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Comment by wegfawefgawefg | Hacker News Reader

People may not like me saying this, but brain implants like this becoming commonplace effective technology is worth a lot of people dying. Probably half a million deaths at least. (not risk unknowingly)

I think the potential is too high. Early airplanes killed a lot of people, but it was totally worth it. Same with transoceanic sailing.

Brain implants can let me think pictures and music and feelings directly into/with other people. Lets us record and replay memories, including tastes and smells. (Imagine youtube for fully featured memories). Add cheap no touch, low latency control interfaces and neural hotkeys for common objects and machines. Instantly learn new skills by trading brain volume to internal asics. Instantly solve drug addiction. Im probably only touching on a small portion here.

Brain computer interfaces are a platform for the future in the same way computers as a whole are.

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Thank you for volunteering. When can we expect you to show up at the meat grinder? Will you bring your family with you?

I did not volunteer. As I would not accept it given the current risk level, or costs. But there are people who would. And as that risk is reduced, and the risk window pushed back, more and more people would, so the sum total of people dying after using a device over ten to fifty years would increase, but the result of the technologies widespread use would be rapid improvement in it that we would all mutually benefit from.

Consider cars kill easily a million people every year, and they are totally normal. Thats not some crazy experimental technology. People decided. Cars are/were worth millions of deaths.

If you are still not convinced, consider what I said but in the context of airplanes in the 1910s.

Nobody should be forced into it. I did not say they should. And they should be well aware of the risks. Short term and long term. Potential unknown risks as well. But poeple use technology and enjoy it, despite dying from it.

The trouble with your utopian thinking is that we do not have an education system that reliably equips people to make rational decisions, nor do we have information hygiene rules that help reduce noise so that people can make rational decisions. Last, but far from least, we do not give people the time to think and/or collect data.

So, this is not to say that any of this tech should be banned or regulated. Regulation itself is at risk of being irrationally/dishonestly captured.

It's just that there's no cause for celebration either. A lot of people are going to suffer, and ultimately even if the tech does mature, people will find far more ways to enshittify it for a quick buck.

In other words, even if in the best case scenario we might have new gadgets etc. the world won't really change. The shape of our conflicts (information vs. misinformation) will remain roughly the same, and the balance of our power in those conflicts will remain roughly the same.

As a consequence: the probability that you (or yours) will get to benefit, rather than merely be the temporarily-disgraced winners will remain roughly the same: quite low.

I do not have any utopian thinking. I just said "wow paper is such a great invention. if i had paper i could send messages really far away and write down my thoughts and draw and write. Everyone could benefit in so many ways if paper was ubiquitous. Its probably worth a lot of effort and sacrifice."

And youre the one going on about politics, regulation, and utopia. Its just not relevant.

This is a terribly cynical take on the world. Why strive for any progress at all, then?

> Brain implants can let me think pictures and music and feelings directly into/with other people.

So this hypothetical device can insert images, sounds, and emotions directly into a person's mind?

> Lets us record and replay memories, including tastes and smells.

Any device that can do this can implant false memories as well.

> Instantly solve drug addiction.

In other words, it has an extreme degree of control over one's emotional state.

You don't even mention a single downside of this tech, only your grand utopian vision. Have you thought about them at all? Handwaving them away with "well airplanes used to crash more, I'm sure we'll figure it out" doesn't count.

Thats not hypothetical those are pretty obvious functions of the tech. If two people have it implanted in similar regions and have record,playback, and can send files to the other person for playback、then you get thought transmission. Probably lossily. Two people with internet enabled laptops. (more useful if both of them can read and write a common language)

There are downsides of course, but the benefit vs downside of most new technology is assymetricaly in favor of the upsides, primarily due to human nature being assymetrically good natured. You can use an iphone to organize terrorist attacks and scams, or to call your loved ones. Thats up to the users. 99.9999% of users are just using it to do normal human social stuff. Probably same for implants, but cooler. That doesnt make an iphone utopian. Thats your words not mine.

paper and conversation, and audio recordings, cameras and video do many of these things. Just with lower bandwidths.

As for new vulnerabilities, I dont know if we will be able to interpret incoming signals via brain interface as foreign, but id guess like any other input, if you didnt grow up with it youd be susceptable to manipulation. But if you grew up with it youd probably have some sense in discerning between your ideas and others ideas. (Sort of like how my grandma thinks scam emails are from honest people, but for younger folks its obviously malicious) Could be wrong though. Only one way to find out. Put one in grandma.

I don't think this:

> the benefit vs downside of most new technology is assymetricaly in favor of the upsides

Follows from this:

> primarily due to human nature being assymetrically good natured.

Even though I agree with the second one.

How many people are involved in adtech, finding new and ever more cynical ways to collect, mine, and exploit your data to manipulate consumer behavior to their benefit? A tiny minority. And yet their work influences nearly everyone in the developed world every day.

How many people are willing to use nuclear weapons against their fellow humans? Again, a tiny minority, but it only takes a few. If the majority of people being good natured was a safeguard, the existence of nuclear weapons would be of no concern to anyone.

There's an asymmetry you're not accounting for: the asymmetry of power wielded by those who are willing to use a technology for nefarious purposes. It only takes a handful of people (relatively speaking) to buy and sell the personal information of billions, to deploy a weapon, or to exploit for personal gain what is essentially a mind control device as you've described it.

Also, while people may be "asymmetrically good natured", I would argue that they're also asymmetrically naive and ineffectual. Just look at domestic spying in the Five Eyes nations. That was considered a wild conspiracy theory for years until Snowden proved it was happening. Then after he proved it, tons of people just shrugged and said "well they're doing it to protect us, and I have nothing to hide anyway". A lot of that "good nature" people have isn't goodness, it's harmlessness. They're not good like Batman, they're good like a bunny rabbit. That's part of the reason it's so easy for the evil minority to wield such power over them.

you have provided some of the water drops of counterexamples in an ocean of cooperatively used technology. Fire, buildings, wheels, hammers. You are so used to this world of assymetrically positively used technology that you dont even notice it.

I would not forego the internet itself in fear of adtech existing. Acceptable consequence. worth it. same for implants. All of the unimaginable malicious avenues provided by the internet,and I still would rather it exist amd be ubiquitous than not.

As would I, and I work in tech myself. Technology is a wonderful thing, when used wisely.

My argument is not that technology is bad. It's that every technology isn't automatically good just because it's technology and "people are nice". There's a reason nerve agents aren't available over the counter at your local pharmacy.

I believe that almost every technology is net good.

The reason i believe that is i fundamentally believe almost all people are selfish semi rational and cooperative by default. And I think that positive behavioural inclination may have evolved as a solution to an environment that required game theory like itterated cooperation, where the emergent solution was like 90% cooperative actors and 10% exploititive actors.

Even if that were not true, this particular technology is a platform, a medium for other technologies, and so I suspect the distribution of its use and misuse will be nearly identical to all the other similar technologies, such as paper, phones, the internet, etc

Damn. I'm all for finding ways for this technology to help people, but you sound like a fucking psychopath. Life isn't as simple as "trade X number of human lives for shinny new Utopia"

apologies for the misunderstanding, perhaps it could have been written better. follow the comments to get more context.

(but i also believe your gut punch interpetation said something about you more than me)

"brain implants like this becoming commonplace effective technology is worth a lot of people dying"

well my context was a lot of people in the thread bitching about how the technology could maybe be dangerous and people might die from the implants 20 years later from brain damage. But nobody mentioning all the cool shit that you can do with it, so its probably worth the risks.

just like cars, planes, surgery, etc. theyre all dangerous as fuck but were worth the risk.

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