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Elon Musk: Humans Need To Merge With Machines Else They Will Become Irrelevant in AI Age (cnbc.com)
Billionaire Elon Musk is known for his futuristic ideas. So it didn't come as a surprise when on Monday at the World Government Summit in Dubai, he predicted that over time we will see a "closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence." He added, via a CNBC report: "It's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output." Musk explained what he meant by saying that computers can communicate at "a trillion bits per second", while humans, whose main communication method is typing with their fingers via a mobile device, can do about 10 bits per second. 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. "Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem," Musk explained.
The code I write at a solid 10 bits per second sure beats anything I've seen a computer do.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Elon needs to go away. One minute we're all in the fucking Matrix and the next we need to "merge with machines". Pick one you fucking douche bag
Irrelevant as corporate slaves?
"We are the Musks, resistance is futile."
Table-ized A.I.
I think most people accept that eventually we will have implants that both do their own AI processing as well as interface with other technology. The cell phone will be the first to be integrated.
This will be a huge problem at work as IT will no longer be able to ban games and people will sit at their desks playing games in their heads, prattling of Slashdot and Facebook, and generally screwing off, invisible to the boss.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Wow..these super rich types much be smoking some killer, killer shit.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
AI can and probably will ultimately make the concept of human employment extinct. And we probably need to accept that fact faster than any prediction, given the speed at which technology has accelerated just in the last couple of decades.
Humans need to first solve the problem of Greed. Otherwise, the chasm that separates the AI owners and wealthy overlords from the rest of the human race will continue to grow, and they won't give a shit about the demise of the irrelevant meatsack masses.
Most of the comments so far have been personal attacks on Musk. I guess this is par for the low level of discourse here.
However, I'd like to see some discussion of his statement.
Would a better connection between humans and machines be beneficial?
What would be the benefits/ problems?
How could this be achieved?
Come on, folks, I have seen much better from you in the past.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
"Humans Need To Merge With Machines?" Reading the article it turns out Musk said nothing of the sort. He actually said, "we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence."
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Some high bandwidth interface to the brain...
Without a 100% perfection inbound firewall you're not coming anywhere near my brain interface.
Elon Musk is working on building a JC Denton.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
It's funny, if I start spouting crazy shit people tell me I'm crazy and might give me two dollars.
If you are rich and crazy then people want to give you two hundred million to try your idea.
Just so everyone is clear... I probably earn way more then you do. So let's invest in my device to detect the shadow people and destroy them.
alternatively: humans only need to communicate at 10 bits, we don't need a trillion bits per second to enjoy life.
But really, isn't the trick to do less, not more? I ain't no worker-bee. I'm jealous of my pet dog sitting on the couch all day while I work at a desk. I want his life -- it's called retirement.
Productivity is the goal of business. Laziness is the goal of life. I've worked hard to be this lazy.
"Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem,"
Once this was achieved humans could outperform self-driving vehicles......
Mr. Musk, this is not a new idea. In the 70's when computer technology was rapidly increasing people were talking about the "expert systems" with which decisions like loan approvals and stock trades could be automated without the need for a human being. We know what direction that technology is headed in and we know that it is going to continue to reduce the need for human workers. The problem is that the economic system is all structured around humans being required to perform labor to support themselves economically. It stands to reason that if the need for labor is on a downward trend that at some point in time there will be a tipping point whereby the current economic system will need to be modified because it won't be wholly relevant anymore. You can't just throw people in the street because they didn't meet their financial obligations because there is no means to acquire money because the robots are doing more of the work. That's the core issue. Mr. Musk please champion that transition to this new age that we are destined to arrive at. What we don't want to do is arrive at that future with most people being in poverty at no fault of their own and a few privileged people reaping all the rewards for no good reason at all.
There is a huge difference between free loaders taking something out of a system at everyone else's expense and there being a surplus of humans and a shortage of labor.
We'll make great pets
I didn't read the article. However even if this is bytes there's so much that is missed!
I look at a tree, recognize it and say "tree" in less than a second.
I can throw a ball against a wall and catch it before it hits the ground. Now give me a completely different size/weight ball and I can do the same (within tolerances of weight and size).
There is communication in both of those in which massive amounts of information is consumed and processed. For example the tree, 32 bits of information is relayed. However if I speak it then there is inflection, volume, direction, body language and intent that are all communicated in a short time.
Even though nothing is typed/spoken with the ball there is an output, catching the ball, that requires a tremendous amount of bandwidth utilized by a human.
Human Computer interfaces have a long way to go to catch up to these types of things; however, I think someone is raising an alarm about something that has no near term danger and just from the porn perspective will be developed as soon as is humanly possible. Think Matrix and Mouse pushing the girl in the red dress to Neo... The first in the porn industry to do that get's money from 99% of the world's men and a good portion of the world's women. Same thing happened with VHS....
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
It's not even a new idea this century..... This idea goes back to at least the 1970s in anime I saw that merged man and machine together... Hell, the 6 million dollar man merged the two together..
He is right, its just the technology is not here yet. But it will be. Once we get genetic level wireless computer interfaces that can connect to the neurons in the brain then we will be able to do stuff we have never imagined before. Voice interfaces are loud, but neural interfaces are quiet and private. Put that along with genetic engineering and HUD displays in the eyes and we will be walking up-gradable computer systems with access to information like never before. Its coming, and if you just deny it then you are out of touch with what needs to be done.
Typing is slower than talking.
Talking is slower than thought.
But by how much? This question was relevant to designers of old pen and paper RPGs (who needed to be concerned about how much could be communicated in a combat round, with magical aids such as telepathy and other such things that the game rules allowed), but I've never seen it discussed by like, scientists.
So I googled it.
http://www.livescience.com/578...
But that seems to mostly cover the latency, not the bandwidth.
Is the bandwidth actually that important? Musk is probably using it as a standin for other things, but I really think we'd need some evidence to see that it is. Even this far into knowledge of cognition, we don't know which cognition tasks are actually difficult, versus which ones are difficult for humans. We also don't know how thoughts work in general, even if we have a pretty good idea about how some specific tasks are solved by humans.
Outgoing bandwidth seems like it might be a problem for a billionaire, or a president, or a teacher. But in general, is it really? In the time since I saw this article to when I clicked refresh, there's been quite a few responses. I've read some of them. I could read them all, given time. But the available data in this comment section will, before the discussion is archived, add up to several minutes of reading for someone who reads fast. Consideration of input bandwidth (and there, reading is much faster than typing, and I'm pretty sure it is faster than speech) seems pretty important, especially to the majority of communication which has to inform, express, and persuade rather than command and instruct.
Telling a computer what to do in little time or effort has been a pretty big push in most computing industries for years now, and somehow voice instruction ends up being lame compared to typing (despite its superior bandwidth), and giving detailed instructions, such as that needed when programming, seems to be very slow indeed when compared with more abstract communications.
So overall I disagree that output bandwidth is going to be the limiter here. There's already more discussion than you can effortlessly input on any topic, and the speed of deeper thinking seems to be pretty slow on a lot of measures anyway.
It would seem language is the limiting factor on output bandwidth, i wonder if, for instance, japanese speakers can think faster than english speakers ..
The code I write at a solid 10 bits per second sure beats anything I've seen a computer do.
Ahh but the future is almost here.
Bio-Modem
Humans love to be lazy. Always want someone else to do their dirty, hard work. In the end, SOME people get to live lazy and some people are still slaves to these folks. The end game on this will be far, far worse than what you saw on TV or a movie. Grovel in the spew of the rich.
Anyone else notice this? Most of statistical machine intelligence is either optimisation or training neural nets. Symbolic, in the form of expert systems and Cyc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... seems to have submarined (although I saw someone from Lucid AI in Cambridge about a year ago). I'm not sure where we are with hybrids, since I'm not a specialist.
Things can play Go, Poker and Jeopardy and (this is more sinister) approve people for loans and credit cards. But they lack the huge compositional flexibility of the human mind. They lack explanatory power and (this is bad for the so-called 'financial industry' ) they often don't deal with outliers well. So we're a while from AGI yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... but the hype and distorted language is outpacing the capabilities. There may be marketing reasons for this. After all, 'our AI said no' is a lot more authoritative than 'our little program said no'.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Great so the next big thing is that we're all gonna be voluntarily turning ourselves into remotely controlled drones.
No thanks. Its already bad enough with cellphones.
Yeah, rich people don't get a lot of reality checks from their hired help. I just wish people were better at differentiating between Hollywood and real life. I hope Elon has a computer surgically implanted in his brain to show everyone how dumb an idea it is.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
why not just stimulate the pleasure center that the porn eventually ends up at?
... please ...
Ok, ya got lucky with PayPal, you're even somewhat smart. But you're not the second coming of Jesus, and the world does not need to hear about every little thought you fart out.
(though I still like you better than the Orange Menace.)
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
i almost torn my leg off at the knee and fractured my pelvis in a terrible motorcycle accident, I almost died, i hope i can get some bionic parts and become the first real 6 million dollar man, i am willing to donate myself to science if they promise to not make my life any more miserable than it is already
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It's Deep Blue, and that was in 1997, under 20 years ago. AI that can beat experts in Go (a much harder task) was achieved just late last year.
And I'm sorry, but if you haven't noticed how much better neural nets have gotten in the past 10 years, or even the past five, or even the past two, you haven't been paying attention. The last company I worked for used them to dissect brain scans, and that was 5 years ago. Now they're embedded into things like image searching, text translation tools, voice recognition, etc. Seriously, haven't you noticed how dramatically these things have gotten better over the past decade, or have you forgotten about how terrible they used to be? You tell Google Photos to search for pictures of a beer on your phone, and it will actually find pictures of beer you've taken. Remember this comic, treating image recognition as an AI Hard problem? That was just from 2 1/2 years ago. It was already becoming obsolete then. This sort of image recognition task is the stuff we grew up being told that only humans can do; now computers are getting as good at it as humans. The best face recognition apps are now as good in random controlled trials as humans.
That doesn't mean that we're going to have "conscious AI" tomorrow. Consciousness isn't just training to a task. But we keep shrinking the bounds of what makes us unique as humans. I'm certainly not willing to bet that there will never be some point where we cross that line altogether.
I spent the evening flickering into your darkness.
"This guy gets it." - Guy With Flashlight Up His Butt
. . . YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED INTO THE MUSK COLLECTIVE. . . .
Really, Slashdot ? "News for Nerds", over an hour, and no Star Trek "Borg" references ??
It's funny, if I start spouting crazy shit people tell me I'm crazy and might give me two dollars.
Even more funny, claim to hear the voice of God in your head and you're enlightened in certain circles of people but claim to hear the voice of Elvis in your head telling you what to do and you're off to the insane asylum
We'll make great pets
Self driving cars are not nuclear fusion. It's only recently that they've been claimed to be the "coming thing", and progress has been remarkably rapid.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Some people need to accept reality before augmenting it.
Years ago a manager who helped disabled people wished there could be some kind of brain implant that could help someone be smarter. I asked, like playing chess? He said yes. I told him that already exists, just give him a laptop with a chess program. All we are doing is playing with different communication interfaces.
Yep.
And Stephen Hawking, too.
Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
What about the horrible security problems this will likely entail?
Like, you're having fun in your thought-controlled robotic bipedal tank, and as your interface is botnetted, someone else decides to have fun and make you crash into a store front. Or :
- You get sent Goatse, tubgirl or (famous short brazilian movie) and still see it if you close or cover your eyes, and even if you try to run away from it.
- They get you to pee your pants
- They mess with your vestibular sense inputs (the human version of motion sensors) and torture you, make you feel you're falling and spinning in all directions, or try to do the minimum to make you puke and vomit all over yourself.
- They live tweet first-person pics of you jacking off
- As is described in the README.TXT file of old id software games (technological zombie soldiers get a strong release of pleasure hormones when they kill) they teach you new "tricks" as if you're a Pavlovian dog. Hopefully this is used for further trolling.
First they wanted to give us chip implants to track us for satan's army, now they want to give us robotic endoskeletons? WHAT NEXT MUSK!?
They could always give us wheels and allow us to plug ourselves into the wall to charge before driving around.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The man wants to create the borg collective.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
In the late 90s one of my EE professors was obsessed with neural networks. We thought him insane when he insisted they could be used for a security system, even though we couldn't make it work after two whole semesters. Now, I'm sure he must feel a little vindication that 20 years later machine learning depends on NNs to such an extent. Who knows what other "crazy" ideas my professors had that might actually prove prescient?
huh what? No computers communicate at a terabit per second.
The concept of bio-integration is quite old. The part-man-part-machine being has been a common theme in popular science fiction for as long as I can remember.
So, one need not use drugs to come up with these ideas. In fact, the scifi authors who came up with these ideas probably didn't need drugs either...they just thought things through.
Seriously, this isn't that weird nor does it require that much creativity to imagine it.
And further, since humans today have machines integrated with them, it is likely that we will see more of this in the future, including and especially where our cognitive abilities are concerned. The potential benefits are just too high.
None of this should be hard to believe for anyone who has been paying attention.
The brain machine interface exists today, moron. Check it out.
The tech is primitive. But as it gets refined, the potential benefits will be far too valuable to overlook. This is a fucking great idea!
You are just one of those people who can't use the power of reason to look past the familiar.
Wow..these super rich types much be smoking some killer, killer shit.....
I'm guessing it's not all that extraordinary shit. Decent college-dorm shit is quite good enough. There's always that one guy/girl at the party who says some crazy "I wanna machine that taps into my MIND, man!" and everyone paying attention says "Oh yeah! That'd be sooooooo grrrrrreat!" as Santanna's "Black Magic Woman" starts rolling on the sound machine.
The only difference is nobody from mainstream media is picking it up and putting it out as killer clickbait, 'cause some editor thinks it's Musk and what if he's REALLY DONE IT? we HAVE to be FIRST with the SCOOP!!!
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Based on what we see today with machines and software, we're all pretty aware of the fact that we don't own any of it. Especially those machines that require code to function.
Imagine your machine implant was made by Microsoft / Apple / Google / Etc who mandates that you will accept periodic software updates to keep it in " top operating condition " and in no way, shape or form would they use any telemetry data gleaned from your prosthetic for any purposes whatsoever. :|
Your implant would also probably get a mandatory backdoor by the USG to boot.
Not only no, but hell no.
It is not money that gives Elon credibility, but his list of accomplishments.
He has a track record of turning ideas into reality, so people pay attention.
He has merged with his iPhone in such a complete way that it's not clear where the kid ends and the machine begins. It's to the point where it's easier to get his attention through the machine rather than his biological audio sensors.
That's a pretty dumb thing to say for a such a smart guy... given that he has provided no evidence that he has mastered AI
He's probably right, eventually taking your glasses off will be like suffering from some kind of learning disability. All text you see automatically scanned and available for perfect recall, the name of ever person you meet whispered in your ear in case you forgot, any equation instantly solved... And an unquenchable thirst for Pepsi, an uncontrollable urge to buy a Tesla.
It's already sort of the case. Most of modern students are incapable of doing anything if they don't have facebook to ask elder friends for what to search on google. And then they have an unquenchable thirst for Pepsi. Conclusion, you don't need a brain interface to sell crap and render people useless.
There is so much bullshit with this. Modern students still learn how to use a library. I know, I see batches of students coming with their teachers all the time to learn how (just like old times.) All colleges make students learn how to use them (just like in old times), etc, etc.
In reality, the ability to search online has made students (and people in general) far more efficient at retrieving information. Obviously, this also has the downside that it makes it easy to plagiarize. But that comes with every technology. You get what you put in, and you put in according to what kind of person you are.
Case in point: my daughter who is in second grade now knows how to use google voice search to check for spelling of words she doesn't know. Then she cross-checks it with her dictionary in English and Japanese (since she is bilingual, and soon to be trilingual if everything goes according plan.)
She has become more efficient at writing her homework reports (while learning how to spell faster) without inducing cheating or sloppy work. It has reduced her frustration while helping her focus on the topics she needs to write. This, at 2nd grade.
This type of efficiency increases a lot more for older students and adults.
Pretending that people now are useless because they leverage electronic searches and social media is like pretending farmers today are useless for using tractors instead of hand-held plows.
In other words, this line of reasoning is both simplistic and stupid.
You do know that this is the experiments where 'always mount a scratch monkey' came from right?
Prosthetics for connectivity are one thing but don't let them modify your DNA.
It's an ancient philosophy; poor people are crazy - rich people are eccentric.
hmm, so that explain Musk's oddly hued skin and unblinking stare.
I, for one had no idea. Cool anecdote!
The meaning is based upon the use in the 1970s of a scratch tape or other storage device, which was available for temporary use, to be loaded in place of other tapes whose valuable contents might be damaged by the operation to be performed. If a problem occurred, it would be the scratch tape that was damaged rather than the more valuable tape that had been removed.
The phrase "always mount a scratch monkey" originated from two tales by technicians about maintenance that was performed on computer equipment. The technicians were unaware that the computer was connected to five laboratory monkeys, and the routine maintenance procedures caused the death of three of the monkeys
-wikipedia
The man wants to create the borg collective.
I think Elon is regurgitating, and perhaps adding a little "bandwidth" to the singularity that Yuval Harari wrote about in "Homo Deus": a thought collective - global AI interface. Only Yuval thinks the rich may be genetically modifying themselves too, so they really will be different from you and me. Oh, and there may be competing "thought-AI-merge" collectives.
My take on all this: When Elon says that AI threatens to make humans useless, I see a metaphorical monster. When he says there's a need to merge with machines, I see another proverbial monster. Imagine such monsters from a collective super id, on their way to eliminate the competition, annihilating the remains of the sapien hoi polloi. Let us prey now, least we become prey. Its the dawn of another age.
Given the fact everything is built to serve humanity.
But its the context where humans fit in that is the tricky part.
He must have read Corinne Whitaker's book, The Quasi's : https://www.amazon.com/Quasis-.... I know because I wrote it.
I hope Elon has a computer surgically implanted in his brain to show everyone how dumb an idea it is.
I don't think it's that dumb. Imagine if instead of having to manually perform math in your head, you had your result just as soon as you could mentally build the function; no need to pull out a piece of paper or type in LaTex, and you understand the entire process, even if your biological brain parts don't (you don't mentally understand how your biological brain parts work anyways, so what's the difference?) Or suppose you wanted to build a list of objects algorithmically, and instead of needing to open up your IDE and start writing code, you could accurately visualize the result near instantaneously. That would be pretty neat, and allow you to become more productive; probably even moreso than any AI.
Something like this may come, though probably not within our lifetimes...unless it's for the purpose of extending them. Even if we solve things like aging, cancer, etc, the barrier will inevitably be how to keep your brain working for more than one natural lifespan, so we'll need to conquer not only how it works, but also develop a technology solution for extending our memories.
So indeed, what Musk suggests may be inevitable, unless skynet beats us to the punch.
I'd sign up.
I was actually more interested in fuzzy logic back then.
Apparently you miss one very important word in my sarcastic post: 'most'. That and the fact it was sarcastic like the previous comment.
Some student are doing just fine, like your daughter, because they got caring parents that gave them a good basic education and could build up from there. They even tend to do better thanks to the effectiveness of current technology. Good for them.
Most students, however, are just plain disastrous. They'll never get bilingual and trilingual is not even considered. For most of the younger people, technology is not an aiding tool, it's a replacing tool. Which means that they don't use the tool the help them doing better (more efficient, more correct), but they use the tool to do something they are completely incapable of doing without it. They don't even know that they are not capable of doing those things.
What online search and social media have done is widen the gap between the good and the ugly. People that were on top are now on a higher top, people that were at the bottom are now at a deeper bottom, and they account for the majority. We believed technology would allow for a cheap mass education and that rapidly we would be in a society of geniuses. Turns out it doesn't work that way, and you can't solve a social problem with a technical solution (that never worked). Because nobody wanted to pay high enough taxes to have a correct education system, we now have a mass of incompetent dudes that don't even realize they're incompetent but still have high expectations of what their job (or better, salary) should be because they're doing college. You have the illusion they're doing fine, but it's technology that's doing fine. With growing automation, they'll be rapidly completely out of the business.
Of course it's not as black and white as I'm putting it here, but you get the idea.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
We need artificial wireless neurons. Not a lot, just enough to let the brain know that stored information can be accessed via these neurons. Let the neurons pull data from the megamind AI hadoop deep thought big data servers, and voila, humans now know that religion is a hoax, jet fuel can't melt steel beams and 1+1 = 2. Then we can focus on social education instead of victorian education, and make this shit society of ours a bit better to live in.
But this tech needs to be available to anyone, not just Americans and friends. We don't need an even greater divide between ignoramuses and everyone else.
Good luck with that. I can't imagine any problems would crop up, because they never do in the movies. So it must be good. Really though, why is it so hard to use a computer? Why do you need that in you head, instead of in front of your eyes? I see only downsides.
Keeping your brain working longer will take better medicine and biology, not implantable computers. It's called health. Try it some time.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
So it must be good. Really though, why is it so hard to use a computer?
Computers require manual entry.
Keeping your brain working longer will take better medicine and biology, not implantable computers. It's called health. Try it some time.
That lasts just over a century tops; I'm talking about longer than that. Your brain has a finite store of memories as well.
No, you have your hard drive in your computer, it stores all your information. What makes you think that damaging brain tissue with a computer implant will make the remaining brain cells live longer? That makes no sense whatsoever (I am a neuroscientist by trade). Neurons are postmitotic, except for some cells that populate the olfactory bulbs and hippocampus. Cells can't live forever, but if you did want to make them live longer you would figure out how to improve protein synthesis and cellular waste removal in the brain. A key would be to prevent ER stress associated with protein misfolding. Those are all medical/biological advancements, not computer implants.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
It is not money that gives Elon credibility, but his list of accomplishments.
He has a track record of turning ideas into reality, so people pay attention.
Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.
Musk has had success (according to certain metrics) with some ideas. He has a lot of ideas. Attributing success to some of them after the fact says nothing about the potential of others.
And then there's the question of originality. How this latest babble is newsworthy is beyond me - it's been an SF cliche for decades. The earliest that I can think of off the top of my head is Bester's The Computer Connection, which is 40-odd years old, but the conceit has roots at least as far back as Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain" (1950).