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Comment by ofou | Hacker News Reader

My thoughts on @neuralink

The Good: Explore by direct observation/interaction the brain, cure countless disseases along the way, and eventually augment humans.

The Bad: Privacy, Hacking, identity theft, memory implants, infinite dystopias.

The Ugly: The rich/poor divide will be cognitive.

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“ The rich/poor divide will be cognitive.”

It has already largely been cognitive for decades because of standardized testing and assortative mating.

Try thousands of years due to differential evolutionary pressure, population bottlenecks in Europe and East Asia and interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovians.

There were thousands of similar predictions when mobile phones were created.

Literally, when any new technology created, people started predicting dooms.

Yes, business as usual but what is actually unpredictable are second or even third order effects from the deployment of technologies. Taking social networks as example, USA's president sounds like doom to me.

Before social networks TV influenced president elections, radio before that, and newspapers before radio. Each time media changes, it is doom.

It is curious to see that the rate of change is the sole thing that accelerates between medias across time. Let's imagine a 1000000x speed scenario among virtually all human endevours. Maybe not doom but that's all folks.

By the way, I'm optimistic about the future.

This is a little bit of a false equivalency imo. You can walk away from a TV. This is literally inside your brain. Imagine if a bad actor got the reigns, or if a nation had a back door installed for their version for direct access to their citizens. Literal mind control that you can't escape from at all. No one is at the TV for 24 hours a day. Imagine if a kill switch were possible, ushering the era of death by keystroke hundreds of miles away. You can't kill someone with a TV, or a radio, or a newspaper.

> if a nation had a back door installed

So far no nation managed to install backdoors on all phones and laptops. I have no reason to believe it will be different with brain implants.

> Literal mind control

It’s very far to that.

> that you can't escape from at all

You can always turn it off. With some hardware button.

mobile phones were telephones with a battery, not something directly wired to your brain and thought processes.

For every new technology there’s an explanation why it changes everything.

And phones are just telegraph with sound and telegraph is just a mail over wires, and mail is just a messenger without a person.

Also, it is very very very far to wiring something “directly” to the “thought process”. Society will have time to adapt.

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