones ability in almost anything, like math or chess or
counter-strike or empathy or almost anything else one could imagine, all in a
way that is totally seamless, new intuitions — indistinguishable from natural
ability.

And that’s just the obvious stuff. Enjoy yourself for now. The world as we
know it has officially ended. You’ll all think back to this comment soon. It
will be sooner than you prefer. I guarantee it.

