
Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future - icey
http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
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icc97
Awesome write up, I've only made it about 1/4 the way through.

It's a huge article and wonderfully approachable.

Loved the image of the speed of signal transfer with and without mylin sheath
and how why that causes the issues that MS patients have (it's under note 13)
[0]. A friend has MS and it's great to be able to better understand the
condition.

> Multiple sclerosis is caused by a glitch in the body’s immune system that
> causes it to destroy the myelin sheaths of neurons, which as you can see
> from the GIF below, would seriously disrupt the body’s ability to
> communicate with itself. ALD, the disease in Lorenzo’s Oil, is also caused
> by myelin being destroyed.

[0]: [http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-
cdn.com/wp-c...](http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/ezgif.com-optimize-2.gif)

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kensai
They seem to have also updated the homepage of Neuralink with specific job
opportunities. Last week or so it was still showing only an email link.

Check it out! :) [https://neuralink.com/](https://neuralink.com/)

"Neuralink is developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to
connect humans and computers. We are looking for exceptional engineers and
scientists. No neuroscience experience is required: talent and drive matter
far more. We expect most of our team to come from other areas and industries.
We are primarily looking for evidence of exceptional ability and a track
record of building things that work. All positions are full time and based in
San Francisco."

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pavement

      Neuralink co-founder Flip Sabes doesn’t get it.
    

It's not so much that I'm worried about _me_ getting ahold of one of these
things. I'm really just worried about other people having them. Rotten people.
Terrible people. The people out on the street, that if I had to share a room
with them, I'd jump out a window.

There's this idea that these things will make them better people. What a can
of worms that concept is.

    
    
      But to Elon, the scariest thing the Human Colossus is 
      doing is teaching the Computer Colossus to think.
    

This is the brute-force hack to achieve the same outcome. One way or another,
the equation is the same. Humans and machines collaborating, to produce an
outcome.

We can either level the playing field, so that each of us has implicit,
private, immediate, instant interaction with our own implanted systems, or, we
can defer to intermediary system administrators holding the keys to machine
rooms around the world, portioning out bandwidth that permits each to siphon
off some compute time from a massive cluster, be it for algorithmic day
trading, personal medical diagnostics, nuclear fission/fusion detonation
simulations, image processing for astronomical observations, winning a Go
tournament, or whatever.

But if an implant changes a person, from what do we derive our concept of
self, and authenticity? Without that, how do we know we haven't died? How do
we know that others are not animated corpses? What prevents us from becoming
pzombies?

What's the difference between a truly convincing Real Doll, and a person after
this?

~~~
Quenz
I don't think we can make that distinction, even now. We might die every time
we go to sleep, similar to how you would if you were to be teleported;
destroyed at one end and recreated at the other.

I'm not worried in quite the same way as you are. I'm worried that once I've
put on the wizard, I'll change, and I won't be who I once was. Maybe I'll lose
my humanity. But maybe my humanity isn't doing me any good.

There are a lot of things I said I would never become when I was younger,
which I have now become. Maybe this will be the same thing on a larger scale.
I might change, a lot, but that's all. I don't see the change as good or bad.

Once I put on the wizard hat, I may miss what it was like without it, but I
probably won't want to take it off again, similar to how I miss my childhood,
but I'm not sure I actually want to regress back to it.

Edit: Even if you're right, and this is a bad idea, and it will change us for
the worse, it still seems to be our best option. Either we pray that AI
doesn't recklessly take off without us, possibly destroying us in the process,
or we try integrating with it, with the chance that our humanity will be
lifted up with it. At least making it so that we have the option is probably a
good idea.

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gallerdude
This may come across as ridiculous as the people who thought our bodies
couldn't handle the high speeds of trains in the 1800s, but I wonder if there
is a speed limit inside our brain. The post keeps bringing up bandwidth as the
issue, but I still think our brain needs time to reflect on what has happened.

~~~
legolas2412
Well, neurons don't fire instantly.

Our reaction time to external stimuli is the "speed-limit" of our brains, but
I guess it is to only some kind of stimuli. Inputs directly into our brains
from a link/lace might have different speeds.

~~~
veli_joza
Latency and bandwidth are not the same. You could potentially have huge
capacity for information processing, that would just be delayed because of
"implementation details" of neuron biology.

I'm fascinated by brain's plasticity. One example is while we are watching a
movie, our perspective constantly "teleports" around actors and across space
and time many times in a minute. Yet this seems normal and doesn't overload
our brain. There are biohacking experiments with installing extra sensors that
seamlessly integrate into our experience of reality.

The unanswered question is how much information can our brain take, and what
will happen if there's too much pouring in. Just temporary fatigue or more
permanent damage? We cannot know because we never tried it before (aside from
specific experiments like air traffic controller and pilot concentration
tests).

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tdalaa
In the middle of reading this, and can't help think about the Nexus trilogy
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nexus_Trilogy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nexus_Trilogy)

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ckemere
I'm also only about 1/4 through. Cool to see that the first piece on Neuralink
with quotes from significant numbers of the actual team chooses to be long
form and in depth.

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boznz
It always sounds so much easier in SciFi novels...

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macawfish
How long before invasive mind-reading is an issue?

~~~
jbpetersen
Already there if you count inferring things people would prefer to keep
private by looking at probabilities given their visible activity.

~~~
dafash
People will speak in generalities to torture someone in a social setting. I
for one am almost dead having experienced this for over two decades.

~~~
macawfish
Care to elaborate?

~~~
dafash
I actually wrote a detailed response, but HN blocked it, likely for the
better.

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jasonlfunk
Anyone care to offer their 'tldr' version of the article? What exactly is Musk
wanting to do?

~~~
jononor
TLDR I posted on Twitter: "If we achieve tight symbiosis, the AI wouldn’t be
_other_ " It will be us, and we it. It will have no reason to destroy us.

~~~
veli_joza
This doesn't really do justice to the article. Decent BMI would be next big
step for mankind, with applications such as practical telepathy, mind control
of IoT devices, instant access to all information, huge increase of memory
capacity, tapping into other people senses, and, yes, fusion with AI.

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mxfh
Besides everything: this is Planet 4 level _science communication_ happening
right here and now.

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boznz
IoB - Internet of Brains

~~~
norea-armozel
Just what I need, Russian hackers installing malware into my mind, threatening
to delete my childhood. I might actually let them do it.

~~~
Quenz
Sounds like fun!

