Elon Musk, the dude who is building a spaceship
to colonize Mars, a Cristopher Columbus-to-be,
said something that got some serious attention.
Humans should merge with machines if that
they don’t want to become obsolete.
This isn’t the first time Musk brought up
this idea.
He expressed quite serious concerns regarding
AI, even calling for worldwide ban on using
AI for military purposes.
Now he says that not only we are on the road
to become cyborgs, but that we should do it.
At the World Government Summit in the United
Arab Emirates, he declared that the bandwidth
of human brain to communicate is 10 bits per
second while computers can do the same job
at a trillion bits per second.
Installment of some kind of extension to the
human processing power is necessary as autonomous
cars are about to hit the roads wiping out
up to 12% of employment across the globe in
the coming years.
Not only that but the arrival of artificial
general intelligence, which basically means
that robots can do variety or even all tasks
at a human level or better, will render humans
useless and will bring huge social and economic
challenges.
Symbiosis between human and machine intelligence
is supposed to solve this problem.
A year ago Elon Musk mentioned something very
similar to this concept.
On an input/output level, humans possess an
output interface that’s particularly slow,
like your two thumbs on a smartphone, while
our visual input, our eyes, are incredibly
powerful receptors of data.
To solve this I/O constraint Musk proposed
this:
NEURO LACE
which sounds like something only a robot could
deal with.
But this concept has been around for quite
a while.
In 2015 Chinese and American researches have
actually succeeded in making it possible to
inject a flexible electrical circuit that’s
smaller than 0.1 mm diameter of a glass syringe
into the brains of mice.
What’s interesting about this is that after
the injection, the mesh spread to 30 times
its size and the brain cells of the mouse
grew all around it.
The biochemistry of the mouse brain accepted
this foreign purely mechanical component without
causing any damage to the poor mouse.
Now you may ask yourself why are these innocent
mice suffering for such an experiment.
Well it’s a quite significant milestone.
If the neural lace could integrate with our
brains, doctors would be able to enter the
space of cures and solutions for all kinds
of neurodegenerative diseases, which I have
no idea what that means but has apparently
something to do with Parkinson, Alzheimer
and things like that… you now, not a big
deal.
But the game changing idea here is to go even
further.
Way beyond treating diseases.
As Charles lieber, a nanotechnologist at Harvard
University said, "We're trying to blur the
distinction between electronic circuits and
neural circuits."
This would mean we could escape the boundaries
of our flesh and meat and stretch our limits
as far as our laws of physics allow us.
We are already at the road to ultimate advancement
and augmentation.
We made a paralyzed man mind control a bionic
arm to serve himself a bottle of beer.
Another paralyzed woman used brain implants
to fly an F-35 fighter jet simulator.
BTW just to briefly pause here, didn’t Elon
Musk say something about not using AI for
military purposes?
You can do so many things with brain implants,,
why fly a machine of death?
Just me?
Anyway to restore lost sight, DARPA developed
a “cortical modem” capable of electronic
telepathy and telekinesis, which truly means
making an interface that links brain with
an external device or software through manipulation
of the visual cortex.
We are approaching the age of artificial intelligence
as computers are getting closer and closer
to integrate with our bodies.
From our rooms, to our desks, to our hands
and wrists, to our eyes and now eventually,
to our brains.
Another interesting dude, a director of engineering
at Google, Ray Kurzweil, also predicts that
human brain will merge with machines.
As soon as 2030 or even earlier.
Ray is a kind of guy to be taken seriously
with his predictions.
He made around 147 of them back 1999 and as
of 2010 78% of them were entirely correct
+ 8% being essentially correct.
Some of them include rise of portable and
wearable computing, keyboards removal from
portable devices, expansion of wireless technology,
Google glass, and digital media.
Google has its own arsenal of artificial intelligence,
including their own self-driving car, Nest
Labs, DeepMind, and Boston Dynamics… yeah
those robot rights abusers.
So when someone like director of engineering
at Google predicts humans merging with machines
in a matter of next decade, it probably shouldn’t
be taken lightly.
It’s only a matter of years until these
so-far-just-experiments-in-science-labs become
a new commercial hit and human species reach
its new age of self-augmentation.
There are three possible scenarios:
1.)
We build an AI but stay separate and become
vulnerable and obsolete
2.)
We don’t build an AI
3.)
We create an AI and use it to augment ourselves
The first scenario is likely if we deploy
AI en masse before figuring out the job loss
problem and rendering humans useless problem.
The second option is only possible if a natural
disaster gets us.
Or our wonderful nukes.
They are still here.
Just a reminder to everyone.
The third option is most plausible for us
if we want to stay relevant and on top of
things.
In control of the AI and not vice versa.
In other words, we are on the brink of fundamental
changes to our societies and potentially our
economic systems as well.
It’s hard to predict how fast this would
be expanding but we have to be aware of it
and talk about the concerns that go hand in
hand with every major technological revolution
in history.
Those weren’t easy times when we were moving
from agriculture to industrial production.
The transition is always difficult and that’s
what we are approaching as soon as next couple
of years.
Let’s think about it while we still have
time to make good decisions.
