Comment by jmfldn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmfldn | Hacker News Reader

This stuff is no doubt promising, not least for disabled people but this neuralink-type stuff seems terrifying. Anyone who is excited about having an Internet connection into their brain needs their head examined. Us humans don't exactly have a good track record of avoiding awful unintended consequences when we introduce new tech, no matter the benefits.

It all starts out with an innocent sales pitch, "we're just connecting people" etc etc, but whatever we build ends up reflecting human nature and our social and economic context in all its myriad ways, good and bad.

We don't control technology or even have the foggiest idea how anything we build will pan out. We just make it look like there was a masterplan after the fact when in reality it was a headless blunder.

I'm the sort of person that yearns for computing to be done sitting on a chair looking at a big screen. I don't even like mobile internet devices that much in terms of what they've done to us. Beaming this straight to our brain? I'm out thanks.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit: there seems to have been a shift sometime during the last 50 years where instead of computers and computing being a tool to be mastered and controlled by humans, we've seen computers switch the power dynamic and render us humans the tools.

To me, that clash of "visions" was supremely represented in Apple's "1984" advert.

I'd love for computing to get back to that utopian vision of the bicycle for the mind but if you look around these days it's more of a train-wreck of the mind.

You may like the Adam Curtis documentary series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", which basically posits that same thought.

"I'd love for computing to get back to that utopian vision of the bicycle for the mind but if you look around these days it's more of a train-wreck of the mind."

Same here. I'm increasingly not interested in machines or software that I don't control at leaf to some extent, that I'm not free to modify, that aren't about empowerment, learning and creativity for the user. It's not just based on a personal desire, although it is partly that. It's the only way we can stay free. This isn't just some high-minded hacker ideology, it's literally about liberty.

"50 years where instead of computers and computing being a tool to be mastered and controlled by humans, we've seen computers switch the power dynamic and render us humans the tools."?

What?? Where exactly in the current world do you see this? It doesn't reflect reality at all...

Walled gardens, ad tech, lack of full ownership over your machine, less general purpose computing. I see where the writer of this is coming from for sure.

"Anyone who is excited about having an Internet connection into their brain needs their head examined."

Perhaps you can have this done with a POST request in the future and kill two birds with one stone.

Being careful is always good, but the dangers are overestimated and the benefits underestimated, by most people.

In terms of security, you could solve 80% of problems you mention by a hardware onoff switch, which would cost next to nothing. A large part of rest of the problems could be solved by limiting the information flow into a certain format/context: imagine just a 4K screen inside your mind that you can look at if you wish, but you always know that information comes from that screen and not from somewhere else. Even just such a dumb usage would be tremendous upgrade to humans everywhere. How do we know it won't give you any "thoughts"? Just limit the information flow to pixels. The interface won't even know what information you look at your internal screen, the most mischievous thing it will be able to do is to maybe make things black-and-white, or make something flicker in an annoying manner.

Last night someone put on a history documentary about Oliver Cromwell's invasions of Ireland. They showed that the invention of the printing press around that time led to all the news of the Irish rebellion having a further reach inside of England. Oliver Cromwell channeled that nationalism into his own political gains and caused a wake of destruction through Ireland.

It's exactly the same phenomenon as we see now with social media.

This is the natural cycle of human innovation in communication.

I want these interfaces to happen despite the growing pains we will have.

Besides, it doesn't matter what we want. They will happen either way.

Think about it in terms of larger time scales and the growing pains of new technology seems like a more worthwhile cost.

I know it's dismissive to label real human suffering and death as growing pains, but this stuff is inevitable, the results are predictable, and in a large enough timescale, the technology will yield immense fruit.

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