
Elon Musk: Humans must merge with machines or become irrelevant in AI age - siculars
http://www.cnbc.com/id/104278281
======
arcanus
I'm sitting in a coffee shop where no one is interacting with each other, and
are all staring at glowing screens of varying sizes.

I'm ssh'ed into both my workstation and one of the ten most powerful
supercomputers ever constructed, where I am running scientific simulations,
essentially to model and probe reality.

At night, my wife and I communicate in real time with our family despite
massive geographic distances.

The merger has already happened, people.

~~~
nojvek
I take a bus in the morning. Everyone is staring at screens. I don't see why
another version of Google Glass isn't going to make a come back. Something
less invasive and dorkier.

We just want the info right in front of our eyes. Something that augments us
as a human directly.

~~~
ageofwant
Nanites directly interfacing with your optic and auditory nerves.
Computational neural laces mirroring ancient structures. Self-replicating
smart-dust that permeates the biosphere. These things have been around in
science fiction for decades. And some of it will eventually be true.

~~~
iainmerrick
The good news is, they'll be free! Coincidentally, we solved the problem of
figuring out when you're actually watching an ad, so the ad market is going to
be much more efficient.

~~~
ageofwant
I wonder what one would sell to people living out their lives in 1cmx3mx3m
slabs of smartmatter perpetually orbiting the sun. Having said that I won't be
surprised if the last few ergs of entropy in the universe will be spent on
some anti heat-death scam email.

~~~
drvdevd
"These people overcame heat-death with this one simple tr-"

~~~
jacquesm
The Church beat you to that one by about two millennia.

------
vitro
Have you noticed, how smartphones vacuum tangible reality?

How many of you have real alarm clock sitting on the table, for example. It
lives on, but as more intangible presence, in each and every phone. Alarm
clock has died, but lives. It is present, but not present at the same time,
just the spirit continues, I would say.

Soon it will happen or is happening to other items as well, and perhaps one
day our spirits will live in the machine the same way alarm clock lives now.

I wholeheartedly recommend watching Japanese anime Ghost in the shell movies
as a nice peek to the future.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
For a real peak at the future, study Roman history.

~~~
olalonde
I've studied Roman history a bit but not sure what you are alluding to, care
to elaborate?

~~~
Arizhel
I think it's pretty obvious. The Romans had a continent-spanning civilization,
with trade routes, aquaducts, roads, and elaborate concrete buildings and
structures, and their civilization collapsed. It took over 1000 years to get
back to the level of civilization the Romans had.

That's what we have in store for us.

------
bpyne
Prediction or self-fulfilling prophecy? Sounds like he's determined to force
it to happen whether or not the average person wants it.

I was disturbed by the notion of an RFID in my dog. I am even more disturbed
by having one in my daughter. Having a brain implant so billionaires can
maximize my profitability (for their own gain) - take a hike! I'll go back to
hunting and growing before participating in that economy.

I wish we'd spend more time trying to get software to work right rather than
creating cyborgs. The idea of having a "blue screen of death" happen in my
head is terrifying.

~~~
marknutter
The problem that a lot of people refuse to acknowledge or simply haven't
thought of is that a very large portion of the world's population is being
left out of the debate about whether or not we should even be moving down
these techno-futuristic paths. It's just sort of happening based on the desire
of a few million nerds. It's not as though people are universally happy about
the technological advancements over the past 20 years. Even people _within_
the tech community debate over the woes of information overload, device
overuse, increasing reliance on inherently insecure systems, etc, and even
then those are debates about what has already come to pass.

Questions that are being answered without the feedback of the world at large:

Should we create artificial intelligences and allow them to become integral
parts of our most critical systems?

Should we become increasingly reliant on the Internet, to the point at which
ones survival is predicated upon their access to it?

Should we create robots in our image to perform the duties humans used to
perform and what should the limit to the abilities and sophistication we imbue
them be?

Should we be mapping the human genome and creating technologies that alter,
categorize, and predetermine our genetic makeup?

Should we be dedicating significant resources to inhabiting other planets
instead of focusing on maintaining the habitability of our own planet?

Should we be trying to eradicate all disease and are we aware of the
ecological and evolutionary consequences of doing so?

Science is great at helping us figure out how to do these things, but it's
useless for figuring out _whether or not they should be done_. Unfortunately,
the virtue of science is so over-emphasized in postmodern western culture
(especially in universities) that our ability to wrestle with the ethics of
our technological advancements has become severely diminished.

The institutions that used to provide a significant counterweight to
scientific thought are being squeezed out of a world that is becoming
increasingly reliant on the systems that scientific endeavors have helped to
establish. The wealth, influence, and power in the world is shifting rapidly
from religious institutions to scientific ones. The assumption is that this
shift is universally good – a move from ignorance to enlightenment – and in a
lot of ways this is true.

Nobody can deny the benefits the enlightenment has brought to the world. But
we're simply trading one set of problems for another. We better able to
understand what the physical world _is_ and to be able to bend it to our will,
but we are less able to understand the metaphysical world and properly define
the way in which we _ought_ to live. We're swinging too far in the other
direction when we should be trying to figure out the correct balance between
the two.

~~~
inimino
And then... what are you suggesting we do about it?

~~~
marknutter
Off the top of my head, we should stop fetishizing science and technology.
STEM is not automatically better than the humanities and the current effort to
try to get more and more people to enter those fields is not helping the
problem.

~~~
inimino
And yet STEM fields represent a viable path into the middle class, while a
humanities degree is a ticket to a career at Starbucks.

~~~
marknutter
I don't see how that's relevant. The point I was making was that we have a
hyper emphasis on science and technology and are careening down the path of
technological advancement without taking the proper time to consider the
ethical problems that we'll encounter. Maybe becoming "middle class" isn't as
important as people say it is? The vast majority of the world lives their
lives far, far below what we consider to be a middle class lifestyle here in
the U.S., yet it is our upper class techno-elite that are deciding the fate of
humanity.

~~~
inimino
It's relevant because that's what motivates people to go into those fields.

The upper class is free to major in the humanities; if your degree is from
Yale it doesn't matter what it's in. The struggling middle class and below has
to be more practically minded. If college is your ticket out of poverty, you
aren't going to waste it studying something useless like history or philosophy
which only qualifies you to be a (well-rounded, intellectually satisfied)
barista.

Computer science is a popular major because of Google salaries, not because
our high school students are fascinated by the mathematical beauty of Turing
machines. In other words, fetishizing technology isn't the problem.

Maslow's hierarchy suggests becoming middle class is important enough to block
out all other considerations for almost all people.

So, I agree with you that we emphasize STEM too much, but it isn't going to
change unless incentives somehow change.

------
CuriouslyC
The thing most singularity proponents are missing is that the human brain
produces its amazing computational abilities with a power consumption of about
20 watts. We're starting to bump up against the limits of industrial
semiconductor fabrication processes and we're probably still about four orders
of magnitude away from that in terms of efficiency.

AI won't take over the world, but I agree with Elon that we are in the process
of becoming a cyborg hive mind. We're already hyperconnected, and as computer
interfaces become more frictionless, they will start to resemble prosthetic
extensions of ourselves. Due to their invasive nature and the difficulty of
security, I doubt neural implants will ever be a thing outside of curing
disabilities. That being said, if we combined data from extremely sensitive
EEG style headwear with gesture and expression analysis we could probably make
something nearly as useful.

~~~
ageofwant
Of course AI will take over the world. It's just that edge between then and
now will likely be fractal. There won't be an enormous battle in the sky,
there will just be a people living in meat and a few generations later most
'people' will live in another computational matrix. Those people will be the
people of their time and will watch and ponder over our shared cultural
heritage just as people do today.

~~~
CuriouslyC
Why would we spend a bunch of energy creating lots of artificial people if for
a lot of tasks biological people are far more efficient? Many engineers think
biology is "stupid" and "poorly designed" but I think that viewpoint is the
result of ignorance.

~~~
mmirate
Aside from the various recognition+analytical+creative tasks that are only
tractable on the human brain ... biology doesn't have much going for it.

It uses carbon, yes, but only in the structurally-weaker forms; e.g. no
nanotubes (ergo flimsy skin+muscle, brittle bones, flimsy cell structure in
general) and no diamond (ergo weak fingernails and teeth). And it makes no use
whatsoever of carbon's heavier quadruple-bonding cousin, silicon.

Oh, and without a nonbiological computer, a human brain has no coprocessor to
turn-to for tasks which are _in_ tractable for the human brain. (e.g.
nontrivial arithmetic computation)

Energy efficiency? That hasn't been a concern _at all_ ever since the Western
world got good enough at food production^W^W calorie production to turn
obesity into an epidemic (from a status symbol).

~~~
CuriouslyC
Cells aren't flimsy, they're flexible and efficient. Diamonds and nanotubes
are going to require quite a bit more energy to produce, and good luck getting
them to self-organize and self-replicate. As for use of silicon, it's hugely
abundant, if there was a really compelling reason to use it, it is likely
biology would have adapted to do so.

Our current obesity issue just highlights the efficiency of biology. Yet,
between topsoil depletion and dependence on fossil fuel inputs, our current
food production systems are unsustainable. That efficiency might return to
importance in the not-too-distant future.

You are right that our machines are very good at simple repetitive tasks, and
for that I am thankful.

~~~
mmirate
Evolution has produced hindrances just as easily as it produced our uniquely
human mental abilities: the same mental feature that helped us avoid
behavioral loops, now mentally impedes humans who perform repetitive tasks.
Yet if that task is intractable for a computer, there is no recourse.

Also, for some tasks efficiency may not be enough. Factory machinery can
produce and convey products which are far too heavy for humans to lift or
push. On the other end of the scale, human vision cannot perceive the hundred-
atoms-scale structures in modern ICs; and our fine motor skills are no better
at manipulating tools to produce such a tiny structure. (Even producing such
tools is beyond the reach of a human craftsperson.)

And that's not even starting on how thoroughly flawed and attention-dependent
the human memory system is. Storing less information is all well and good,
until important information goes unstored.

And then there's the numerous flaws in how humans perform that array of mental
tasks only tractible for humans; cf. _Thinking Fast and Slow_ , which has been
discussed on HN recently iirc. I can't imagine how much e.g. mismanagement
would not occur if managers were not so ... human.

------
EdSharkey
I predict that augmented minds will perform spectacular feats and then quickly
burn out. Either vegetative state or depression and suicide. We're far too
moody and fragile to have our thoughts accelerated to compute speeds without
mental collapse.

That is, unless we can somehow lose our humanity in the process. But then,
we're no longer being augmented. We're being _replaced_.

The happy medium we will obtain will be replacing the video, audio, touch
input and keyboards with mental equivalents. Therefore, one's 'bandwidth' to
the computer/network will still necessarily be limited to that of an observer
of the compute functions of the computer rather than one who has integrated
their mind and consciousness with the computer.

One of the most treasured features of these systems will be the off button.
And a sizeable subset of the populace will run primarily in offline-mode but
with regular access to some huge local data trove curated from online data.

~~~
mirimir
I doubt that burn-out will be that serious an issue. I used to get depressed a
lot, until I learned how to hack the mechanism. With deep hooks into brain
function, I see no reason why people would be depressed, unless they wanted to
be.

Some will argue that heavily augmented people are no longer human. Back in the
day, I'm sure that some considered the use of stone tools in the same way. But
they apparently didn't have many descendants ;)

~~~
hashnsalt
And how exactly did you hack the 'depression mechanism?'

~~~
mirimir
I use modafinil. I don't force 24 hour circadian cycle. And when I start
feeling down, I laugh at myself for being such a dumbass. And that always puts
a smile on my face :) Maybe sometimes it takes a few choruses of one
Turbonegro song or another, or creative cursing, or whatever.

------
AIMunchkin
As someone who has early adopted technology since childhood, I'm surprisingly
contrarian on this. And it's not the tech, it's the state of society and
industry that's making me feel this way.

For I want said technology to all but disappear Avatar-style except when I
need it(1). Along the way I don't want craptastic screendoor VR, I want BSG-
reboot Cylon VR. I don't see that coming anytime soon.

I don't want to be bombarded by the outputs of conv nets, SVMs, and other
assorted RainMan-level ML models that are occasionally helpful but mostly just
distracting factoid spam (see Google Now for a perfect example of this).

I'd love a self-driving car (for real), but I'd love a life where I didn't
have to drive everywhere even more. I don't need AI for that, I just need to
move to a city. And honestly, driving my sportscar is fun when it's on nearly
abandoned mountain roads and highways (see craptastic VR bit about why VR is
not a good surrogate). Why would I want to give that up to run with the cool
kids(tm)?

I'd even love a brain computer interface, in fact MIT Neuroscience turned me
down for admission despite my GPA and GRE scores specifically for saying I
wanted to work on this a couple decades ago, but the mobile web is godawful
enough already without giving silicon demons like Google and Facebook a direct
feed to my brain. I don't trust industry 1 QBit here.

Finally, to quote RadioHead, "I want a perfect body, I want a perfect
soul(tm)." If that makes me a creep, I'm OK with that. If AI (and tech in
general) doesn't improve me or my life, I don't want it around me anymore and
we're just a few years into this.

1\. I work in AI. And I'm trying to make it work behind the scenes rather than
in your face. To that end, I focus on pull, and I despise any sort of push
short of protecting me from harm or keeping me on my schedule.

------
1propionyl
We already are cyborgs.

We just haven't implanted our augments yet, and haven't come up with a direct
neural bus. We communicate with them via touch and sight instead.

Which of the following transitions is more world-shaking?

1) Going from being a plain old human to a human with a smartphone, internet
access practically anywhere.

2) Implanting the functionality of that phone in our bodies.

~~~
rubber_duck
1 is easily reversible and isolated, 2 not so much. It's realistic and highly
probably that someone with a little effort could hack my phone and cause it to
malfunction in various ways. I account for that in the way I use it.

There is no chance in hell I'm implanting something like that in my body. And
that's not even touching on bugs, regular malfunction and shitty standards we
have in SW industry for reliability and maintenance - good luck being stuck
with an implant from corp X that got acquired and is no longer supporting it.

~~~
K0SM0S
> someone with a little effort could hack my phone and cause it to malfunction
> in various ways

Even with the best of intents, the actual makers of said phone (and apps)
sometimes end up causing it to malfunction in various ways... Let that sink in
for a minute.

Admittedly, bio-implants would probably fall under much higher reliability
standards than mere external electronics, including user control of the
hardware and software.

But things like infrastructure (e.g. networks), everything "ambient" to the
end device that's required for a true AR paradigm to exist, cannot be
accelerated by wishful thinking (e.g. bandwidth, business model of currently
leading companies, etc.)

While it's crucial that we begin these ethical debates early on, preferably
_before_ it actually happens let alone scales, I think we're still a decently
big "last-mile"away from an actual consumer-tsunami the likes of PCs or
smartphones. Thinking 5 years for early adopter/high end devices, twice that
for infra to follow and enable consumer-grade scaling.

By that time, 2020-25-ish, we _should_ have some medically-informed (in
physical expertise and centennial empirical experience) ethically-decent
legal/engineering framework to work with when it comes to intrusive implants.

My personal guess is that we'll limit those to tiny <1mm devices that act as
mere interfaces with external nodes.

~~~
projektir
> Even with the best of intents, the actual makers of said phone (and apps)
> sometimes end up causing it to malfunction in various ways... Let that sink
> in for a minute.

No to take away from what's being said, but I don't think this in particular
is a very strong point.

Makers of phones and apps do not have the best intents to do a good job. Their
primary intent is to sell those phones and apps and many corners are cut on
the way there. It may be good enough for that purpose, but it's hardly the
best intent.

------
M_Grey
I have to admire Elon Musk's ability to tap into the zeitgeist of the
intelligent, technical community. Mars, AI... he hits all of the big
hopeful/scary notes as though he were somehow riding astride them; truly, a
master of PR.

~~~
Robotbeat
PR? I think Musk just likes those things.

I don't get this idea. I mean, what is he trying to do other than what he
says???

If I were a multibillionaire, I'd do the same thing: build really cool stuff
and solve problems I think are important that no one else is really addressing
appropriately. I'd be building spaceships and flying cars and things like
that, just what Musk is doing (well, not flying cars, but close).

~~~
RodericDay
I'd solve poverty, fight corruption, and whatnot. The whole techno-futurism
stuff feels like really obnoxious nerdbait to me.

~~~
bryondowd
I'd put higher odds on a multi billionaire being able to successfully colonize
mars than be able to solve poverty or make an appreciable impact on
corruption.

~~~
RodericDay
Yeah, not surprised.

It's weird feature of our time, that sensible people think nothing of
supercomputers in the palms of our hands, going to Mars, or living forever.

And yet any kind of equitable redistribution of resources or alternative
societal arrangement is assumed to be absolutely determined to end in death
and famine and destruction and should not be entertained for one second.

All the utopianism is reserved for tech. Social utopianism is branded
Marxist/communist/anarchist and swiftly disposed of.

------
holydude
I see the opposite. I do not advocate hippie kumbaya lifestyle but I see a lot
of people around me wanting to disconnect from internet. People are sick of
endless stream of irrelevant or relevant data.

~~~
ashark
In the late 90s/early 2000s I couldn't wait to hardwire the 'net into my
brain.

Now, after watching advertising companies and black-hats (state sponsored and
otherwise) eat the Web and shit it back out as something horrifying and
creepy, I'm expecting to one day be part of some kind of weird 'net-free
community. When Moloch[1] inevitably makes everyone wire in (permanently) to
keep participating in the ordinary economy, count me out.

[1] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

------
baursak
> "In an age when AI threatens to become widespread, humans would be useless,
> so there's a need to merge with machines, according to Musk."

Useless for what? Working their jobs and feeding families? Sure, if we assume
that current capitalistic structure is going to persist, many humans will
either need to be eliminated or otherwise sustained through some of form of
welfare. But why must we assume that?

~~~
ivm
"Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us
cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too
little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need
kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all
will be lost."

– Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator (1940)

------
mtgx
I just hope it happens in a subtler way than "implant chip in brain" or
"install bionic eyes", or even "plug cable in the back of the head".

I don't think the vast majority of people would go for things like that. Non-
invasive procedures would be much more preferable, if this is to happen. Maybe
something like wireless communication between the brain and machines, but
without implanting receivers in our heads.

------
swayvil
A divine, golden, glowing but somewhat wretchedly obsessive unicorn has fallen
into obsession with an end-table.

"How symmetric, how uniform, how efficient. If only I could be like you!"

He proceeds to plane his back flat, saw off his legs to replace them with
painted oak, trim that awkward horn...

His friends, appalled, have him committed.

------
tmsldd
"... as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to
move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone... they no longer
build spaceships. They were spaceships." Arthur C. Clarke.

It seems clear that this biological implementation is going to be obsolete
some time soon..

------
CodeSheikh
I think the symbiotic relationship b/w humans and machines is more on the
lines of interaction based rather than a stereotypical sci-fi chip implant
one.

------
nashashmi
I did not come across that quote anywhere in the link. And everyone here seems
to take it ... oddly.

My interpretation of the quote is not literal. Instead as machines take over
greater and greater portions of our day to day tasks, we will need to utilize
them better and more significantly. They have incredible power and capability
in performing tasks of more complex, large-scale, or annoying nature, and the
tighter we merge with them, the more useful they will be to us, and the more
relevant we will be to them.

And I believe he is right. Put it this way, there are a million tasks for
humanity to do in the world. Yet, we can only find the time, resource,
manpower to do 10% of them. How can we allow for more people to do more of
those million things? By automating the mundane.

What do we automate first? The stuff that is unhealthy, then the stuff that is
a tax on the ecology of the planet, then the stuff that is too boring to do.

So what does humanity focus on then? Health, Elderly care, Animal protection,
community development, child development, recreation, religion. Maybe the
economics of these industries have not fully developed yet. But when they do,
that is what we can focus on.

I hate this gloom & doom talk about when AI will take over. Have we lost all
imagination about what greater things there is left to do?

------
castle-bravo
Most human beings have been working in the service of some 'other' since the
agrarian revolution got into full swing 6000 years ago. First it was the
raiders, slavers, and tyrants of city states. The priesthoods of hydraulic
empires. Churches, guilds, and kings. Then there was an emergent capitalist
class, machinery, and national states.

Now human beings are being framed as competitors with machines for livelihoods
in a money economy that is increasingly inappropriate for our social,
environmental, and economic needs.

The unfortunate insistence that human beings serve technology and the powerful
people who use it as a tool to facilitate the extraction of wealth from an
increasingly complacent domesticated human population will result in our
extinction as Elon Musk predicts - unless we can collectively insist MORE
INSISTENTLY that technology be made to serve us: human beings whose lives have
intrinsic value. Technology can be used to build a paradise in the physical
world for us, but instead we are being shuffled into brightly lit
slaughterhouse chutes of virtuality. Fuck that.

------
TeeWEE
I think, what most people here are missing in the discussion, is that Elon
Musk mainly points out there is a mismatch in INPUT vs OUTPUT bandwidth
between a computer and a human.

We only communicate to computer via toch, button clicks, keyboard and mouse.
The bandwidth is low here.

However we can already "read" from a computer using vision which is a high
bandwidth connection.

If you think about it, from first principles (like Elon Musk often advocates),
this gap can probably be solved by a better interface with computers. Thing
about a Brain-Computer cable.

Or we could computers learn to recognize human voice, human facial expression
etc. That would increase the bandwidth. However it would be a lot cooler to
send our "thinking" to a computer. This would allows us to program faster, too
lookup wikipedia articles faster etc.

Thats the merger he is pointing to.

I think its a valid point.

~~~
gnoim
I think you and Elon are missing the point as to how a computational system
works..

There will always be a mismatch between input and output bandwidth. If output
matched input, you effectively have a pass-through system. If output exceeds
input.. yeah, explain to me how that works in any place in our universe..

Structuring information isn't 'free'. It takes time. It takes lots of
information. What comes out the other end is less information via (a
relatively small number of intelligent actions).

Try taking your hand off the keyboard and mouse and speaking 'internally'
without activating output. Now, try speaking 'really.. really' fast about a
thought. You can't can you?

There's a fundamental reason why you can't. There are also fundamental truths
that will restrict what can be interfaced. This fundamental reason is
understood by those who actually have a grasp of the human brain as a system.
It is not grasped by those who make uninformed comments about input/output
bandwidth.

NLP tech exists. You can draw pictures (picture speaks 1000 words). Human
facial expression processing software exists.

We don't exploit half the capabilities of what we have today in realized
technology. Yet people won't to go further down the rabbit hole without a
flashlight...

'Sending thinking to a computer' sounds cool .. I recall an anime named 'Ghost
in the shell' that did a way better job at exampling it. The manga was
serialized in 1989.

Where the rubber meets the road in reality is where engineering and science
take over.. Engineering nor information theory are with this proposal. I think
this is what most people are missing on this hype train.

~~~
skoocda
'cute dog videos 10 hours HD' is a 216 bit UTF-8 string input.

Youtube's video result is a 288 000 000 000 bit HD video output.

So for the (server - disregarding the client) computer, output exceeds input.
For the human, input exceeds output.

Vice versa, there is a physical output > input effect for the human brain-
sensory deprivation. Lack of input seems to fairly reliably cause psychosis
and schizophrenic effects.

------
coldcode
Let me know where people plug directly in machines, I will look forward
watching a brain being hacked.

~~~
logfromblammo
You think a brain has to be connected to a machine to be hacked? Ask a cult
deprogrammer if you need a computer to hack a brain. Ask an "enhanced
interrogator" if you really need anything more sophisticated than a pair of
pliers or a rag and a bucket of water.

We have always been able to hack each others' brains by manipulating sensory
inputs, and by using conditioning.

And we have more recently been able to use drugs to target particular classes
of neuroreceptor. Does taking a dose of LSD or Salvia divinorum count as
hacking a brain? How about heroin or cocaine?

Even if you have a computer wired directly into your brain, it will likely be
a long time until anyone can do anything more complicated than reading out
from or injecting into one of the sensory inputs. And so guess what? No one
will be typing "these aren't the droids you're looking for" into a console
window and piping it into your brain. Instead, they will yank out just one
fingernail, save the sensory stream to a file, and hit the "replay" button
until you decide to cooperate.

Hopefully, no one will be so foolish as to connect their brain directly to the
Internet, without some sort of firewall.

------
kaaree
The problem with this type of AI development is that decisions are made based
on wrong assumptions. "AI" as in "fast computing" is no match for a bio based
sentient human. The "AI" does not know of dreams, of love, of inspiration, of
introversion, osmosis, compassion, biodiversity or other fundamental
archetypes. As a computer it can only make decisions based on logic. But we
surely can agree that our day to day experience of life is much more than only
"logic". Based on logic only the human will become irrelevant. . true. It is
up to us to agree we are much more that a small part in our brain that can be
used for computation.

------
AmIFirstToThink
I think eye glasses or contact lens are marriage of man and machine.

A car or bicycle is a marriage of man and machine.

So, is a sword.

Marriage of man and machine has been happening ever since humans started using
tools... stone age or stick age tools.

We are increasing the accessibility and intimacy of the tools.

I don't know, I am conflicted about this. Should we make it super easy for
everyone to access and link and build upon vast knowledge at moments notice at
the service of individual whims and wishes that are susceptible to greed,
lust, jealously and pure evil, and just environmental hiccups, Or, should we
let our AI overlords control how far we go as individuals?

Age of AI is arriving, but has humanity of humans arrived?

------
projektir
To be clear, I'm a transhumanist, and I'm very much OK with things like
merging with machines.

But I really hope Musk himself is not framing things this way: that humans
will have to merge with machines because they'll be _useless_ otherwise. I
can't separate the inflammatory headline and text from what Musk himself said,
though...

I guess it's not too out of character given Musk's apparent treatment of his
own employees, though.

Merging with machines and other similar things should happen because it
benefits humans, not because it's necessary to make someone money or because
someone decided that humans are "useless".

~~~
devopsproject
It would be a competitive advantage which would make some people more valuable
than others.

As far as profit and motives, I think it may be similar to tractors: Someone
will make money on the equipment and service, farmers will be more productive
which will kill farming jobs, and more food will be produced. I don't see an
altruistic path.

------
reddog
When I am watching a Netflix movie my (download) bandwidth between me and
whatever computer is serving it is much higher than 10bps. By 5 to 6 orders of
magnitude. And that bandwidth has been matched perfectly by evolution to my
processing speed. Speeding it up so I can binge watch all seven seasons of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 40 seconds doesn't do me much good.

I guess Musk is talking about upload speed. I can't think of a whole lot of
good reasons to increase my upload speed to anything much faster than typing
and talking other than turning myself into a sensor for the hive mind.

------
AndrewKemendo
I'm glad that Musk is speaking out here on this topic because there aren't
enough people doing it, and it's the most important thing (in my opinion)
humanity can work on.

The challenge is: How do you get people to engage with the idea and not just
write them off as crazy? Well, best to have good spokespersons.

Besides that, Transhumanism isn't new. For anyone in the "Singularity" camp
(including myself) this isn't news, it's a basic maxim of how we expect the
future will play out.

------
nudpiedo
It seems that Elon Musk used to read the ghost in the shell (攻殻機動隊) as well...
which very soon will have a Hollywood version in every cinema. The problem I
find on Elon words is that everything he says tends to be oversimplified and
put in a dichotomy without much fundamental basis (just because something is
plausible is not more closed to happen) this is in one hand great to create a
vision, but I would say that at the same doesn't play well with the scientific
method...

------
martin1b
While this makes a great story, in reality, technology evolves much slower
than it is conceived.

I understand we've made progress. However, direct neural integration is very
difficult. I would understand bio-integration for very good limb prosthetics
in 20 years, better than we have today. Perhaps even indistinguishable from
the real thing to the wearer. However, integration directly into the brain
without detrimental psychological effects is going to be very difficult.

20 years is a very short time.

------
losteverything
To me this

<He said the disruption to people whose job it is to drive will take place
over the next 20 years, after which 12 to 15 percent of the global workforce
will be unemployed. "The most near term impact from a technology standpoint is
autonomous cars … That is going to happen much faster than people realize and
it's going to be a great convenience,"

Was more important.

------
rl3
> _" Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps
> achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves
> the control problem ..._

At least he qualified that with a "maybe". Going by the headline alone, it
almost sounded as if Musk was squarely in Kurzweil's camp.

------
baccheion
Any merging with machines (which I'm very much against) would have to be
"wireless." That is, injecting or implanting chips or bots is a bad idea.

The AI age is overblown. The only fallout would be the automation of
repetitive jobs.

------
nepotism2016
So tesla is leading the very thing that Elon is warning will cause
chaos...brilliant

------
mirimir
That seems pretty obvious to me. But then, it's an old trope in SF, and I've
read lots of SF.

I highly recommend _Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture & Technology in
the Twentieth Century_ by O.B. Hardison Jr. (1989).

------
samfisher83
According to musk: In an age when AI threatens to become widespread, humans
would be useless, so there's a need to merge with machines, according to Musk.

Then why won't the machines just kill the humans and take over?

~~~
m3talsmith
It is a threat to our system, and the fallout of our system is a threat to our
life, but the AI aren't intentionally threatening us; our lack of foresight
and stubborn desire to live under a wage earning system will eventually hurt
us because our efficiency is always going to lag behind a digital
intelligence. This isn't Skynet, this is the logical conclusion of capitalism.

------
jimmytucson
To me, there is essentially no difference between AI completely merging with
humans and conquering us. Consider what a complete merger might look like.
Which pieces of humanity remain? I suppose we'll have replaced some or all of
our mental faculties with AI, we'll no longer procreate or degrade
biologically -- hell, why even retain a human-like body? Mount a case on one
of those dog-bots from Boston Dynamics.

AI will conquer humanity by slowly replacing each of its components with
perfect, "artificial" ones. And then? I'm sure it will eventually calculate
the only logical course of action is to turn itself off since its existence
serves no purpose other than to threaten the existence of all organic life on
the planet. Such great heights!

------
saalweachter
I can't help but feel like, best case, all of these people warning about the
Singularity are like Arrhenius warning about global warming a century or two
early and no one caring.

~~~
hashkb
What? The world is round? Let's start tying nooses.

------
ksec
And for anyone who think Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs, or thinking Apple
should buy Tesla so Elon could be CEO of Apple, you should think again.

------
JustSomeNobody
Self serving comments more than anything. I mean of course he is going to say
things like this, he owns companies that are investing in ML/AI.

------
known
AKA [http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

------
mrfusion
What could musk possibly be building for this neural lace? I just can't think
of any modern technology that's up to the task.

Any ideas?

------
inertial
Less catchy version : "machines will augment human capabilities".

But, we've been doing that for decades.

------
throwaway_aibot
long time passive reader. just came here to say that i am tired of Elon Musk
and _his_ version of the future_of_humanity.

There is an opportunity cost here. Like one of the comments said, we are
trying to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

------
siculars
Tl;dr humans communicate at 10 bits per second. Machines communicate at a
trillion bps. We don't communicate or synthesize information fast enough and
this will, of course, be a problem. Also, ai autonomous driving will leave
12-15% of the world's population unemployed... so, uh, get ready for that.

~~~
CuriouslyC
We might only communicate via words at 10 bits per second. We're constantly
leaking _way_ more information than that in the form of cranial
electromagnetic waves, gestures/body position, muscle tonus, facial
expression, heart rate, blood flow, etc.

~~~
pavelmelnichuk
Yes, we process data visually much faster than the ten bits per second example

------
trumbitta2
Resistance is futile, I guess?

------
baq
the problem is there's only so much information you can process in meat
computers using 20W of power no matter the bandwidth.

the best we can hope for is to design the AIs to treat us as very interesting
pets.

------
pmarreck
SOMEone got the "synthesis" ending of Mass Effect 3, Elon ;)

------
shmerl
So he is into cyberpunk now?

------
alexro
Humans must unmerge with machines and make AI irrelevant

~~~
grzm
Is this coming from a general Luddite-type stance or something more
interesting? Care to dig into this more?

------
mlmlmasd
> Musk explained what he meant by saying that computers can communicate at "a
> trillion bits per second", while humans, whose main communication method is
> typing with their fingers via a mobile device, can do about 10 bits per
> second.

Humans communicate in much more complex ways than computers. Facial
expressions, intonation, language, body language, etc. All things we do not
quite understand.

Elon Musk is a little arrogant due to his success in business and likes to
make 'fun' predictions based on his very limited understanding of whatever
field he happens to be talking about. He sounds like an eager undergrad
student that tries to demonstrate his genius to his professors and the class.
I don't understand how anyone can take him seriously in technical fields.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
> Humans communicate in much more complex ways than computers. Facial
> expressions, intonation, language, body language, etc. All things we do not
> quite understand.

That's the medium - but how many bits of information, after compression, are
exchanged in a conversation between humans?

It's true that facial expressions and body language are difficult to measure
with a camera, that intonation and speech are difficult to measure with a
microphone, and that duplicating them with an artificial face on a monitor, a
robot, or a speaker are all very difficult programs for humans to write.

But this isn't what Musk was trying to communicate. He's saying that the
amount of information contained in the combination of these human
communication mechanisms can be compressed to about 10 bits per second.

Imagine us talking for a minute, compressed to a movie script. Your wetware
could easily use my expressions to come up with an estimate of my happiness,
sincerity, confidence, truthfulness, sarcasm (and so on) on a scale of 1-10.
These values might change from sentence to sentence. If you're very observant,
in 60 seconds you might get 10 estimates for each of a dozen emotions with
3-bit fidelity from these observations - only a few bits per second of actual
information transferred. And I might be creating sound waves that could be
recorded at very high bit rates digitally, but aside from a one-time
characterization of my voice, I would perhaps speak 200 English words in that
minute. 200 words, averaging 4.5 characters each, with a 20% compression
ratio, is only on the order of 4 bytes per second. And most of that is
overhead for grammar.

Or imagine meeting two aliens in a wormhole/portal that's only going to be
open for 60 seconds. You attempt to convey as much about our society to them
as possible vocally, while I'll attempt to use a computer. Afterwards, you
might be able to have politely (to a human) said "Hello, we come in peace" and
smiled, be able to describe the sound of their unintelligible speech, and be
able to make a sketch of their appearance. I'd have recorded the entire
exchange in 4k/60 fps video, from which we could probably reconstruct the
anatomy under their equivalent of skin, and my only communication lag would
have been gesturing that I want to give them computer equipment containing
Wikipedia and Archive.org and whatever else I can download, transferring it at
a few pounds of multi-terabyte hard drives a second, and get computer
equipment back at the same rate. Or if you want to remove the sneakernet
exploit, fine, we can hook up a Thunderbolt cable and send it across, or even
just play individual frames of text or images on high-resolution monitors and
record that video. From that, we could learn an incalculable amount about each
others' species. From a minute of talking, we would learn next to nothing.

The medium is irrelevant. The question is how much information can be
exchanged. And computers win that with no contest.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> how many bits of information, after compression, are exchanged in a
> conversation between humans?

It depends on the listener. Billions of bits are encoded, but if you are only
listening for one thing you will only decode a single bit.

A good listener can see a whole film in a single look. A good speaker can
encode a while film in a few words. A good couple can exchange volumes in a
few moments.

~~~
lgas
Speakers can not encode a whole film in a few words -- they can compress it to
a few words, but this is most definitely a very lossy process.

~~~
erikpukinskis
You just need a big dictionary you can encode any content in a few bits.

I'm talking about lossless compression only.

------
cLeEOGPw
At the point where merge is possible, human + machine will probably already be
inferior to machine only, in other words human would only make machine worse.
Or at the very best, the human+machine period will last for very short time.

Example is chess - there was a brief moment, where human using computer would
outperform computer alone. That moment passed and that's it, humans can only
weaken AI.

------
Neliquat
Human might as well mean part machine. We are a product of our tools and
structures more than any other. We have always been on this evolutionary path.

------
arca_vorago
Once again why FOSS is so important, either the user controls the program
(AI), or the program (AI) controls the user.

I told a former boss once while he would eventually be plugging into his
iBrain, I won't be touching anything not GPLesque that I haven't reviewed
personally.

RMS was right, and those of you embracing proprietary ecosystems are going to
suffer for it.

------
gerbilly
Eyeroll, I have no desire to merge with a calculator.

Humans, and even the 'lower' animals for that matter, out compute computers
even today.

------
spaceboy
Can't help but bring up the notion of _envy_ these people (technocrats
specifically) have for the biological miracle that is the human body. They can
simulate the human brain all they want, but they'll never match it, as it's
orders of magnitude more complex than any supercomputer they can dream of. And
it has free will, which AI does not. AI is impotent at making free decisions
because it's deliberately constrained by the programmers to think rigidly and
inside their own custom black box. There's no _room to roam_ unless we get to
Mars where we can unleash AI and watch it make free decisions, which I suspect
Musk is trying to do...Turning planets into giant labs where AI can be less
constrained.

~~~
solipsism
_AI is impotent at making free decisions because it 's deliberately
constrained by the programmers to think rigidly and inside their own custom
black box_

That's a strange assertion to make. And false. AI cannot make what you would
call "free decisions" because it lacks the level of complexity necessary to
trick you into thinking it can, the way your brain tricks you into thinking
you make "free decisions". The idea that we're intentionally crippling AI
because we have no room for it both overstates our ability to create
intelligence and understates the financial incentives for anyone who creates
it.

 _mars where we can unleash AI and watch it make free decisions, which I
suspect Musk is trying to do_

So, the real reasons he's given for wanting to go to Mars.. I guess those are
just a smoke screen?

~~~
spaceboy
> the way your brain tricks you into thinking you make "free decisions"

It's my own experience that I have Free Will[1] without my brain tricking me.
The idea of free will is not without controversy, though, and we could argue
at length of whether it's truly _free_ in the classical sense, or a mix of
advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will)

~~~
solipsism
_and we could argue at length of whether it 's truly free in the classical
sense, or a mix of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition_

No we couldn't because I don't entertain false choices. It's as deterministic
as a game of billiards and you have no power to argue otherwise.

