Lex Fridman interviews Elon Musk and the Neuralink team on the Future of Humanity for over 8 hours. Lex interviews them in sequence. Elon Musk is CEO of Neuralink, SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, and CTO of X. DJ Seo is COO & President of Neuralink. Matthew MacDougall is Head Neurosurgeon at Neuralink. Bliss Chapman is Brain Interface Software Lead at Neuralink. Noland Arbaugh is the first human to have a Neuralink device implanted in his brain.
Elon Musk talked about the goal of merging humanity with AI with a high bandwidth brain interface. The bitrate will get to gigabits per second in 10-15 years. Elon thinks regular people like Lex Fridman could choose to get a Neuralink in 10 years.
Elon says the winner in AI has to have the best training compute.
I have a projection that Elon Musk’s XAI will have a billion petaflop of training compute by 2029. XAI and Tesla would have twenty to a hundred times more distributed inference compute from the chips in Teslabots and Tesla cars.
DJ Seo is COO & President of Neuralink talked about his goal of creating neural dust. They would use ultrasound waves because it will work in the body better. Ultrasound would used to power the devices and get the data back. It would work at the right scale of tens of microns.
An approximation is that it could take 200-300 million connections to achieve a full mindmeld with the biological brain and computers.
Everyone could eventually need a Neuralink.
Here Seo talks about the future capabilities of Neuralink.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
I have thought for decades that the only way we’ll avoid being supplanted by AIs is to meld with them. We’re not improving, and it is; It’s not hard to see where that ends up.
But if we can make the “A” in AI stand for “Amplified” or “Augmented” intelligence, we’ve got a chance.
That said, the threat of hacking is very real. I’d go so far as to say that, given the current business models of most online companies, hacking your brain to take you over would be the goal of many companies right from the start. At best, they’d want you in a position where, if you don’t keep paying that subscription, your brain ends up bricked. At worst, you wake up one day and sending them money out of the kindness of your heart is just the most obvious thing in the world to do, and that would be the least pernicious part of it.
But if we do it right, the AIs can become our frontal lobes’ frontal lobes, transparently augmenting our ability to pursue our own ends, the way our frontal lobes may lead us to do really complicated things, but in the end they’re really just helping the hind brain find food, shelter, and mating opportunities.
I think rule 1 has to be: Any AI hooked up to me has to be running locally on MY hardware. Remote servers are just a way of making sure you don’t own what you’ve paid for…
Emphasis on purely augmenting organic human minds has a certain “monsters from the Id” risk.
We have a big advantage over the Krell: We actually know we have a nasty side. In the movie the Krell had somehow forgotten.
There is that
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/16/22937198/bionic-eye-company-defunct-ieee-spectrum-go-read-this
And then how often does your phone lock up, let alone gets obsoleted.
Do look up the Melding Plague from Revelation Space
And even if you do merge with silicon, and get perfect memory and 400 IQ, is that even you anymore, or just a gestalt that stole your memories.?
And will the real AI, with 10000 IQ, and able to flawlessly multitask with a million avatars, even be able to tell the difference between you and a normal human. Like comparing a smart dog to a dumb dog.
And if I don’t merge with silicon, and 15 years from now have dementia, is that even me anymore? That’s a lot more likely than me getting a neural interface and adding 250 IQ points.
I’m going to stop being me sooner or later regardless of what I do. That is an absolute, unavoidable reality looming in my future. In all of our futures. The question is whether merging with silicon is a better way of ceasing to be me, than merging with some dirt six feet down.
I realize it’s science fiction and manga/anime, but I “Ghost In The Shell” does a very good job of showing how augmented intelligence can go off the rails in the future. We could get this right, we really could. But it definitely needs to have guard rails and all focus on privacy and security.