
Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants to boost the brain to keep up with AI - ndr
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/27/elon-musks-neuralink-wants-to-boost-the-brain-to-keep-up-with-ai/?sr_share=facebook
======
AndrewKemendo
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
clear that the whole vector of humanity is to functionally merge with our
engineered system in a symbiotic way and then probably see the extinction of
the human species in (relatively) short order.

We're gonna go extinct anyway, so what's the alternative?

edit: Used a slightly different time horizon on suggestion.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1817](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1817)

~~~
blazespin
More realistically I think will be genetically selecting super smart babies.
Most likely this is already being done today. As it proves to be effective
people will get better and better at it until we start genetically selecting
and even engineering superminds.

~~~
nradov
There's no free lunch when it comes to genetics. If it was possible to be a
lot smarter without negative consequences then we probably would have evolved
it already. Most likely there are some downsides such as increased risk of
depression, autism, schizophrenia, etc.

~~~
btschaegg
Perhaps. Another explanation might be that it doesn't produce enough
evolutionary advantages in the context of a human society.

One could also argue that the medical advancements of the last 100 years or so
have greatly reduced the evolutionary pressure created by "bodily weakness",
and I'd imagine similar arguments could be made in the opposite direction when
it comes to other factors (like the norms of a society and its influence on
the advantage of mental capabilities of some kind).

It would be very interesting to see in what ways societies "skew" the
evolutionary process. Does anyone know of good research/data in this
direction?

~~~
adrianN
Those lines of research are usually shut down because of claims of racism.
Researching genetic differences between different societies is frowned upon.
There are for example people who claim that Jews tend to excel in science
because historically they have been banned from many trades and retreated into
more intellectual fields like banking.

~~~
nradov
There's nothing stopping researchers from searching for correlations between
certain genes and intellectual ability (or at least performance on
standardized tests as a proxy). Bringing race or ethnicity into the issue
doesn't add anything.

------
Animats
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 launch Q1 2017. Now Q3 2017.
Maybe.)

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

~~~
neshibble
Now that you've made this comparison, I can never unsee it. They're extremely
similar! This makes me wonder whose going to be Musk's Tesla. I.e., what's the
first amazing idea he's going to throw away (out of mainly hubris) that
actually solves his problems.

------
RangerScience
BAM -
[http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v10/n7/full/nnano.2015.1...](http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v10/n7/full/nnano.2015.115.html)

AFAIK, it's the most promising technology for actually _making_ the neural
lace.

TL;DR: If you put electrodes on an angled plastic mesh, you can roll it up,
inject it, and it'll safely unroll. Also, brain cells like to grow into it.

~~~
donlzx
This scenario scare the hell out of me. Is injecting/intercepting brain
signals directly really the way forward? Do we really want to create monster
human species?

IMHO, future AI should be used to enhance human cognitives in a noninvasive
way. Never in such a dystopian way as in the movie "The Matrix".

~~~
RangerScience
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.

~~~
mysterydip
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?

~~~
RangerScience
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.

------
QuantumRoar
If I remember correctly, there are needle-like implants with around a thousand
contacts and it is quite a difficult task to get the signals out of the brain.
Either you have the ADCs directly at the contacts, which means you can't get
your density of contacts up, or you have the ADCs outside which will give you
a nightmare of wiring. In either case the technology to actually have an
interface read out individual neurons is still quite far off, as far as I
know.

I'm not quite sure about all of this, so maybe someone with up to date
information on the technology can help me out here?

~~~
mattkrause
If I may add some details....

The most popular implant is probably Blackrock Microsystems' "Utah Array",
which has 96 electrodes arranged in a 10x10 grid (minus the corners). It looks
like this: [http://aerobe.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/11/utah-3.jpg](http://aerobe.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/11/utah-3.jpg) For scale, the entire electrode grid is
about 4mm on a side and the electrodes are between 0.5 and 1.5mm long
(depending on the model).

There are a few other models (and similar stuff from other companies), but I'd
be surprised if anything with thousands of contacts is in regular _in vivo_
use. There are some _in vitro_ (i.e., cells or tissue slices in a dish)
systems with more contacts, but the signal quality isn't nearly as good.

We can read out the activity of single neurons--people have been doing it for
single electrodes since the 1960s. It's slightly easier with a single
(movable) electrode since you can creep up on the cell until its action
potentials are fairly large and well-isolated from the background noise (here,
large means about ±150 µV). You can't move the array or its individual
electrodes, so you're stuck hoping that the individual shanks end up in good
positions. Then, data is recorded at a fairly high sampling rate (say, 30 kHz)
and the "spikes" are clustered based on their shapes to get individual
neurons' responses.

The ADCs aren't _directly_ at the contacts, but you want the amplifiers and
ADCs as close to electrode as possible to avoid all sorts of weird EMI from
the mains, other equipment, etc. Getting the grounding and shielding right is
a bit of a black art and eats up tons of researcher time. (You'd think "throw
it all in a Faraday cage" would work, but...it doesn't).

What else do you want to know? :-)

~~~
hprotagonist
I've done ephys in mice and gerbils. Spike sorting is nontrivial, and the
effects on local tissue from jamming long shank electrodes into cortex are
nothing i'd like done to me.

Unfortunately, less invasive recording techniques will never give you the
ability to record from single units.

edit: pulled your google scholar and boy am I preaching to the choir...

~~~
mattkrause
And none of my array stuff is published yet (grrr!)

I did single-electrode experiments for my PhD and those definitely mess up the
brain after a while. The Utah array stuff strikes me as "less bad" in there's
only one* big insult to the brain, but it is a pretty bad one: the arrays are
inserted with a pneumatic "gun".

I think you're right that non-invasive techniques will never give us single
unit data, though I hope we can get some longer-lasting implantable electrodes
soon.

------
scardine
The [Black Mirror][1] (British science fiction television anthology series
created by Charlie Brooker) has a few episodes dealing with AI and brain-
machine interfaces.

It is very interesting to watch some of the emotional and social implications
this kind of technology will bring.

    
    
      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror

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

~~~
Namrog84
Why or how does it make you sick?

Also are you regarding a specific season? the camera work? The ideas/stories
themselves?

~~~
andai
I don't know enough about stories or reality to explain this better, but the
episodes seem to have a lot in common with a bad acid trip.

------
erikpukinskis
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 around you.

~~~
erkkie
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?

~~~
XorNot
Wrong paradigm: imagine being able to have perfect recall of information you
looked at once. Or being able to check point your active memories and recover
that state of mind at will.

~~~
littledouglas
Wrong paradigm: Imagine your brain has the entire contents of Google. The
speed of all machines connected to the network. And the creativity of all
other linked minds.

~~~
gambiting
But it won't, unless Musk somehow figures out how to "write" information to
your brain, and right now we can't even fully figure out how the information
is stored, much less how to write it back - the way this will most likely work
is that you will search something on google by thinking about it, and it will
"appear" in your vision by stimulating your visual nerve. You still have to
read it and remember it, you won't magically know Kung-Fu Matrix-style by
thinking about it.

~~~
XorNot
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.

------
neurotech1
Related WSJ article (Facebook non-paywalled):

[https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/article...](https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-
musk-launches-neuralink-to-connect-brains-with-computers-1490642652)

Another non-paywalled news article:

[http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/27/15077864/elon-musk-
neurali...](http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/27/15077864/elon-musk-neuralink-
brain-computer-interface-ai-cyborgs)

------
arca_vorago
My theory has been for a while it is human-brain interfaces that will wake
people up to the issues of GPL(v3) vs BSD style licensing.

No iBrain device is touching my brain.

~~~
globuous
It's hard to resist to a tech when everyone around you is uing it. It's not
impossible, but it is hard.

My mum was super anti Facebook when it first came out. Now she has one.

I'm not saying you will have an iBrain, but myself for instance, hope that I
will not have one. Maybe though, I won't really have a choice in a world where
nearly everyone has an iBrain. Kinda like that show where everyone has smart
contact lenses and only some people go against the movement and remove them.

~~~
gambiting
I wonder if these conversations are how we ended up in 21st century with old
people adamantly refusing to use computers - at some point in their 20s they
decided they don't want to have anything to do with this dangerous technology,
and now they are 60 year old and unable to receive email. Will it be us in
40-50 years time, with kids running neural laces with ease, and we will be
refusing to use them because we were worried about certain aspects of it?

~~~
arca_vorago
I think there is a clear distinction between what we are talking about and
your example. I'm not talking about refusing to learn a new tech, such as
"computers", rather insisting to only use tech that respects my freedom. For
example, Linux is my daily operating system largely for this reason.

Stallman knew these issues were and are important, he was simply a man so far
ahead of his time most people fail to understand the level of importance of
his arguments.

------
drzaiusapelord
I don't want to compete with AI. I want AI to create efficiency and wealth so
I can relax and have a leisure lifestyle. This shows that work-a-holic CEO
culture is only about margins and gains and not improving lifestyle and
quality of life. Automation should be improving our lives not adding anxiety
to compete with it, which we will ultimately lose.

We're probably in for another 1880's labor movement as automation keeps eating
jobs. We either decide to benefit from it via strict regulation or we somehow
try to compete with it which is greatly lower the value of our labor and only
enrich the owners of automation.

~~~
cannonpr
Not everyone wants to be human for ever, some people take joy in their work
and want to continue doing it and contributing in a meaningful way, etc, etc.
Nothing to do with being a workaholic or the rest. I hate to say it, but
'leisure' gets boring awfully quickly.

~~~
cafebabbe
You realize that leisure could be any kind of work you want.

The distinction is not leisure vs work. It's freedom vs. constraint.

~~~
cannonpr
I appreciate that, however I feel constraints give meaning to a task, you
might argue that I can self impose them, I will argue that I wish those
constraints to be imposed by society or by the conditions needed to advance
science. To do that, eventually as AI's come online, I will have to stop being
human.

~~~
eon1
So everyone should suffer, because you enjoy it?

~~~
davidrusu
That's not fair. The argument you seem to be advocating for is that we can
make people happier by reducing scarcity, they are offering you a counter
example.

'happy' is hard, it could very well be that suffering is an important part of
happiness... who knows, but it's a valid line of argument.

------
sixQuarks
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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 hoping there will be more people like Musk
though; I think we desperately need them.

~~~
sixQuarks
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.

------
grondilu
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.

Once we reach this point, I think humans will eventually replace their brains
with artificial ones, either gradually (Moravec transfer), or in one-go. There
will be various motivations : immortality, mind-performance improvements, etc.
The end-result will be the same : we will turn into machines. It won't be a
merger, it'll be a plain replacement. The scenario where AI robots kill us all
will only be different from a subjective point of view.

~~~
namlem
I'm not convinced that's true. There are countless innovations that we were
able to get to work despite having little understanding of the underlying
theory. Given how adaptable both biological and artificial neural networks
are, I'd say that the hardware is far and away the primary limiting factor,
not our theoretical understanding. Once we get a safe and reliable connection
between brain and computer, we can figure out the rest through trial and
error.

------
ajobaccount2017
8.2

A Master Programmer passed a novice programmer one day.

The Master noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game.

"Excuse me," he said, "may I examine it?"

The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the Master. "I see
that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium, and Hard,"
said the Master. "Yet every such device has another level of play, where the
device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human."

"Pray, Great Master," implored the novice, "how does one find this mysterious
setting?"

The Master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it with his heel.
Suddenly the novice was enlightened.

 _If you want to compete with AI, don 't make humans easier to hack._

~~~
zeroxfe
Humans are typically the weak link in a security strategy... so I think this
would make them harder to hack.

~~~
M_Grey
We're easier to socially engineer, but so far humans are monstrously hard to
hack; we're as likely to break unpredictably or not at all, as be broken.

~~~
hexagonc
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 efficacy of these techniques are somewhat
in doubt, on a more mundane level, most people are used to attempts by
advertisers and marketers to subvert our desires and preferences to buy
certain products. A great deal of research and money has been spent on
essentially hacking our desires and exploiting our brain's response to
intermittent reward and social cues. This has brought us product placement in
movies, celebrity endorsements and video games that produce changes in the
brain not much different from those found in drug addicts. Scientists have
engineered fast food to exploit our evolutionary desire for sugars and fats --
something that was good at one point but now serves only to make us and fast
food executives' wallets fat. I would consider all of these a type of human
hacking simply due to the reliability of their effect, if not on an individual
level, certainly on groups of people.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion)
[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli)

~~~
M_Grey
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 the first place_.

~~~
hexagonc
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](http://im-
possible.info/english/art/classic/shepard.html)

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

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

[4] -
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370202...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370202003995)

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

------
hyperpallium
Neural interfaces are an obvious direction to go, and we already have well
established commercial nerve-interface products, like cochlear implants.

But I think there'll be significant problems in interfacing with the brain in
a meaningful way, if you want to bypass the existing interfaces (hearing,
sight, touch etc).

I think it will turn out that the internal implementation is a lot stranger
than the external interface, it could vary significantly between persons.
Perhaps falling into major categories for some aspects, analogous to blood
types; but then varying in the details as much as our finger prints - note
that even genetically identical twins have unique fingerprints, as they are
highly developmentally affected, like the branches of a specific tree. Simikar
for retina prints, an example closer to (some say part of) the brain.

I think interoperation with the internal implementation could require actual
understanding of the brain - enough to build strong AI. We might even have
strong AI before.

It seems very difficult, we haven't the faintest clue at this point. We may
need new fields of marhematics. Could take even more than 20 years.

------
hprotagonist
Have fun with that. Cochleas are tricky enough!

~~~
aerovistae
Pretty much what they said about reusable rockets and electric cars.

~~~
tormeh
They said that about electric cars? They had electric buses before they had
petrol ones. In most ways electric is actually simpler. We've just been
waiting for the batteries, and Tesla didn't do anything revolutionary there.
Tesla saw the batteries were finally there and found a way to hype, market and
sell electric cars successfully. That's praiseworthy. The self-driving stuff
and over-the-air software updates are also cool. Lots of innovation there. But
making electric cars has never been that hard per se.

~~~
lgas
I'm not sure I buy it either. Car don't have cochleas.

------
nategri
"Neural lace," indeed. No such thing as too many Iain M. Banks references for
Mr. Musk, eh?

------
LeanderK
forgive me if i am wrong, i don't know much about these matters. Just a quick
thought. For me Elon Musks ventures seem a bit like angel-investors. Every
company he founds has probability of making billions (car-company, rockets,
tunnelling etc.), though they are also high risk. Of course he can't spread
his risk as broad as a investor. But while risky, every venture seems to be
very calculated, the opposite of crazy. I mean he could focus everything on
Tesla, but if Tesla bites the dust he would loose everything.

But cause != correlation, maybe he just likes founding stuff.

~~~
baq
he needs the money, but he doesn't want it. he's not playing the business game
for the game's sake, he wants to advance civilization and the best way to do
it is via billion dollar disruptive businesses, so that's what he's doing. i
applaud him for keeping true to this after however many years of having access
to that much assets.

~~~
komali2
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 profit, obsessed with status quo, etc). Luckily we've got folks like Musk
who don't seem to give a shit and do what they think is right for humans. I'd
love some other examples of people like this.

Another example: Zuckerberg took flak for his Internet.org idea, because
_clearly_ he's an evil Capitalist that just wants to profit off the
advertising clicks of Indian goat farmers.

~~~
taneq
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.

~~~
komali2
>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."

------
Corrado
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.

------
cing
There's a "non-invasive" brain-computer interface on the market. It's a little
less ambitious; targeted towards people who practice meditation.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_(headband)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_\(headband\))

~~~
nylonstrung
This just EEG which has been around forever. I wouldn't call that a brain-
computer interface

~~~
iamcreasy
EEG is a brain computer interface. There has been many BCI projects that uses
EEG.

------
jameslk
I've had a casual curiosity on why these billionaires like Musk who seem to
care about world wide problems such as AI aren't working to solve the imminent
issues with global warming. I'm not talking about reducing fossil fuels, but
perhaps coming up with solutions with their resources that addresses a world
that isn't so habitable by life in the future. I don't know enough about
global warming to know why this might be the case (hence why it's a casual
curiosity). Or perhaps there are grand efforts and I just haven't heard about
them yet.

Edit: I'm not condemning Elon Musk or downplaying his efforts. This was just
an honest question I was hoping someone more knowledgeable than me might
comment on.

~~~
20100thibault
He's founded tesla and SolarCity with that objective in mind and almost went
bankrupt in the process...

~~~
jameslk
My point was more around addressing global warming from the perspective of
mitigation rather than prevention. There seems to be a lot of reports that
indicate our opportunity for preventing global warming has passed or will soon
pass[0][1][2]. So if that's the case, it seems like it would be pretty
important to work on solutions to survive the effects of global warming
instead.

0\.
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9988890...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99888903)

1\.
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/climate...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/climate-
change-may-be-irreversible-2016-9)

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change#Current...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change#Current_risk)

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
I've been seeing studies since the release of the Inconvenient Truth claiming
that the point of no return has been reached.

I don't doubt climate change, but I'm very skeptical of studies positing a
slippery slope of catastrophic proportions. It's true we don't know the
cascading effects of increased CO2 and methane emissions, but that doesn't
mean it the unknown is apocalyptic.

~~~
FeepingCreature
And hey - maybe we _won 't_ all die!

~~~
always_good
Humanity could use some thinning out.

Unfortunately we'll take a lot of innocent fora/fauna down as well.

------
JabavuAdams
The universities, companies, and individuals involved in this machine learning
renaissance are a collective super-intelligence.

It's amazing how fast we can learn now, fuelled by information-sharing over
the internet. I'm literally forgetting the names of everyday acquaintances
because I'm learning and retaining so much new stuff.

The problem, from an individual's perspective is that, while you can stand on
the shoulders of giants, you can't easily commandeer all that brain-power.

I'm imagining getting some time-slices of Terry Tao, Geoff Hinton, <insert
other big brain names> 's cognition to devote to my own projects. What would
that even look like?

On a different note, if we really could mind-meld, could we ever truly hate or
kill each other?

~~~
zzzzzzzza
"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to
defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible
to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love
them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love
them -" "You beat them." For a moment she was not afraid of his understanding.
"No, you don't understand. I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to
ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don't exist." Ender
& Valentine, Ch. 13: Valentine

~~~
JabavuAdams
Ender's catchy and interesting, but I don't think it would play out that way.

Imagine that at the moment you fully understand your adversary you also fully
understand others like yourself. The hurt that lead to the desire to never be
harmed again. The harm that this kind of mentality inflicts. All the victims
of your proposed victory. ...

I mean, it's a hell of a quote, but at a certain point he just stops the
recursion for bad-ass conclusion.

------
norea-armozel
I'm not sure if Musk's contention makes sense because intelligence isn't a
uniform attribute to systems (biological or synthetic). Specifically, what
passes for intelligence is just the proper applicable, discovery, and/or
refinement of algorithms which we can do easily without intelligence (as in
self-awareness and raw analytical capability). Just run through all possible
paths or solutions on a sufficiently fast computer and you'll eventually get
all the possible solutions to any given problem. It's not a matter of
intelligence, it's a matter of lifespan and applicability.

------
littledouglas
How do you prevent a malevolent AI from controlling armies of neurally-linked
humans?

~~~
scarlac
The proposed idea with a neural lace would be that we became the "AI". Any AI
advancements would be augmenting our shared thoughts.

If you accept the notion that the internet is our backbone, then we're already
a super organism with shared thoughts.

Or to reduce it to a catch phrase: If you can't beat [it], join [it].

------
imron
How long before humans are 0wnz0red?

[http://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/](http://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/)

------
jasonwilk
Congrats to Max and team.

------
bhouston
Sounds like an Exocortex:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocortex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocortex)

------
Ericson2314
I'm... more excited about digging tunnels than this. Nothing like cyborg
immortality to make our societal issues permenantly unsolvable.

~~~
JimmyAustin
On the other hand, it might be easier to get people to care about catastrophic
climate change if it goes from "I'll be dead by the time thats an issue" to
"I'll be alive to watch my great grandchildren's homes get swallowed by the
sea".

~~~
Ygg2
On the third hand, it might be easier just to upgrade your immortal body to
survive in low oxygen environment.

------
pizza
Wonder if we'll ever see "Humans as AI-ASICs" type services..? (I mean, apart
from the movie "the Matrix".)

~~~
scotth
Bizarrely, humans weren't used for computation in the Matrix. They were
batteries...somehow.

~~~
jp555
Well, a resting human body generates 4x more heat per volume than the fusion
reaction at the core of the Sun.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Astrophysical...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Astrophysical_reaction_chains)

But why didn't the machines just build geothermal generators? I guess it's not
much of a story then?

~~~
zzzzzzzza
pretty sure the volume of available humans was way smaller than the volume of
the core of the sun

------
throwaway7645
Nice try Elon. I've read the Avery Cates series. You aren't "monking" me!

------
davidiach
What happens when my brain implants are under DDoS attacks? Or get hacked?

------
du_bing
This is great, he always concentrates on the really important problem.

------
adrianotadao
I believe that someday, this guy will save us! He is so amazing!

------
marktam264
We will need to prevent malicious brainhacks.

------
keithwhor
Hello, Cookie.

------
maverick_iceman
Am I the only one surprised (and concerned) by how many ventures Musk start at
the same time?

~~~
tachyonbeam
I am too. He's been successful so far, but it seems to me that at some point,
he will be overextending himself, and will start to run into more failures. As
a Tesla shareholder, I wish he would focus on making sure that company is
successful. Just Tesla, with its car, power, and battery divisions, is a huge
project for one person to manage.

~~~
greenhatman
Well, if the Neuralink works then it will probably make everything else
easier.

~~~
gldalmaso
Maybe he already has a Neuralink for himself, is a cyborg, and is just doing a
parallel construction of it now.

------
sarreph
Seems like Tony Stark isn't a character necessarily bound to a fictional
world, after all.

~~~
DennisAleynikov
Elon Musk announces new company, wants faster brain so he can take serial
entrepreneurship lifestyle to the max.

sky's the limit

