Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future | Hacker News Reader

Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future

waitbutwhy.com

133 pointsicey25 comments

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...

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/

"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."

  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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

How long before invasive mind-reading is an issue?

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

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.

Care to elaborate?

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

Bit late to the discussion (found this thread by searching for the article on HN) but am really interested to hear more about this. Are you able to point me towards some resources that discuss this in more detail?

Just read today in the paper about LEOs using it in investigations. Showing suspects possible visuals from crime scene and observing brain activity can prove one was accomplice or was in the scene.

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

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.

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.

We are going to be to the AI what hooked sensors and actors are to the IOT now.

Besides everything: this is Planet 4 level science communication happening right here and now.

IoB - Internet of Brains

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

Sounds like fun!

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