Neuralink Progress Update, Summer 2020

Wow, you beat me by only a few minutes. At least I get the first comment. In any case, this is momentous. It’s amazing to me how little attention neuralink gets — it’s subreddit is pathetically small. This company/product will be the most important company/product ever conceived of. People don’t understand that they are witnessing the birth of something bigger even than the domestic computer. It will ultimately be considered the start of a new stage of evolution rather than something that changed how we live.

The initial products treating various low-hanging fruit neurological injuries/diseases, or that connect motor cortex to peripherals, will not even begin to touch the potential of these devices, even rudimentary ones.

All you have to do is extend some of those threads into the deep brain and it’s game over — the world will forever be changed into something totally different. It will change what we are fundamentally, and we still haven’t touched the potential of the device.

The brain is always guessing. Your consciousness occupies a simulation of the world that is hosted inside one part of your brain. Sensory data is translated into primitives, sort of like video game assets, that are re-used and conform to repeating patterns in the environment — abstractions. Be it an object, a person, there is a neural representation of it stored in the brain. Sensory data is taken in by parts of your brain that translate the data into the presence or absence of these abstractions. If something is detected, it is inserted into the simulation and you experience it. This simulation is all you ever experience. Not all sensory data is translated directly into an abstraction. The end result of sensory data translation is a sparse data set — a simulation that only has a few things present within it. As an optimization, the brain then looks at the abstractions that are present in the simulation and then guesses what might be in the parts of the simulation that were not populated by the sensory translation hardware. The guess is placed into the simulation as an abstraction, the same as if it were based on sensory input. The key here is that the brain guesses way more and way more accurately than anyone appreciates. There’s no way to tell since all abstractions are equally real in your experience. Most of the things you experience are guesses... what do you get when you take away sensory input from that system? You get a dream. Dreams are not poor simulations, they are astonishingly good guessing.

When we figure out how to interface with these abstractions, naturally it will be totally insane. Imagine augmenting your senses so that there is no guessing at all, every abstraction is put there deliberately and is totally accurate to the real world. It is a way of experiencing the world that cannot be described in words other than saying it would be totally unlike anything before. Things will be possible like simply knowing where things are, even if they are behind you or out of view. It gets to the level where it’s like trying to describe an lsd trip...

And the use of abstractions is not limited to the physical world. We will discover the neural whereabouts of many useful abstractions... it will be trivial to augment ones ability in almost anything, like math or chess or counter-strike or empathy or almost anything else one could imagine, all in a way that is totally seamless, new intuitions — indistinguishable from natural ability.

And that’s just the obvious stuff. Enjoy yourself for now. The world as we know it has officially ended. You’ll all think back to this comment soon. It will be sooner than you prefer. I guarantee it.