The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, the ever-innovative Elon Musk, is now supporting a brain-computer interface venture, calling it Neuralink. This concept is based on creating devices that can be implanted inside the human brain. The objective is to help humans merge with software and be on par with the advancements in Artificial Intelligence. This type of advancements could directly result in improvement of memory and allow interfacing with computers.
According to Verge, Musk recently said,
Over time, I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence. It's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output.
Long Neuralink piece coming out on @waitbutwhy in about a week. Difficult to dedicate the time, but existential risk is too high not to.
Musk took it to Twitter saying Wait But Why is going to publish a detailed article on Neuralink very soon. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Neuralink is not going to be focused on enhancing the ordinary human brainpower; instead, it is going to explore how brain interfaces might alleviate the symptoms of dangerous and chronic medical conditions.
The advancements could also include epilepsy and depressive disorders. These could conveniently amplify the current therapies that use electrodes in the brain to treat symptoms of Parkinson’s. This phenomenon offers Neuralink a starting point with established science and a much easier path towards approval for human use. Though it might sound far-fetched, it is actually Musk's master plan behind building new companies based on big ideas.
Apart from SpaceX and Tesla, and now Neuralink, the genius has also co-founded OpenAI, a non-profit organisation that aims to advance digital intelligence in a way that supports the entire human fraternity in the world.
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比尔·乔伊： 为什么未来不需要我们人类
Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us by Bill Joy
2012. 7. 1
人类，就是这样被机器人控制住的：
Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species.
I had missed Ray’s talk and the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on, and they now picked right up where they’d left off, with Ray saying that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering that this couldn’t happen, because the robots couldn’t be conscious.
First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur.
The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines.
如果允许机器自主运行，由于我们不可能猜测出机器是如何得出结论的，
所以也就无法推测这一结果。我们将会发现人类的命运将掌握在机器手中。
也许有人会争论说人类不会愚蠢到把所有的权力移交给机器，
But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions.
但我们正在谈论的既不是人类把权力让度给机器，
也不是机器有意攫取权力。
我们谈论的是人类很容易陷入不得不接受机器的自主决定，
从而依赖机器生存的境地。
As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system.
并且由于人类劳动不再是必需的，广大群众也变成了整个系统无用而多余
的负担。
If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite.
Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.
