Darpa Wants Brain Implants That Record from 1M Neurons
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
If we are machines, then it seems reasonable that within a few millennia we might have this capability. I'm trying to think up some scenarios where it might be reasonable to turn over your brain to a business.
The ability to become "immortal" would probably be enough for most people. Is your disembodied mind still you? Do you feel an attachment to the idea of preserving it? What about modifying it?
Where it gets really strange is if you think of your wife or husband making a backup of their brain, then running a simulator on that backup. I.e. giving it "life" by letting the simulated neurons fire. Does that count as thinking? What if you can see those thoughts? What if you can communicate? Would you love them just as much as you love your SO?
Probably useless questions, but I can't help but wonder.
(I've expanded my comment since it was posted; the "no"'s are in response to the first question.)
No. If you were offered wings so you could fly, but in exchange you must spend rest of your life in a cage, would you take it?
So many questions surround this... If the body is dead, but the brain is still active of reasonable thought and to that end communication, who decides it's fate? Does a mind deteriorate once there is no outside stimuli of the senses?
Not that I would agree to be in this state, but man there would be huge fields of research to do.
Sounds like a more reasonable basis for the genesis of the Matrix than what was portrayed in the movie. :-)
Hell, folks (including me) want to live on a Mars base, where "living in a cage" is probably an apt description of life for at least the first couple generations.
I'd sure as hell hand over a copy of my brain to a corporation in exchange for the ability to back up my brain and functionally live forever.
Its actually maybe even a pretty accurate description of religion
"And, my students, if we equate both expressions, then, ... ahem, by the way, do you know how easy it is to get a brain extension from Acme Corp?"
Would you today be worried about preserving the life of all 10 clones (with memories)?
We are all afraid to die - but what if tomorrow there were clones with the memories you have today?
The question basically is posed here
Yeah, I have a few issues with that comic.
> The man was not a murderer.
This is one of a few logical leaps I can't accept. His past selves are already "dead". His future selves do not yet exist. If, for example, all my ancestors are dead and my offspring not yet conceived, how does my suicide harm them in any way? None will so much as feel the grief of losing me, but I'm supposed to feel guilty over "murdering" them? (Let's not follow up on what this would mean for topics such as abortion!)
If future and past selves are of such importance that we not murder them, how can present copies be valued any less? If destroying the original is not necessary, then that must surely be murder as well. It's worse, actually, because then it's not even hypothetical; "The Machine" would be intentionally and unnecessarily ending a life.
Why do I possess the subjective experience of me, not you, and not some other me separated by time or space? Barring notions of a soul, either those other instances are not real in some sense or else there's something phenomenologically special about each, which I can only attribute to being uniquely present at a particular point in space-time. If the teleported me is a clone, their existence ought to have nothing to do with me, thus I should not be murdered for their sake. However, if the teleported me instead can only exist as a function of my past-self ceasing to be, then that's little different than how I am from any moment to the next.
TL;DR: If it works like the movie version of "The Prestige" where one copy is murdered purely for convenience, I'm not stepping into that teleporter.
Often, utopia is portrayed as the result of a technolocial breakthrough, sometimes "if we could read each others thoughts there would be no misunderstanding and conflict". I believe it is the other way around - utopia is a precondition for singularity-type technology. At least, if we want it to be beneficial and not hellish.
Brain implants are easy, communism is going to be hard.
Not if everyone has brain implants!
It will take time to get there. Many will resist, so we have to keep our goal a secret. But people are gullible. With our morphogenic brain technology, we can give people experiences they've only dreamed of. Think of it. The high of heroin, with none of the downsides. The ability to know instantly when any of your loved ones are in distress. The ability to shape yourself and your children into any form you desire.
If we appeal to base emotions, if we appeal to their need to control, to own, to shape, then we can implement our plan.
This is not democracy. Every dictatorship begins with "I know better what is good for you than you do".
You should watch movie "Equilibrium" with Christian Bale. I don't think you really want that, it only sounds good in theory.
A tangent, but: I've been wondering how a novelist builds their skill. They're not born with it. One idea would be to watch a movie and write it like a book, transcribing it scene for scene. I'm not sure whether that'd help, though.
write 1000 words a day, be crap for decades, eventually you get skilled.
'Most ideas have been done to death' is a central reason I have stopped reading novels that much. Ah its one of those, he will do this. Ah yes, I see the twist. its one of those.
If you're not, I must ask: is your name Andrew Ryan perchance?
We need a socio-cultural breaktrough of the same magnitude as the technological breakthrough
That's what transhumanism is. It's a restructuring of the human system around symbiosis with AI.
I don't want to change people, I want to change society.
Somehow you think those are different things and I'm not sure why. Society only changes when enough people individually change. You can force change through government or coercion, but it's temporary and unsustainable.
utopia doesn't work because people are flawed.
Right, I'd agree with that.
We have been technically able to satisfy the needs of everybody from a purely material point of view for decades now.
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not every man's greed" - Gandhi
This sounds more like to basically have a socio-cultural breakthrough, you want a technological entity (some AI or whatever it turns out to be in the future) to control and direct human socio-cultural thoughts and execution. Transhumanism seems to be more oriented towards equipping humans to be interfaced(through some HCI - human computer interface) with computers around an AI, and other human built accessories (atleast for now) to enhance their mental abilities to project them as more powerful humans. One question is, how much do we actually know the power of our brain and abilities, if its properly used rather than enhancing with computers etc., Yes, there are great use-cases for HCI. But giving control to an AI to make your decisions or control humans in the name of technological break through is absurd.
Yes exactly!
Transhumanism seems to be more oriented towards equipping humans to be interfaced(through some HCI - human computer interface) with computers around an AI, and other human built accessories (atleast for now) to enhance their mental abilities to project them as more powerful humans.
It's currently sold that way, yes, but I don't see it that way. I envision it more like what I have been told/read about is the "Borg" from Star Trek (admittedly I've never seen it).
But giving control to an AI to make your decisions or control humans in the name of technological break through is absurd.
As absurd now as walking around on the moon was in the 1st Century.
Yes true(wonder why we don't shuttle down to the moon since we landed half a century ago and still never went back???), it is going to be absurd till we have an AI which is as capable(or even half as capable) as much as a human and we can debug that AI or maybe that AI debug's itself reflexively. Till then, I would say its absurd anytime to think that an AI could take control of a human and guide the human in its actions. Till then, I will keep my brain intact and keep away from any AI implants or any kind of implant altogether).
It's not a question of IF we will have AI direct our behavior, it's just a question of scale.
Though now that I think of it, if people got their shit together in the ways required to kick their own governments in the dick where required, that would also translate to paying attention with how we vote with our wallets (it also would translate to any corp trying just one line of cutesy marketing-speak of sinking to the bottom before you can say iceberg, which would improve the world by orders of magnitude within one week), so in the end maybe "capitalism or communism", or anything of that nature, matters much less than the individuals do... after all you can't polish turds, and you don't need to array gold nicely for it to shine.
How about this instead, just imagine I'm so dumb that you have to spell your point out fully. I don't get what you're trying to say, what rookie cop? A specific one, or "the" rookie cop, every single one? And who is Bill Gates? If it's not worth spelling it out for you it's not worth trying to speculate for me.
To not even acknowledge that, and go "but government", or "but corporations", really means at this point I need you to rephrase my whole comment in your own words to believe you did more than scan it. (That goes for the person downvoting me asking you to elaborate, too. If it's soooo obvious to you, make with the goods.)
For that to be true you have to assume that everyone has enough empathy to come to agreement. It isn't really much different from the way things are now (without being able to read each other's thoughts).
If it would be the same as physical strength today,maybe most people won't bother with that too much, and instead focus on other things,maybe more core to feeling well.
One of those things could be the experiences meditation practices talking about, enlightenment etc, and it seems that we won't need neuron level sensing to do that, but something more at the affordable fmri level or maybe eeg+localization, and those seem to be here much before intelligence augemntation.
So I wonder if we'll ever see intelligence augmentation.
Interestingly, despite widespread adoption of both, there's still some people "smarter" (i.e. better at certain tasks) than others because they can better apply the tools available.
Argh, I can just imagine having extremely realistic advertisements beamed directly into my mind, in exchange for something like immediate translation.
It's gonna be really weird when those perfume ads start before Christmas.
I suspect given the opportunity many would take this. ( without knowing any of the consequences I tentatively would certainly take it in that situation)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cage_(Star_Trek:_The_Origi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menagerie_(Star_Trek:_The_...
Because that's the person who will have to put up with it. You can only ask such a question if you're willing to give the future recipient of the gift the option to back out and be sent back to your present state. And if that new individual isn't 'you' in a legal sense you might find that contract nul and void anyway.
> Where it gets really strange is if you think of your wife or husband making a backup of their brain, then running a simulator on that backup.
There is a Black Mirror episode around that called 'Be right back'.
Well, they were approximations based on people's social media presence, and the episode's conflict mainly came from the imperfection of the approximation. I think you get a very different set of cultural conflicts if the simulation is of an accurate copy of the mind (issues more like in the book Permutation City).
Sounds like a pretty good deal right? Well in three-five years time, surgery probably won't change much. Installing such devices is still going to be pretty risky. And even then, having the hardware in introduces its own medical risks. Our super-programmers can't ever go swimming because of the risks of the fiberoptic and power jack plug going through their skull getting infected. This is a problem current medical implants have, so probably one we will still have in a couple years time.
There are a whole host of other problems with this too. IE what do you do when the hardware in your head is obsolete? Can the company that paid to put it in fire you because you aren't keeping up, in part because you have obsolete hardware in your head?
I wouldn't take hyperintelligence for free.
DRM is another such arena: as I said in another thread the other day, do you want it enforced by your brain implant? No? Then think about how you want to allow the issue to get framed.
Ditto for compelled decryption.
One takeaway that gives you the sense of scale: there are at least 40,000 neurons in 1mm^3 of the cerebral cortex. Those 40,000 neurons create around 20,000,000 synapses. You have to create a sensor that can capture a reasonable portion of those synapses to understand what's going on in that tiny section of the cortex.
On the technical side: The most advanced neural techniques allow for parallel measurement calcium signals in ~10,000 neurones. That's a long way off from complete observation!
Semiconductors are really fairly simple in comparison.
> I always assumed Gutenberg had made some genius machine, but it turns out he just created a bunch of stamps of letters and punctuation and manually arranged them as the page of a book and then put ink on them and pressed a piece of paper onto the letters, and that was one book page. ... That's Gutenberg’s thing? A bunch of stamps?
Gutenberg's genius was figuring out that while it took a long time to cast and to set up the stamps - probably longer than just writing the page - he'd Automated his process and could print At Scale. (His other major contribution was a good screw press, and, more importantly, the metalurgy and a casting system for the letters).
How long until counter-interrogation techniques include not even thinking about what you want to conceal?
Isn't language a bit of a proxy for what we are actually trying to communicate? As in the statement "Yesterday, I saw a yellow bus" the are millions of shades of yellow, different bus styles, and of course different times of day and different scenery in which you could have seen that bus.
Is it possible to convey that picture of the yellow bus (wherever and whenever you happened to see it) through a level of communication below typical "language." Is it possible to reconstruct thoughts that have not been put into explicit words? Additionally, if we were able to do this and do it in both ways (sending/receiving) would a Chinese speaker and English speaker be able to communicate without learning a new spoken language?
It's interesting we may have a new way to communicate thoughts using tech coming up.
You can think of it as MS Word vs. Libreoffice Writer. You don't get better interoperability by letting an app access the other app's memory, whcih is a crazy historically grown representation of memory-mapped structs.
And by accessing this private structure (and say memcpy'ing external data into it), you open yourself to lots of exploits, like buffer overflows. No way I'm letting somebody memcpy random information into my brain.
Current neural interfaces tend to kill neurons and eventually fail. Determining how to avoid these problems is still a very big question. This is incredibly important for making practical neural interfaces. However, the approaches developed might not necessarily be compatible with technologies developed here. For example, the manufacturing process might need to be completely different, or a flexible substrate might be required.
There has progress in solving these problems though: https://phys.org/news/2017-03-graphene-based-neural-probes-p...
Of course, it's kind of one of those situations where you need the knowledge to get the knowledge, but we'll break the cycle somehow!
I would say that this is the end of the beginning for BCIs.
[0]https://tcnl.bme.wisc.edu/laboratory/founder [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampal_prosthesis#Recent_...