Everyone is so scared of all of this, but where do you all realistically see humanity in 200 years? Living like we do now? I mean do you realize how different things were in 1817 compared to now? Unfathomable to them [1].
I know HN hates techno groups, but this kind of thing is not new at all to folks who consider themselves "Transhumanists."
How is this not an obvious eventuality for everyone here? It seems pretty clear that the whole vector of humanity is to functionally merge with our engineered system in a symbiotic way and then probably see the extinction of the human species in (relatively) short order.
We're gonna go extinct anyway, so what's the alternative?
edit: Used a slightly different time horizon on suggestion.
1917 was a lot like today in the most developed areas. The New York City subway system was running. Electric lights, telephones, and telegraphs were available. Running water. Indoor plumbing. Movies, even. Cars were being driven around, and airplanes were flying. Railroads were everywhere. NYC had skyscrapers with elevators. IBM was already in business.
Compare 1817. No useful railroads. A few steam engines here and there. No electricity. Running water and indoor plumbing were rare. Steel was as rare as titanium is now. Nothing moved faster than a horse.
In 1817, we sat in chairs like we do new, drink out of glasses like we did now, talked with close friends and relatives over coffee or tea, enjoyed music and books, etc etc.
Of course things will change, but many things stay largely the same. Not only will most things stay the same, but the things that are unpredictable.
Where do I see humanity in 200 years? It's totally unfathomable to me (although I'd bet on drinking glasses and chairs still being recognizable as similar to what our ancestors used).
I don't see why despite it being unfathomable to people 200 years ago, the future 200 years from now is not only fathomable, but predictable and even inevitable to you. That's some pretty extreme arrogance.
Predictions that were "obvious" to small groups of people and not to anyone else have a poor track record historically.
That's not an argument against, but it justifies significant skepticism, and helps explain why your "but it's obvious" argument isn't going to convince anyone to take you seriously.
Poll ten transhumanists, get ten mutually incompatible futures, all "obvious".
AFAIK, it's the most promising technology for actually making the neural lace.
TL;DR: If you put electrodes on an angled plastic mesh, you can roll it up, inject it, and it'll safely unroll. Also, brain cells like to grow into it.
If I remember correctly, there are needle-like implants with around a thousand contacts and it is quite a difficult task to get the signals out of the brain. Either you have the ADCs directly at the contacts, which means you can't get your density of contacts up, or you have the ADCs outside which will give you a nightmare of wiring. In either case the technology to actually have an interface read out individual neurons is still quite far off, as far as I know.
I'm not quite sure about all of this, so maybe someone with up to date information on the technology can help me out here?
The most popular implant is probably Blackrock Microsystems' "Utah Array", which has 96 electrodes arranged in a 10x10 grid (minus the corners). It looks like this: http://aerobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/utah-3.jpg For scale, the entire electrode grid is about 4mm on a side and the electrodes are between 0.5 and 1.5mm long (depending on the model).
There are a few other models (and similar stuff from other companies), but I'd be surprised if anything with thousands of contacts is in regular in vivo use. There are some in vitro (i.e., cells or tissue slices in a dish) systems with more contacts, but the signal quality isn't nearly as good.
We can read out the activity of single neurons--people have been doing it for single electrodes since the 1960s. It's slightly easier with a single (movable) electrode since you can creep up on the cell until its action potentials are fairly large and well-isolated from the background noise (here, large means about ±150 µV). You can't move the array or its individual electrodes, so you're stuck hoping that the individual shanks end up in good positions. Then, data is recorded at a fairly high sampling rate (say, 30 kHz) and the "spikes" are clustered based on their shapes to get individual neurons' responses.
The ADCs aren't directly at the contacts, but you want the amplifiers and ADCs as close to electrode as possible to avoid all sorts of weird EMI from the mains, other equipment, etc. Getting the grounding and shielding right is a bit of a black art and eats up tons of researcher time. (You'd think "throw it all in a Faraday cage" would work, but...it doesn't).
If anything you're underselling the existing hurdles. It was once thought that the brain was immunoprivileged, but now it's known to have its own immune system. As a result implants are prone to having scar tissue form around them, and after some years it starts to inhibit their ability to perform.
The [Black Mirror][1] (British science fiction television anthology series created by Charlie Brooker) has a few episodes dealing with AI and brain-machine interfaces.
It is very interesting to watch some of the emotional and social implications this kind of technology will bring.
Musk is wrong that input bandwidth is a limiting factor in intelligence. We don't efficiently use the megapixel our phones show us, let alone the several megapixels on our laptops.
Improving UIs will provide much more bang for the buck for many many decades to come. A neural lace is the equivalent of trying to increase the yield per square inch of the herbs in your window box when you have 100 acres of empty land around you.
I don't want to compete with AI. I want AI to create efficiency and wealth so I can relax and have a leisure lifestyle. This shows that work-a-holic CEO culture is only about margins and gains and not improving lifestyle and quality of life. Automation should be improving our lives not adding anxiety to compete with it, which we will ultimately lose.
We're probably in for another 1880's labor movement as automation keeps eating jobs. We either decide to benefit from it via strict regulation or we somehow try to compete with it which is greatly lower the value of our labor and only enrich the owners of automation.
Sadly it's a quirk of human nature that we get more defensive over our things when work gets tough. It tends to push us to more neoliberal policies. If work gets hard to find; Gen Z and the baby boomer generation would rather keep millennials renting, as opposed to massive social spending. Unless there's a massive shift towards the left we'll only see widening inequality due to the insurgence of AI on the job market. This is more of a cynical outlook, but in the last three decades in politics across the globe there's been no progressive popular movements.
> I don't want to compete with AI. I want AI to create efficiency and wealth so I can relax and have a leisure lifestyle. This shows that work-a-holic CEO culture is only about margins and gains and not improving lifestyle and quality of life.
I suspect, though I'm not 100% sure, that when Musk speaks about AI "competition" there's an implication of existential danger. If true, then from his POV it would not so much about "I want to min-max my CEO experience" but "I'd rather we not go extinct within my children's lifetime"
Not everyone wants to be human for ever, some people take joy in their work and want to continue doing it and contributing in a meaningful way, etc, etc. Nothing to do with being a workaholic or the rest.
I hate to say it, but 'leisure' gets boring awfully quickly.
It's hard to resist to a tech when everyone around you is uing it. It's not impossible, but it is hard.
My mum was super anti Facebook when it first came out. Now she has one.
I'm not saying you will have an iBrain, but myself for instance, hope that I will not have one. Maybe though, I won't really have a choice in a world where nearly everyone has an iBrain. Kinda like that show where everyone has smart contact lenses and only some people go against the movement and remove them.
Elon Musk's "bold" ventures are the only things that excite me. Meaning, whenever I hear of a supposed "big idea" that's right around the corner (cough, cough - Magic Leap), I basically dismiss it. Except when it has to do with Elon Musk.
He is the first to admit that his plans will probably fail, but he actually has an incredible track record over 10+ years.
An efficient brain-computer interface would require a good understanding of the inner-workings of the brain. So any effort in building such interface would motivate neurobiological research to get such understanding. I personally believe that once we have an accurate model of the brain, that is one that explains how thoughts, memory, emotions, consciousness and so on arise from brain activity, we're literally done.
Once we reach this point, I think humans will eventually replace their brains with artificial ones, either gradually (Moravec transfer), or in one-go. There will be various motivations : immortality, mind-performance improvements, etc. The end-result will be the same : we will turn into machines. It won't be a merger, it'll be a plain replacement. The scenario where AI robots kill us all will only be different from a subjective point of view.
A Master Programmer passed a novice programmer one day.
The Master noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game.
"Excuse me," he said, "may I examine it?"
The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the Master. "I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium, and Hard," said the Master. "Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human."
"Pray, Great Master," implored the novice, "how does one find this mysterious setting?"
The Master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it with his heel. Suddenly the novice was enlightened.
If you want to compete with AI, don't make humans easier to hack.
Neural interfaces are an obvious direction to go, and we already have well established commercial nerve-interface products, like cochlear implants.
But I think there'll be significant problems in interfacing with the brain in a meaningful way, if you want to bypass the existing interfaces (hearing, sight, touch etc).
I think it will turn out that the internal implementation is a lot stranger than the external interface, it could vary significantly between persons. Perhaps falling into major categories for some aspects, analogous to blood types; but then varying in the details as much as our finger prints - note that even genetically identical twins have unique fingerprints, as they are highly developmentally affected, like the branches of a specific tree. Simikar for retina prints, an example closer to (some say part of) the brain.
I think interoperation with the internal implementation could require actual understanding of the brain - enough to build strong AI. We might even have strong AI before.
It seems very difficult, we haven't the faintest clue at this point. We may need new fields of marhematics. Could take even more than 20 years.
OTOH, if something does come out of this, it could have extremely far-reaching consequences. Forget interfacing with AI. Think - locked-in syndrome, or people with various disabilities (blindness, etc).
This is the kind of moonshot that ought to be encouraged.
forgive me if i am wrong, i don't know much about these matters. Just a quick thought. For me Elon Musks ventures seem a bit like angel-investors. Every company he founds has probability of making billions (car-company, rockets, tunnelling etc.), though they are also high risk. Of course he can't spread his risk as broad as a investor. But while risky, every venture seems to be very calculated, the opposite of crazy. I mean he could focus everything on Tesla, but if Tesla bites the dust he would loose everything.
But cause != correlation, maybe he just likes founding stuff.
This is an interesting story, especially considering the new Ghost in The Shell movie is coming out this week. It really makes me think that something like this might be possible. As we've discussed here before, technology moves really, really quickly and things that we never thought of 20 years ago are pretty common now. Even full on auto-drive cars are on the horizon in a very realistic way. Sure, we thought it would probably happen at some point but we are now within a couple of years of actually being able to purchase such a thing. And we all have pretty powerful supercomputers in our pockets. Is brain augmentation that weird.
Also, I've been thinking that we will need a new interface for our cell phones. The screens can't get much bigger without being uncomfortable, yet we need to interact with them more and more. I was thinking that a contact lens display would probably be within reach soon but maybe we'll just skip the physical stuff and go directly to injecting signals into the brain stem.
There's a "non-invasive" brain-computer interface on the market. It's a little less ambitious; targeted towards people who practice meditation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_(headband)
I've had a casual curiosity on why these billionaires like Musk who seem to care about world wide problems such as AI aren't working to solve the imminent issues with global warming. I'm not talking about reducing fossil fuels, but perhaps coming up with solutions with their resources that addresses a world that isn't so habitable by life in the future. I don't know enough about global warming to know why this might be the case (hence why it's a casual curiosity). Or perhaps there are grand efforts and I just haven't heard about them yet.
Edit: I'm not condemning Elon Musk or downplaying his efforts. This was just an honest question I was hoping someone more knowledgeable than me might comment on.
Logistics. Can the problem be solved with engineering and invention alone, or do they need to get governments and political movements involved in order to accomplish anything? Why would anyone with any real ability or drive want to bother with that shit?
Forget about AI, which is something Elon realized to be an issue only relatively recently. Tesla Motors and SolarCity exist as his response to exactly the problem of climate change - the stated goal of Tesla is not "fast and sexy cars of the future", but "electrification of all transportation", exactly because the latter is an important way to fight climate change.
As for other grand efforts - I haven't heard of them either, and I'd damn love to hear about them. We need to praise and support people who're doing good work.
Because the solutions to these problems are unconscionable to tech nerds, whose entire life style is dependent on the happy belly of Western resource and energy profligacy. The solutions involve powerdown, a rollback of technological progress and refocus on survival and sustainability at a global scale, and quite possibly a significant reduction of the human population.
The universities, companies, and individuals involved in this machine learning renaissance are a collective super-intelligence.
It's amazing how fast we can learn now, fuelled by information-sharing over the internet. I'm literally forgetting the names of everyday acquaintances because I'm learning and retaining so much new stuff.
The problem, from an individual's perspective is that, while you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can't easily commandeer all that brain-power.
I'm imagining getting some time-slices of Terry Tao, Geoff Hinton, <insert other big brain names> 's cognition to devote to my own projects. What would that even look like?
On a different note, if we really could mind-meld, could we ever truly hate or kill each other?
I just started reading the Nexus trilogy by Ramez Naam (http://rameznaam.com/nexus/). It's quite good so far, and explores some of these concepts from a sci-fi bent.
"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them -"
"You beat them." For a moment she was not afraid of his understanding.
"No, you don't understand. I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don't exist."
Ender & Valentine, Ch. 13: Valentine
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|9 years ago|reply
I know HN hates techno groups, but this kind of thing is not new at all to folks who consider themselves "Transhumanists."
How is this not an obvious eventuality for everyone here? It seems pretty clear that the whole vector of humanity is to functionally merge with our engineered system in a symbiotic way and then probably see the extinction of the human species in (relatively) short order.
We're gonna go extinct anyway, so what's the alternative?
edit: Used a slightly different time horizon on suggestion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1817
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
Compare 1817. No useful railroads. A few steam engines here and there. No electricity. Running water and indoor plumbing were rare. Steel was as rare as titanium is now. Nothing moved faster than a horse.
[+] [-] ericdykstra|9 years ago|reply
Of course things will change, but many things stay largely the same. Not only will most things stay the same, but the things that are unpredictable.
Where do I see humanity in 200 years? It's totally unfathomable to me (although I'd bet on drinking glasses and chairs still being recognizable as similar to what our ancestors used).
I don't see why despite it being unfathomable to people 200 years ago, the future 200 years from now is not only fathomable, but predictable and even inevitable to you. That's some pretty extreme arrogance.
[+] [-] inimino|9 years ago|reply
That's not an argument against, but it justifies significant skepticism, and helps explain why your "but it's obvious" argument isn't going to convince anyone to take you seriously.
Poll ten transhumanists, get ten mutually incompatible futures, all "obvious".
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
- Tesla Model 3 production line (First deliveries late 2017. He said he was going to live at the factory to get the cars out the door.)
- Brownsville TX launch facility (first launch scheduled for 2018, not much construction started yet)
- Manned Dragon spacecraft (as of 2015, first crewed launch scheduled for late 2017)
- Falcon Heavy (as of Q3 2016, supposed to launch Q1 2017. Now Q3 2017. Maybe.)
[+] [-] RangerScience|9 years ago|reply
AFAIK, it's the most promising technology for actually making the neural lace.
TL;DR: If you put electrodes on an angled plastic mesh, you can roll it up, inject it, and it'll safely unroll. Also, brain cells like to grow into it.
[+] [-] QuantumRoar|9 years ago|reply
I'm not quite sure about all of this, so maybe someone with up to date information on the technology can help me out here?
[+] [-] mattkrause|9 years ago|reply
The most popular implant is probably Blackrock Microsystems' "Utah Array", which has 96 electrodes arranged in a 10x10 grid (minus the corners). It looks like this: http://aerobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/utah-3.jpg For scale, the entire electrode grid is about 4mm on a side and the electrodes are between 0.5 and 1.5mm long (depending on the model).
There are a few other models (and similar stuff from other companies), but I'd be surprised if anything with thousands of contacts is in regular in vivo use. There are some in vitro (i.e., cells or tissue slices in a dish) systems with more contacts, but the signal quality isn't nearly as good.
We can read out the activity of single neurons--people have been doing it for single electrodes since the 1960s. It's slightly easier with a single (movable) electrode since you can creep up on the cell until its action potentials are fairly large and well-isolated from the background noise (here, large means about ±150 µV). You can't move the array or its individual electrodes, so you're stuck hoping that the individual shanks end up in good positions. Then, data is recorded at a fairly high sampling rate (say, 30 kHz) and the "spikes" are clustered based on their shapes to get individual neurons' responses.
The ADCs aren't directly at the contacts, but you want the amplifiers and ADCs as close to electrode as possible to avoid all sorts of weird EMI from the mains, other equipment, etc. Getting the grounding and shielding right is a bit of a black art and eats up tons of researcher time. (You'd think "throw it all in a Faraday cage" would work, but...it doesn't).
What else do you want to know? :-)
[+] [-] Balgair|9 years ago|reply
Also, the main issue with their work is glia' scarring inside the central nervous system; the body ensures the implants are time limited.
[+] [-] M_Grey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scardine|9 years ago|reply
It is very interesting to watch some of the emotional and social implications this kind of technology will bring.
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|9 years ago|reply
Improving UIs will provide much more bang for the buck for many many decades to come. A neural lace is the equivalent of trying to increase the yield per square inch of the herbs in your window box when you have 100 acres of empty land around you.
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|9 years ago|reply
We're probably in for another 1880's labor movement as automation keeps eating jobs. We either decide to benefit from it via strict regulation or we somehow try to compete with it which is greatly lower the value of our labor and only enrich the owners of automation.
[+] [-] pizza|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pippy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doktrin|9 years ago|reply
I suspect, though I'm not 100% sure, that when Musk speaks about AI "competition" there's an implication of existential danger. If true, then from his POV it would not so much about "I want to min-max my CEO experience" but "I'd rather we not go extinct within my children's lifetime"
[+] [-] cannonpr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|9 years ago|reply
You don't have an option.
Said another way, in the long run you either merge with AGI or go extinct.
[+] [-] comboy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ci5er|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neurotech1|9 years ago|reply
https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/article...
Another non-paywalled news article:
http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/27/15077864/elon-musk-neurali...
[+] [-] arca_vorago|9 years ago|reply
No iBrain device is touching my brain.
[+] [-] globuous|9 years ago|reply
My mum was super anti Facebook when it first came out. Now she has one.
I'm not saying you will have an iBrain, but myself for instance, hope that I will not have one. Maybe though, I won't really have a choice in a world where nearly everyone has an iBrain. Kinda like that show where everyone has smart contact lenses and only some people go against the movement and remove them.
[+] [-] sixQuarks|9 years ago|reply
He is the first to admit that his plans will probably fail, but he actually has an incredible track record over 10+ years.
[+] [-] grondilu|9 years ago|reply
Once we reach this point, I think humans will eventually replace their brains with artificial ones, either gradually (Moravec transfer), or in one-go. There will be various motivations : immortality, mind-performance improvements, etc. The end-result will be the same : we will turn into machines. It won't be a merger, it'll be a plain replacement. The scenario where AI robots kill us all will only be different from a subjective point of view.
[+] [-] ajobaccount2017|9 years ago|reply
A Master Programmer passed a novice programmer one day.
The Master noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game.
"Excuse me," he said, "may I examine it?"
The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the Master. "I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium, and Hard," said the Master. "Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human."
"Pray, Great Master," implored the novice, "how does one find this mysterious setting?"
The Master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it with his heel. Suddenly the novice was enlightened.
If you want to compete with AI, don't make humans easier to hack.
[+] [-] zeroxfe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperpallium|9 years ago|reply
But I think there'll be significant problems in interfacing with the brain in a meaningful way, if you want to bypass the existing interfaces (hearing, sight, touch etc).
I think it will turn out that the internal implementation is a lot stranger than the external interface, it could vary significantly between persons. Perhaps falling into major categories for some aspects, analogous to blood types; but then varying in the details as much as our finger prints - note that even genetically identical twins have unique fingerprints, as they are highly developmentally affected, like the branches of a specific tree. Simikar for retina prints, an example closer to (some say part of) the brain.
I think interoperation with the internal implementation could require actual understanding of the brain - enough to build strong AI. We might even have strong AI before.
It seems very difficult, we haven't the faintest clue at this point. We may need new fields of marhematics. Could take even more than 20 years.
[+] [-] hprotagonist|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|9 years ago|reply
OTOH, if something does come out of this, it could have extremely far-reaching consequences. Forget interfacing with AI. Think - locked-in syndrome, or people with various disabilities (blindness, etc).
This is the kind of moonshot that ought to be encouraged.
[+] [-] pizza|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aerovistae|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nategri|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeanderK|9 years ago|reply
But cause != correlation, maybe he just likes founding stuff.
[+] [-] Corrado|9 years ago|reply
Also, I've been thinking that we will need a new interface for our cell phones. The screens can't get much bigger without being uncomfortable, yet we need to interact with them more and more. I was thinking that a contact lens display would probably be within reach soon but maybe we'll just skip the physical stuff and go directly to injecting signals into the brain stem.
[+] [-] cing|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jameslk|9 years ago|reply
Edit: I'm not condemning Elon Musk or downplaying his efforts. This was just an honest question I was hoping someone more knowledgeable than me might comment on.
[+] [-] 20100thibault|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mongmong|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewclunn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atarian|9 years ago|reply
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/tech/2013/03/elon-musk-die-ma...
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|9 years ago|reply
As for other grand efforts - I haven't heard of them either, and I'd damn love to hear about them. We need to praise and support people who're doing good work.
[+] [-] bitwize|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baq|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JabavuAdams|9 years ago|reply
It's amazing how fast we can learn now, fuelled by information-sharing over the internet. I'm literally forgetting the names of everyday acquaintances because I'm learning and retaining so much new stuff.
The problem, from an individual's perspective is that, while you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can't easily commandeer all that brain-power.
I'm imagining getting some time-slices of Terry Tao, Geoff Hinton, <insert other big brain names> 's cognition to devote to my own projects. What would that even look like?
On a different note, if we really could mind-meld, could we ever truly hate or kill each other?
[+] [-] transcranial|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzzzzzzza|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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