Neuralink success
This is extraordinarily wonderful:
They chose Patient One well. Great guy; great attitude.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
This is extraordinarily wonderful:
They chose Patient One well. Great guy; great attitude.
One of the first things he did was stay up until 6am playing Civilization VI.
lol
As I commented last night in response to …
We just need a better Wonk.
West+TX+Intermediate+Crude:
We’ve got a better Musk. 🙂
I’d take another dozen, if possible, which I doubt. Musk is a real throwback to the Edison/Tesla/Hughes days.
I find Musk quite a surprise. I didn’t think they made ’em like that no more.
I’m not a fanboy, but I do like a smart guy who can make things happen. Musk’s Neuralink company just did its first big demo:
–“Elon Musk’s Neuralink shows first brain-chip patient playing chess”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sjUPR2u2C0
This is a quadriplegic who has had a chip implanted in his brain which interacts with neurons such that he can move a computer mouse on the screen just by thinking.
Just by thinking.
Whatever else, hi-tech has been an amazing boon to the handicapped.
Agree it is good news.
In other good news, Sam Bankman Freid has been conviced and now senrenced to about 25 years in prison.
I’ll be standing by for the headline ” Major Democrat Donor Convicted of Defrauding Investors”
Love him, hate him, or just like him… Elon Musk is one of the most consequential currently living human beings. I found it amusing that Elizabeth Warren was going after Musk over some BS earlier this week. In a way, comparing someone like Elizabeth Warren to Elon Musk is pretty damn funny. One is a useless waste of carbon atoms and a parasite on innovation who lied about their heritage for advantage. The other is building giant rocket ships to go to the Moon and Mars and developing neural interfaces that allow severely disabled people the ability to interact with their environment. Which is doing more good for humanity?
Elon Musk wants to chip everyone. An analogy: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner morphed into Black Lives Matter.
He actively wants to save the country.
(Good enough for me….)
when they came to write the character of tony stark, the writers leaned much on their impression of Musk with a touch of Howard Hughes, I knew most about him because of Tesla, as well as his quixotic train to nowhere in California,
How many children by how many different women?
oh liz warren who I’ve dubbed red squaw, ironically, is like good for nothing, the dem electorate seem to have agreed on that point,
The development of neural interfaces that allow severely disabled people the ability to interact with their environment is a positive good.
It is a certainty that its future use by the military is being considered.
In order for a neural interface to work, it must allow for feedback, which makes it a two way street.
In principle, control over those implanted with a neural interface should also be achievable.
It is a certainty that future possibility will be used by those who see controlling other human beings as a… ‘positive’ good.
Welcome… to your brave new world.
This writer is not so sanguine about the larger, longer-term implications:
https://khmezek.substack.com/p/unlocking-the-black-box
Oh, those who know with certainty what the future holds, sheer profunditry.
Somehow allowing a quadrapedic some new joy is to be feared.
This is great for the disabled but it won’t be long until anyone without a Neuralink (or similar) implant will essentially be left behind and unable to participate in mainstream society. To some this will be seen as progress and a great expansion of the human mind. To others this will be the very end of humanity as we know it.
Whether you think this is good or bad won’t change the fact that this development is inevitable. I don’t think there is any way to stop it. We are only at the very early stages of the merger of the human mind with computers. Progress in this field will be very rapid and the results impossible to predict.
Whether you think this is good or bad won’t change the fact that this development is inevitable. I don’t think there is any way to stop it
Gregory Harper:
No argument here. AI is coming at us so fast. Even without Neuralink humanity is splitting into those who use AI and those who don’t. The former will have the advantage over the latter.
Certainly medical applications are an important immediate goal for Neuralink. But longer-term Musk is looking ahead to help humans keep pace with artificial intelligence by enabling a symbiotic relationship between the two.
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!
Gregory Harper:
As long as it requires brain surgery I don’t think it will be mainstreamed. On the other hand, if implantation becomes easy, watch out.
Once again, to know with certainty what the future holds, except on Easter, must be a crushing burden.
huxley:
I agree about AI and Musk’s plans. These developments are happening fast but we are just at the beginning of the curve. Part of me is very curious to see what happens next and part of me is absolutely terrified.
neo:
I think the advantages that a chip implant will give to those who have it combined with the progress in the relative ease of the procedure will make it an irresistible force. As I said we are at very beginning of what I think is an exponential curve.
We are talking about everybody having instantaneous access to all accumulated knowledge and the ability to nonverbally communicate with all other chipped individuals.
Those poor unchipped individuals will be living in another dimension. Kind of like the Joaquin Phoenix character in the movie “Her”.
…we are just at the beginning of the curve. Part of me is very curious to see what happens next and part of me is absolutely terrified.
Gregory Harper:
Likewise. We are at the beginning of the curve. I take some small pride in being a tech guy, but I got blindsided by the Chats. I wasn’t alone.
I figured this kind of AI was decades away and frankly I was happy with that.
But it looks like Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity timeline is right. In which case, hold on to your hats!
huxley;
Yeah, I thought Kurzweil was off by a few decades. When I read the Singularity is Near I thought it sounded all very exciting. I’m a bit less sanguine about AI now.
A couple of AI stories, not as nifty as neuralinks, but good to know.
FWIW, the brain-computer symbiotes are a staple of science fiction.
Readers of Lois Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga will recall Simon Illyan, the head of Barrayar’s security complex, and what happened when his implanted brain chip went bad in “Memory,” which IMO is one of the best character-driven detective stories ever, SF and otherwise.
If you haven’t read the book, don’t read the Wikipedia article; too many spoilers.
Oops, forgot the links.
I guess I need a memory chip!
https://notthebee.com/article/ad-companies-are-ditching-influencers-for-ai-can-you-spot-the-bots
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/announcing-nrs-chatbot-rightwinggpt/
EMP for the win.
https://tomgrey.substack.com/p/computer-aided-telepathy
I was talking about computer aided telepathy before blogging in 2001-ish, but then “something happened” in September (when I was arguing economics with Nobel winner Gary Becker about Slovakia wanting to enter the EU & the Euro zone, plus other things.)
As cell phones became popular, they provided much of the service that telepathy was expected to provide – telephones in general were closer than I thought at the time.
For some future brain-computer interface, I expect a skull cap of many highly sensitive brainwave sensors to become a sensor-AI customized controller of computers by thought. Including thinking, getting converted to text, to order Siri/ Alexa/ “Her” to do your computer bidding.
Control of the cursor is an important first step.
Kind of interesting that human thought control of cursors and computer assistant programs are even now racing against AIs being programmed to be able to understand human speech generally … in order to control & do everything that can be done on a computer screen.
“Centaurs” and cyborgs are the future — with neuralink a big cyborg step. The centaurs will have a bigger division between what the human part does and what the ai does. Sort of like chess players using ai in tournaments, combined human+ai.
Exciting. Scary. Probably the biggest ai threat is most likely a mad genius human hacking as a cyborg controlling many other AIs to do as the human wants.
Perhaps AI is the Great Filter answer to the Fermi Paradox.
AI researchers have a charming metric called p(DOOM) or PDOOM, which is the probability that AI will doom humanity.
It’s obviously a gut check, not a calculation. The numbers I hear from top people run from 5-30%.
Are you feeling lucky?