I'm sitting in a coffee shop where no one is interacting with each other, and are all staring at glowing screens of varying sizes.
I'm ssh'ed into both my workstation and one of the ten most powerful supercomputers ever constructed, where I am running scientific simulations, essentially to model and probe reality.
At night, my wife and I communicate in real time with our family despite massive geographic distances.
I take a bus in the morning. Everyone is staring at screens. I don't see why another version of Google Glass isn't going to make a come back. Something less invasive and dorkier.
We just want the info right in front of our eyes. Something that augments us as a human directly.
> and are all staring at glowing screens of varying sizes
I don't know.. whenever I peek most of the times it happens to be facebook/whatsapp/instagram/email. To me it seems to be more of an addiction of some kind, perhaps I'm wired differently because I like deep focus and totally abhor random notifications and alerts and don't peek as much into my devices
The last cafe I was at, last week, I had an engaging conversation with the cashier, shared a smile with a mother about her ungainly, teetering toddler's excitable wanderings and commented with a guy at the neighbouring table about how nice it was to hear kids playing outside in the courtyard. When not chatting to people around me, I read a book and ate the delicious chocolate cake. The merger has already happened for some people.
I think the interesting point is that he has a fleet of cars that are all driving around coming across new situations.
These are fed into the big AI that figures out new rules, these rules are sent to the cars to see how they work.
So the AI is learning way faster than any human could, it is learning in parallel. We can only drive on car at a time.
And this is version 1.0 of AI, I do wonder how relevant humans will be when AI is learning everything in parallel . Robots, rovers, the internet, cars, factories, humans, weather stations, satellites, everything hooked up to these AIs who learn and learn and learn.
Just like a parent can watch a child and predict their mood, what they want, what will make them happy, how to control and manipulate them... won't the AIs do the same thing. Sometimes with our blessing. How useful will it be to have an AI keep an eye on paedophiles, monitor them, maybe with tactics to distract them and to engage them in some other way. Society likes that. Now how far will we push that? Will we allow the AI to almost re-program them? To make them better? The AI will understand the human brain, it will understand how to change triggers and behaviours (don't we already have therapists who do this?) ... do we allow this to happen?
Fake news ... wouldn't an AI be able to perform mass experiments on the population to see how to change the popular vote. Say a Trump supporter dislikes muslims, then some gentle persuasion by showing a more pro-muslim news feed .... would the government want to alter this behaviour. We currently try to do this with terrorists, with illegal activity by blocking pro-<insert illegal activity here> websites ... when do we move from blocking a site to actively promoting the other point of view?
An AI that is reading what we read, simulating what we think (are we so unique? Could a population be simulated with a few thousand different personality types?) ... simulate how we respond to certain news stories, what are triggers are.
Exactly. People are going to slowly merge with non-human elements from biological and machine systems, assuming that we don't wipe ourselves out or go back to banging the rocks together. It's going to be a while before it's at the level of an external interface though.
Sure, we are able to work/communicate remotely. But the problem is that even remote work on super-computer is limiting and reduces the iteration cycle. I prefer to run small and fast experiments on local machine, fine-tune for significant time and after this send them to big cluster. Once in this stage, observing the progress from coffee shop is more like a "gradient addiction" for me. Why? On local machine I get much faster iterations and find errors quickly. In Elon's words, the "bandwidth" between me and machine is higher. The merge started, but there is still a lot to be discovered in order to broaden the information flow.
Machines can already see better than blind people. Machines can already hear better than deaf people. Machines can already move better than an invalid.
The low hanging fruit will be prosthesis for people missing that function. Then for people with impaired function. Then for people with full function (would you like a better memory/vision/hearing than you ever had before?)
The "merger" that musk has in mind is on another level though.
You are describing what we already have, and yes, it's amazing, but it's not nearly enough to compete with the AI of the future.
If we want to be competitive, we'll need a larger bandwidth in input and output for our brains to get and put out larger amounts of data, and possibly a speed upgrade to make the necessary calculations faster.
If we don't, then we will have no chance to keep up with artificial intelligence, and if our goals don't align with the goals of the AI, then there is nothing we'll be able to do, that could be potentially very dangerous, and it's the reason Musk is saying that we need a neural lace to make this merger.
Have you noticed, how smartphones vacuum tangible reality?
How many of you have real alarm clock sitting on the table, for example. It lives on, but as more intangible presence, in each and every phone. Alarm clock has died, but lives. It is present, but not present at the same time, just the spirit continues, I would say.
Soon it will happen or is happening to other items as well, and perhaps one day our spirits will live in the machine the same way alarm clock lives now.
I wholeheartedly recommend watching Japanese anime Ghost in the shell movies as a nice peek to the future.
This is a beautiful analogy. It captures the essence of it. The clock has transcended from wood and steel gears into flowing electrons on a generic computational matrix. It will be the same for humans.
It'll become pretty funny if humans become so addicted to alt-reality that future generations view leaving the planet's atmosphere as stuff of nightmares. Since they'll no longer have instant access any more.
Prediction or self-fulfilling prophecy? Sounds like he's determined to force it to happen whether or not the average person wants it.
I was disturbed by the notion of an RFID in my dog. I am even more disturbed by having one in my daughter. Having a brain implant so billionaires can maximize my profitability (for their own gain) - take a hike! I'll go back to hunting and growing before participating in that economy.
I wish we'd spend more time trying to get software to work right rather than creating cyborgs. The idea of having a "blue screen of death" happen in my head is terrifying.
The problem that a lot of people refuse to acknowledge or simply haven't thought of is that a very large portion of the world's population is being left out of the debate about whether or not we should even be moving down these techno-futuristic paths. It's just sort of happening based on the desire of a few million nerds. It's not as though people are universally happy about the technological advancements over the past 20 years. Even people within the tech community debate over the woes of information overload, device overuse, increasing reliance on inherently insecure systems, etc, and even then those are debates about what has already come to pass.
Questions that are being answered without the feedback of the world at large:
Should we create artificial intelligences and allow them to become integral parts of our most critical systems?
Should we become increasingly reliant on the Internet, to the point at which ones survival is predicated upon their access to it?
Should we create robots in our image to perform the duties humans used to perform and what should the limit to the abilities and sophistication we imbue them be?
Should we be mapping the human genome and creating technologies that alter, categorize, and predetermine our genetic makeup?
Should we be dedicating significant resources to inhabiting other planets instead of focusing on maintaining the habitability of our own planet?
Should we be trying to eradicate all disease and are we aware of the ecological and evolutionary consequences of doing so?
Science is great at helping us figure out how to do these things, but it's useless for figuring out whether or not they should be done. Unfortunately, the virtue of science is so over-emphasized in postmodern western culture (especially in universities) that our ability to wrestle with the ethics of our technological advancements has become severely diminished.
The institutions that used to provide a significant counterweight to scientific thought are being squeezed out of a world that is becoming increasingly reliant on the systems that scientific endeavors have helped to establish. The wealth, influence, and power in the world is shifting rapidly from religious institutions to scientific ones. The assumption is that this shift is universally good – a move from ignorance to enlightenment – and in a lot of ways this is true.
Nobody can deny the benefits the enlightenment has brought to the world. But we're simply trading one set of problems for another. We better able to understand what the physical world is and to be able to bend it to our will, but we are less able to understand the metaphysical world and properly define the way in which we ought to live. We're swinging too far in the other direction when we should be trying to figure out the correct balance between the two.
The thing most singularity proponents are missing is that the human brain produces its amazing computational abilities with a power consumption of about 20 watts. We're starting to bump up against the limits of industrial semiconductor fabrication processes and we're probably still about four orders of magnitude away from that in terms of efficiency.
AI won't take over the world, but I agree with Elon that we are in the process of becoming a cyborg hive mind. We're already hyperconnected, and as computer interfaces become more frictionless, they will start to resemble prosthetic extensions of ourselves. Due to their invasive nature and the difficulty of security, I doubt neural implants will ever be a thing outside of curing disabilities. That being said, if we combined data from extremely sensitive EEG style headwear with gesture and expression analysis we could probably make something nearly as useful.
Well I am sitting in India and have been watching a lady sitting outside a temple making a beautiful flower garland. That is all she does the whole day. I don't think she needs the hive mind or AI in any way whatsoever.
So lets not get carried away with Elon Musk's Ivory tower hubris. You want reality don't pay attention to ego-maniacal salesmen pay attention to people like Andrew Ng. He doesn't just have the tech cred but lives in close contact with the needs of ordinary people who aren't thinking about Mars or Teslas. And doing so quite happily I might add.
Of course AI will take over the world. It's just that edge between then and now will likely be fractal. There won't be an enormous battle in the sky, there will just be a people living in meat and a few generations later most 'people' will live in another computational matrix. Those people will be the people of their time and will watch and ponder over our shared cultural heritage just as people do today.
> Due to their invasive nature and the difficulty of security, I doubt neural implants will ever be a thing outside of curing disabilities. That being said, if we combined data from extremely sensitive EEG style headwear with gesture and expression analysis we could probably make something nearly as useful.
I don't agree that neural implants would necessarily remain disfavored due to the invasive nature. I (and probably many others here) would get one in a heartbeat.
On the security issue and your fix: I read an interesting blog post on the anime "Ghost in the Shell". We see the characters using cybernetic hand replacments with 30 micro-fingers, and a keyboard that supports an unlimited degree of chording.
With a standard keyboard, this works out to roughly 2.7 trillion possible key combinations, assuming you can type 24 times per second this works out to a data rate of 6.59e13 bits per second. This is an absurd amount of data, more than a human could ever comprehend without a cybernetically-enhanced brain (in which case - why use a computer?). It's vastly larger than you would need even to represent whole words or concepts as individual glyphs as in Kanji.
Instead, the author posits that this is in fact a digital representation of the (~100 billion) neurons in a human brain. The cybernetic hands might be a simple "passive" device which produces a snapshot of the state of the brain and expresses it physically via the fingers. The characters in this universe do have direct electronic neural connections. However, this analog approach would avoid the dangers inherent to directly connecting "wetware" to an untrusted system using a 2-way connection.
I predict that augmented minds will perform spectacular feats and then quickly burn out. Either vegetative state or depression and suicide. We're far too moody and fragile to have our thoughts accelerated to compute speeds without mental collapse.
That is, unless we can somehow lose our humanity in the process. But then, we're no longer being augmented. We're being replaced.
The happy medium we will obtain will be replacing the video, audio, touch input and keyboards with mental equivalents. Therefore, one's 'bandwidth' to the computer/network will still necessarily be limited to that of an observer of the compute functions of the computer rather than one who has integrated their mind and consciousness with the computer.
One of the most treasured features of these systems will be the off button. And a sizeable subset of the populace will run primarily in offline-mode but with regular access to some huge local data trove curated from online data.
>That is, unless we can somehow lose our humanity in the process. But then, we're no longer being augmented. We're being replaced.
Right, which is a great thing that should be celebrated! Creating a successor is arguably what our core "programming" (DNA) is all about. The biological imperative as it were.
What about the idea that we can create the successor to humanity? Why wouldn't we celebrate creating something better than ourselves?
I doubt that burn-out will be that serious an issue. I used to get depressed a lot, until I learned how to hack the mechanism. With deep hooks into brain function, I see no reason why people would be depressed, unless they wanted to be.
Some will argue that heavily augmented people are no longer human. Back in the day, I'm sure that some considered the use of stone tools in the same way. But they apparently didn't have many descendants ;)
As someone who has early adopted technology since childhood, I'm surprisingly contrarian on this. And it's not the tech, it's the state of society and industry that's making me feel this way.
For I want said technology to all but disappear Avatar-style except when I need it(1). Along the way I don't want craptastic screendoor VR, I want BSG-reboot Cylon VR. I don't see that coming anytime soon.
I don't want to be bombarded by the outputs of conv nets, SVMs, and other assorted RainMan-level ML models that are occasionally helpful but mostly just distracting factoid spam (see Google Now for a perfect example of this).
I'd love a self-driving car (for real), but I'd love a life where I didn't have to drive everywhere even more. I don't need AI for that, I just need to move to a city. And honestly, driving my sportscar is fun when it's on nearly abandoned mountain roads and highways (see craptastic VR bit about why VR is not a good surrogate). Why would I want to give that up to run with the cool kids(tm)?
I'd even love a brain computer interface, in fact MIT Neuroscience turned me down for admission despite my GPA and GRE scores specifically for saying I wanted to work on this a couple decades ago, but the mobile web is godawful enough already without giving silicon demons like Google and Facebook a direct feed to my brain. I don't trust industry 1 QBit here.
Finally, to quote RadioHead, "I want a perfect body, I want a perfect soul(tm)." If that makes me a creep, I'm OK with that. If AI (and tech in general) doesn't improve me or my life, I don't want it around me anymore and we're just a few years into this.
1. I work in AI. And I'm trying to make it work behind the scenes rather than in your face. To that end, I focus on pull, and I despise any sort of push short of protecting me from harm or keeping me on my schedule.
1 is easily reversible and isolated, 2 not so much. It's realistic and highly probably that someone with a little effort could hack my phone and cause it to malfunction in various ways. I account for that in the way I use it.
There is no chance in hell I'm implanting something like that in my body. And that's not even touching on bugs, regular malfunction and shitty standards we have in SW industry for reliability and maintenance - good luck being stuck with an implant from corp X that got acquired and is no longer supporting it.
I have to admire Elon Musk's ability to tap into the zeitgeist of the intelligent, technical community. Mars, AI... he hits all of the big hopeful/scary notes as though he were somehow riding astride them; truly, a master of PR.
I don't get this idea. I mean, what is he trying to do other than what he says???
If I were a multibillionaire, I'd do the same thing: build really cool stuff and solve problems I think are important that no one else is really addressing appropriately. I'd be building spaceships and flying cars and things like that, just what Musk is doing (well, not flying cars, but close).
I see the opposite. I do not advocate hippie kumbaya lifestyle but I see a lot of people around me wanting to disconnect from internet.
People are sick of endless stream of irrelevant or relevant data.
In the late 90s/early 2000s I couldn't wait to hardwire the 'net into my brain.
Now, after watching advertising companies and black-hats (state sponsored and otherwise) eat the Web and shit it back out as something horrifying and creepy, I'm expecting to one day be part of some kind of weird 'net-free community. When Moloch[1] inevitably makes everyone wire in (permanently) to keep participating in the ordinary economy, count me out.
And I think it is completely foolish to ignore that trend. Just like new threats naturally generate counter-measures (e.g. computer viruses and bugs drive the emergence of security software), things that are perceived to have negative consequences will give birth to counter-measures of some kind, and the net result will be a much less extremist future, a boring, middle-of-the-road thing, where people can access the "hive mind" much more freely.
Which makes you wonder, why are people who are proponents of such things use such terribly connoted words words to market them? Who the fuck wants to be part of a "hive mind"? Or is it just FUD?
> "In an age when AI threatens to become widespread, humans would be useless, so there's a need to merge with machines, according to Musk."
Useless for what? Working their jobs and feeding families? Sure, if we assume that current capitalistic structure is going to persist, many humans will either need to be eliminated or otherwise sustained through some of form of welfare. But why must we assume that?
"Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost."
I just hope it happens in a subtler way than "implant chip in brain" or "install bionic eyes", or even "plug cable in the back of the head".
I don't think the vast majority of people would go for things like that. Non-invasive procedures would be much more preferable, if this is to happen. Maybe something like wireless communication between the brain and machines, but without implanting receivers in our heads.
"... as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone... they no longer build spaceships. They were spaceships." Arthur C. Clarke.
It seems clear that this biological implementation is going to be obsolete some time soon..
I think the symbiotic relationship b/w humans and machines is more on the lines of interaction based rather than a stereotypical sci-fi chip implant one.
I did not come across that quote anywhere in the link. And everyone here seems to take it ... oddly.
My interpretation of the quote is not literal. Instead as machines take over greater and greater portions of our day to day tasks, we will need to utilize them better and more significantly. They have incredible power and capability in performing tasks of more complex, large-scale, or annoying nature, and the tighter we merge with them, the more useful they will be to us, and the more relevant we will be to them.
And I believe he is right. Put it this way, there are a million tasks for humanity to do in the world. Yet, we can only find the time, resource, manpower to do 10% of them. How can we allow for more people to do more of those million things? By automating the mundane.
What do we automate first? The stuff that is unhealthy, then the stuff that is a tax on the ecology of the planet, then the stuff that is too boring to do.
So what does humanity focus on then? Health, Elderly care, Animal protection, community development, child development, recreation, religion. Maybe the economics of these industries have not fully developed yet. But when they do, that is what we can focus on.
I hate this gloom & doom talk about when AI will take over. Have we lost all imagination about what greater things there is left to do?
Most human beings have been working in the service of some 'other' since the agrarian revolution got into full swing 6000 years ago. First it was the raiders, slavers, and tyrants of city states. The priesthoods of hydraulic empires. Churches, guilds, and kings. Then there was an emergent capitalist class, machinery, and national states.
Now human beings are being framed as competitors with machines for livelihoods in a money economy that is increasingly inappropriate for our social, environmental, and economic needs.
The unfortunate insistence that human beings serve technology and the powerful people who use it as a tool to facilitate the extraction of wealth from an increasingly complacent domesticated human population will result in our extinction as Elon Musk predicts - unless we can collectively insist MORE INSISTENTLY that technology be made to serve us: human beings whose lives have intrinsic value. Technology can be used to build a paradise in the physical world for us, but instead we are being shuffled into brightly lit slaughterhouse chutes of virtuality. Fuck that.
I think, what most people here are missing in the discussion, is that Elon Musk mainly points out there is a mismatch in INPUT vs OUTPUT bandwidth between a computer and a human.
We only communicate to computer via toch, button clicks, keyboard and mouse. The bandwidth is low here.
However we can already "read" from a computer using vision which is a high bandwidth connection.
If you think about it, from first principles (like Elon Musk often advocates), this gap can probably be solved by a better interface with computers. Thing about a Brain-Computer cable.
Or we could computers learn to recognize human voice, human facial expression etc. That would increase the bandwidth. However it would be a lot cooler to send our "thinking" to a computer. This would allows us to program faster, too lookup wikipedia articles faster etc.
The problem with this type of AI development is that decisions are made based on wrong assumptions. "AI" as in "fast computing" is no match for a bio based sentient human. The "AI" does not know of dreams, of love, of inspiration, of introversion, osmosis, compassion, biodiversity or other fundamental archetypes. As a computer it can only make decisions based on logic. But we surely can agree that our day to day experience of life is much more than only "logic". Based on logic only the human will become irrelevant. . true. It is up to us to agree we are much more that a small part in our brain that can be used for computation.
I think eye glasses or contact lens are marriage of man and machine.
A car or bicycle is a marriage of man and machine.
So, is a sword.
Marriage of man and machine has been happening ever since humans started using tools... stone age or stick age tools.
We are increasing the accessibility and intimacy of the tools.
I don't know, I am conflicted about this. Should we make it super easy for everyone to access and link and build upon vast knowledge at moments notice at the service of individual whims and wishes that are susceptible to greed, lust, jealously and pure evil, and just environmental hiccups, Or, should we let our AI overlords control how far we go as individuals?
Age of AI is arriving, but has humanity of humans arrived?
[+] [-] arcanus|9 years ago|reply
I'm ssh'ed into both my workstation and one of the ten most powerful supercomputers ever constructed, where I am running scientific simulations, essentially to model and probe reality.
At night, my wife and I communicate in real time with our family despite massive geographic distances.
The merger has already happened, people.
[+] [-] nojvek|9 years ago|reply
We just want the info right in front of our eyes. Something that augments us as a human directly.
[+] [-] krmboya|9 years ago|reply
I don't know.. whenever I peek most of the times it happens to be facebook/whatsapp/instagram/email. To me it seems to be more of an addiction of some kind, perhaps I'm wired differently because I like deep focus and totally abhor random notifications and alerts and don't peek as much into my devices
[+] [-] proactivesvcs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monk_e_boy|9 years ago|reply
These are fed into the big AI that figures out new rules, these rules are sent to the cars to see how they work.
So the AI is learning way faster than any human could, it is learning in parallel. We can only drive on car at a time.
And this is version 1.0 of AI, I do wonder how relevant humans will be when AI is learning everything in parallel . Robots, rovers, the internet, cars, factories, humans, weather stations, satellites, everything hooked up to these AIs who learn and learn and learn.
Just like a parent can watch a child and predict their mood, what they want, what will make them happy, how to control and manipulate them... won't the AIs do the same thing. Sometimes with our blessing. How useful will it be to have an AI keep an eye on paedophiles, monitor them, maybe with tactics to distract them and to engage them in some other way. Society likes that. Now how far will we push that? Will we allow the AI to almost re-program them? To make them better? The AI will understand the human brain, it will understand how to change triggers and behaviours (don't we already have therapists who do this?) ... do we allow this to happen?
Fake news ... wouldn't an AI be able to perform mass experiments on the population to see how to change the popular vote. Say a Trump supporter dislikes muslims, then some gentle persuasion by showing a more pro-muslim news feed .... would the government want to alter this behaviour. We currently try to do this with terrorists, with illegal activity by blocking pro-<insert illegal activity here> websites ... when do we move from blocking a site to actively promoting the other point of view?
An AI that is reading what we read, simulating what we think (are we so unique? Could a population be simulated with a few thousand different personality types?) ... simulate how we respond to certain news stories, what are triggers are.
[+] [-] M_Grey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kalal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hashkb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] localhost|9 years ago|reply
Machines can already see better than blind people. Machines can already hear better than deaf people. Machines can already move better than an invalid.
The low hanging fruit will be prosthesis for people missing that function. Then for people with impaired function. Then for people with full function (would you like a better memory/vision/hearing than you ever had before?)
[+] [-] Metsuryu|9 years ago|reply
You are describing what we already have, and yes, it's amazing, but it's not nearly enough to compete with the AI of the future.
If we want to be competitive, we'll need a larger bandwidth in input and output for our brains to get and put out larger amounts of data, and possibly a speed upgrade to make the necessary calculations faster.
If we don't, then we will have no chance to keep up with artificial intelligence, and if our goals don't align with the goals of the AI, then there is nothing we'll be able to do, that could be potentially very dangerous, and it's the reason Musk is saying that we need a neural lace to make this merger.
[+] [-] shiftoutbox|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vitro|9 years ago|reply
How many of you have real alarm clock sitting on the table, for example. It lives on, but as more intangible presence, in each and every phone. Alarm clock has died, but lives. It is present, but not present at the same time, just the spirit continues, I would say.
Soon it will happen or is happening to other items as well, and perhaps one day our spirits will live in the machine the same way alarm clock lives now.
I wholeheartedly recommend watching Japanese anime Ghost in the shell movies as a nice peek to the future.
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lightbyte|9 years ago|reply
Is this really THAT unusual? I still use a normal alarm clock next to my bed every day because I don't like to bring my phone into my bedroom.
[+] [-] ageofwant|9 years ago|reply
I'm stealing it, it's mine now. Thanks.
[+] [-] lithos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devopsproject|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpyne|9 years ago|reply
I was disturbed by the notion of an RFID in my dog. I am even more disturbed by having one in my daughter. Having a brain implant so billionaires can maximize my profitability (for their own gain) - take a hike! I'll go back to hunting and growing before participating in that economy.
I wish we'd spend more time trying to get software to work right rather than creating cyborgs. The idea of having a "blue screen of death" happen in my head is terrifying.
[+] [-] marknutter|9 years ago|reply
Questions that are being answered without the feedback of the world at large:
Should we create artificial intelligences and allow them to become integral parts of our most critical systems?
Should we become increasingly reliant on the Internet, to the point at which ones survival is predicated upon their access to it?
Should we create robots in our image to perform the duties humans used to perform and what should the limit to the abilities and sophistication we imbue them be?
Should we be mapping the human genome and creating technologies that alter, categorize, and predetermine our genetic makeup?
Should we be dedicating significant resources to inhabiting other planets instead of focusing on maintaining the habitability of our own planet?
Should we be trying to eradicate all disease and are we aware of the ecological and evolutionary consequences of doing so?
Science is great at helping us figure out how to do these things, but it's useless for figuring out whether or not they should be done. Unfortunately, the virtue of science is so over-emphasized in postmodern western culture (especially in universities) that our ability to wrestle with the ethics of our technological advancements has become severely diminished.
The institutions that used to provide a significant counterweight to scientific thought are being squeezed out of a world that is becoming increasingly reliant on the systems that scientific endeavors have helped to establish. The wealth, influence, and power in the world is shifting rapidly from religious institutions to scientific ones. The assumption is that this shift is universally good – a move from ignorance to enlightenment – and in a lot of ways this is true.
Nobody can deny the benefits the enlightenment has brought to the world. But we're simply trading one set of problems for another. We better able to understand what the physical world is and to be able to bend it to our will, but we are less able to understand the metaphysical world and properly define the way in which we ought to live. We're swinging too far in the other direction when we should be trying to figure out the correct balance between the two.
[+] [-] CuriouslyC|9 years ago|reply
AI won't take over the world, but I agree with Elon that we are in the process of becoming a cyborg hive mind. We're already hyperconnected, and as computer interfaces become more frictionless, they will start to resemble prosthetic extensions of ourselves. Due to their invasive nature and the difficulty of security, I doubt neural implants will ever be a thing outside of curing disabilities. That being said, if we combined data from extremely sensitive EEG style headwear with gesture and expression analysis we could probably make something nearly as useful.
[+] [-] ergen-|9 years ago|reply
So lets not get carried away with Elon Musk's Ivory tower hubris. You want reality don't pay attention to ego-maniacal salesmen pay attention to people like Andrew Ng. He doesn't just have the tech cred but lives in close contact with the needs of ordinary people who aren't thinking about Mars or Teslas. And doing so quite happily I might add.
[+] [-] ageofwant|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulmd|9 years ago|reply
I don't agree that neural implants would necessarily remain disfavored due to the invasive nature. I (and probably many others here) would get one in a heartbeat.
On the security issue and your fix: I read an interesting blog post on the anime "Ghost in the Shell". We see the characters using cybernetic hand replacments with 30 micro-fingers, and a keyboard that supports an unlimited degree of chording.
http://i.imgur.com/tthpnHa.gif
With a standard keyboard, this works out to roughly 2.7 trillion possible key combinations, assuming you can type 24 times per second this works out to a data rate of 6.59e13 bits per second. This is an absurd amount of data, more than a human could ever comprehend without a cybernetically-enhanced brain (in which case - why use a computer?). It's vastly larger than you would need even to represent whole words or concepts as individual glyphs as in Kanji.
Instead, the author posits that this is in fact a digital representation of the (~100 billion) neurons in a human brain. The cybernetic hands might be a simple "passive" device which produces a snapshot of the state of the brain and expresses it physically via the fingers. The characters in this universe do have direct electronic neural connections. However, this analog approach would avoid the dangers inherent to directly connecting "wetware" to an untrusted system using a 2-way connection.
https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/the-secret-...
[+] [-] EdSharkey|9 years ago|reply
That is, unless we can somehow lose our humanity in the process. But then, we're no longer being augmented. We're being replaced.
The happy medium we will obtain will be replacing the video, audio, touch input and keyboards with mental equivalents. Therefore, one's 'bandwidth' to the computer/network will still necessarily be limited to that of an observer of the compute functions of the computer rather than one who has integrated their mind and consciousness with the computer.
One of the most treasured features of these systems will be the off button. And a sizeable subset of the populace will run primarily in offline-mode but with regular access to some huge local data trove curated from online data.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|9 years ago|reply
Right, which is a great thing that should be celebrated! Creating a successor is arguably what our core "programming" (DNA) is all about. The biological imperative as it were.
What about the idea that we can create the successor to humanity? Why wouldn't we celebrate creating something better than ourselves?
[+] [-] mirimir|9 years ago|reply
Some will argue that heavily augmented people are no longer human. Back in the day, I'm sure that some considered the use of stone tools in the same way. But they apparently didn't have many descendants ;)
[+] [-] devopsproject|9 years ago|reply
They will make a drug for that
[+] [-] kordless|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AIMunchkin|9 years ago|reply
For I want said technology to all but disappear Avatar-style except when I need it(1). Along the way I don't want craptastic screendoor VR, I want BSG-reboot Cylon VR. I don't see that coming anytime soon.
I don't want to be bombarded by the outputs of conv nets, SVMs, and other assorted RainMan-level ML models that are occasionally helpful but mostly just distracting factoid spam (see Google Now for a perfect example of this).
I'd love a self-driving car (for real), but I'd love a life where I didn't have to drive everywhere even more. I don't need AI for that, I just need to move to a city. And honestly, driving my sportscar is fun when it's on nearly abandoned mountain roads and highways (see craptastic VR bit about why VR is not a good surrogate). Why would I want to give that up to run with the cool kids(tm)?
I'd even love a brain computer interface, in fact MIT Neuroscience turned me down for admission despite my GPA and GRE scores specifically for saying I wanted to work on this a couple decades ago, but the mobile web is godawful enough already without giving silicon demons like Google and Facebook a direct feed to my brain. I don't trust industry 1 QBit here.
Finally, to quote RadioHead, "I want a perfect body, I want a perfect soul(tm)." If that makes me a creep, I'm OK with that. If AI (and tech in general) doesn't improve me or my life, I don't want it around me anymore and we're just a few years into this.
1. I work in AI. And I'm trying to make it work behind the scenes rather than in your face. To that end, I focus on pull, and I despise any sort of push short of protecting me from harm or keeping me on my schedule.
[+] [-] 1propionyl|9 years ago|reply
We just haven't implanted our augments yet, and haven't come up with a direct neural bus. We communicate with them via touch and sight instead.
Which of the following transitions is more world-shaking?
1) Going from being a plain old human to a human with a smartphone, internet access practically anywhere.
2) Implanting the functionality of that phone in our bodies.
[+] [-] rubber_duck|9 years ago|reply
There is no chance in hell I'm implanting something like that in my body. And that's not even touching on bugs, regular malfunction and shitty standards we have in SW industry for reliability and maintenance - good luck being stuck with an implant from corp X that got acquired and is no longer supporting it.
[+] [-] akerro|9 years ago|reply
For everyone! For free!*
* Sponsored by Google, Facebook, NSA, Twitter, Bayern. Terms and conditions apply ask your local dealer for more info.
[+] [-] lallysingh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] M_Grey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Robotbeat|9 years ago|reply
I don't get this idea. I mean, what is he trying to do other than what he says???
If I were a multibillionaire, I'd do the same thing: build really cool stuff and solve problems I think are important that no one else is really addressing appropriately. I'd be building spaceships and flying cars and things like that, just what Musk is doing (well, not flying cars, but close).
[+] [-] holydude|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ashark|9 years ago|reply
Now, after watching advertising companies and black-hats (state sponsored and otherwise) eat the Web and shit it back out as something horrifying and creepy, I'm expecting to one day be part of some kind of weird 'net-free community. When Moloch[1] inevitably makes everyone wire in (permanently) to keep participating in the ordinary economy, count me out.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
[+] [-] davidivadavid|9 years ago|reply
Which makes you wonder, why are people who are proponents of such things use such terribly connoted words words to market them? Who the fuck wants to be part of a "hive mind"? Or is it just FUD?
[+] [-] baursak|9 years ago|reply
Useless for what? Working their jobs and feeding families? Sure, if we assume that current capitalistic structure is going to persist, many humans will either need to be eliminated or otherwise sustained through some of form of welfare. But why must we assume that?
[+] [-] ivm|9 years ago|reply
– Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator (1940)
[+] [-] mtgx|9 years ago|reply
I don't think the vast majority of people would go for things like that. Non-invasive procedures would be much more preferable, if this is to happen. Maybe something like wireless communication between the brain and machines, but without implanting receivers in our heads.
[+] [-] swayvil|9 years ago|reply
"How symmetric, how uniform, how efficient. If only I could be like you!"
He proceeds to plane his back flat, saw off his legs to replace them with painted oak, trim that awkward horn...
His friends, appalled, have him committed.
[+] [-] tmsldd|9 years ago|reply
It seems clear that this biological implementation is going to be obsolete some time soon..
[+] [-] CodeSheikh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nashashmi|9 years ago|reply
My interpretation of the quote is not literal. Instead as machines take over greater and greater portions of our day to day tasks, we will need to utilize them better and more significantly. They have incredible power and capability in performing tasks of more complex, large-scale, or annoying nature, and the tighter we merge with them, the more useful they will be to us, and the more relevant we will be to them.
And I believe he is right. Put it this way, there are a million tasks for humanity to do in the world. Yet, we can only find the time, resource, manpower to do 10% of them. How can we allow for more people to do more of those million things? By automating the mundane.
What do we automate first? The stuff that is unhealthy, then the stuff that is a tax on the ecology of the planet, then the stuff that is too boring to do.
So what does humanity focus on then? Health, Elderly care, Animal protection, community development, child development, recreation, religion. Maybe the economics of these industries have not fully developed yet. But when they do, that is what we can focus on.
I hate this gloom & doom talk about when AI will take over. Have we lost all imagination about what greater things there is left to do?
[+] [-] castle-bravo|9 years ago|reply
Now human beings are being framed as competitors with machines for livelihoods in a money economy that is increasingly inappropriate for our social, environmental, and economic needs.
The unfortunate insistence that human beings serve technology and the powerful people who use it as a tool to facilitate the extraction of wealth from an increasingly complacent domesticated human population will result in our extinction as Elon Musk predicts - unless we can collectively insist MORE INSISTENTLY that technology be made to serve us: human beings whose lives have intrinsic value. Technology can be used to build a paradise in the physical world for us, but instead we are being shuffled into brightly lit slaughterhouse chutes of virtuality. Fuck that.
[+] [-] TeeWEE|9 years ago|reply
We only communicate to computer via toch, button clicks, keyboard and mouse. The bandwidth is low here.
However we can already "read" from a computer using vision which is a high bandwidth connection.
If you think about it, from first principles (like Elon Musk often advocates), this gap can probably be solved by a better interface with computers. Thing about a Brain-Computer cable.
Or we could computers learn to recognize human voice, human facial expression etc. That would increase the bandwidth. However it would be a lot cooler to send our "thinking" to a computer. This would allows us to program faster, too lookup wikipedia articles faster etc.
Thats the merger he is pointing to.
I think its a valid point.
[+] [-] coldcode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaaree|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AmIFirstToThink|9 years ago|reply
A car or bicycle is a marriage of man and machine.
So, is a sword.
Marriage of man and machine has been happening ever since humans started using tools... stone age or stick age tools.
We are increasing the accessibility and intimacy of the tools.
I don't know, I am conflicted about this. Should we make it super easy for everyone to access and link and build upon vast knowledge at moments notice at the service of individual whims and wishes that are susceptible to greed, lust, jealously and pure evil, and just environmental hiccups, Or, should we let our AI overlords control how far we go as individuals?
Age of AI is arriving, but has humanity of humans arrived?