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Tech Billionaires Invest In Linking Brains To Computers (technologyreview.com)
"To many in Silicon Valley, the brain looks like an unconquered frontier whose importance dwarfs any achievement made in computing or the Web," including Bryan Johnson, the founder of Braintree online payments, and Elon Musk. An anonymous reader quotes MIT Technology Review:
Johnson is effectively jumping on an opportunity created by the Brain Initiative, an Obama-era project which plowed money into new schemes for recording neurons. That influx of cash has spurred the formation of several other startups, including Paradromics and Cortera, also developing novel hardware for collecting brain signals. As part of the government brain project, the defense R&D agency DARPA says it is close to announcing $60 million in contracts under a program to create a "high-fidelity" brain interface able to simultaneously record from one million neurons (the current record is about 200) and stimulate 100,000 at a time...
According to neuroscientists, several figures from the tech sector are currently scouring labs across the U.S. for technology that might fuse human and artificial intelligence. In addition to Johnson, Elon Musk has been teasing a project called "neural lace," which he said at a 2016 conference will lead to "symbiosis with machines." And Mark Zuckerberg declared in a 2015 Q&A that people will one day be able to share "full sensory and emotional experiences," not just photos. Facebook has been hiring neuroscientists for an undisclosed project at Building 8, its secretive hardware division.
Elon Musk complains that the current speeds for transferring signals from brains are "ridiculously slow".
According to neuroscientists, several figures from the tech sector are currently scouring labs across the U.S. for technology that might fuse human and artificial intelligence. In addition to Johnson, Elon Musk has been teasing a project called "neural lace," which he said at a 2016 conference will lead to "symbiosis with machines." And Mark Zuckerberg declared in a 2015 Q&A that people will one day be able to share "full sensory and emotional experiences," not just photos. Facebook has been hiring neuroscientists for an undisclosed project at Building 8, its secretive hardware division.
Elon Musk complains that the current speeds for transferring signals from brains are "ridiculously slow".
I think Kurzweil is about right for 2029 assuming nothing big happens. If we just go rolling along with the research for the next 12 years, then MMIs will be amazingly advanced. My guess however is that we have at least a major depression and very possibly a world war to get through. I say somewhere around 2050...
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
https://xkcd.com/644/
*Bzzzzzt*
People are investing in this? We barely have any idea how the human brain works, let alone linking it to something.
A time machine would be a better investment as far as magical fantasy pipe dreams go.
People will one day be able to share "full sensory and emotional experiences," not just photos.
N/T
Certainly Mr. (Mrs.) tech billionaire, I share your enthusiasm for integrating the human mind with a machine and believe it is indeed within our reach now that innovators such as yourself are stepping up to the challenge. A one-time donation of $15,000,000 to my lab to pursue our groundbreaking research that we were already doing anyway will ensure that humanity will praise your name forever, parades will be held in your honor, and all other entrepreneurs will gaze at you longingly at tech events.
... until we are seeing commercials for Lightspeed Brand Briefs in our dreams.
#DeleteChrome
But seeing the direction the tech industry is developing in, I changed my mind. Instead of ending up with lots of cool and useful capabilities, it seems more likely you will end up being someone else's cool and useful capability instead.
I don't fancy becoming a Borg.
Just like Dick Cheney, we'll never be free from assholes like Peter Thiel.
They can buy nearly everything except eternal life.
As they get older they get more desperate - this is their attempt for immortality.
Just like Dick Cheney, we'll never be free from assholes like Peter Thiel.
Quick question: what makes Peter Thiel an asshole?
AFAICT, the only controversial thing he's done is come out in favour of Trump.
He's not personally known as an asshole (as Mark Zuckerberg), he doesn't do a lot of sketchy things with his charitable foundation (like Bill and Hillary Clinton), he doesn't finance riots and protests here in the US (like George Soros), and he certainly hasn't led us into war under false pretences or authorized torture like Dick Chaney has.
I'm just wondering... what makes him comparable to Dick Cheney?
It's the Trump thing, isn't it?
You're complaining about his support of Trump, right?
Pinky will get some smarts so he can help The Brain... LOL!
I can just imagine the last joke of all is finding the interface has to be custon-trained for each brain/mind since there is no guarantee that all minds run the same 'software'... as if each one has its own programming language.... ( defnitely the case for male vs female, and I imagine a few other types that would have different 'languages' )
Gotta be positive, though - I am positive that the results will be hooked up to a lightbulb and the brightness correlated to the actvity...
Have gnu, will travel.
Investing in removing there heads from there arseholes I think that would be a more worthy cause.
Will they pay people to use their brains for computing power while they are idle (i.e. watching tv) ?
Have gnu, will travel.
There is no issue of sharing "intelligence". See Godel for details. But emotions and pips ... it's voltages all-the-way down.
Don't do it... just don't hook a computer to your brain. You gonna be h@x0red.
Go with something like overlay visual contacts, so when you get rick astley permanently in you visual field, you can just take the contacts out.
I think I've read stories on here from these very billionaires warning us about the danger of cyborg's and AI's enslaving us and or killing us!
Look at what a bunch of non-AI enhanced, walk on two legs primates have done. Maybe this is the step we need to get over our evolutionary lag and consider the long time scale issues that affect human survival.
I wonder what AI enhanced dogs, cats, chimps, gorillas, dolphins, whales will say, after all I doubt we will be going first.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Well, in that case, that's okay, because I'm not really me. Sure I resemble the me from just a few moments ago, but the further out you go in time, the less I resemble me's gone by and so it goes for future me's as well. So say goodbye to any me you meet in the future, for you will never meet another me like him ever again.
Was just one of several similar books and I'd argue this was even more important, published before Limits to Growth:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
Published 1980:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy:_A_New_World_View
Before they develop the technology to actually censor thought they disapprove of?
Mark Zuckerberg declared in a 2015 Q&A that people will one day be able to share "full sensory and emotional experiences," not just photos.
Brainstorm
Find it.
Watch it.
Think about it.
“Do you remember being born?” the armless girl asked.
“We do.”
She stood alone on the white moss floor in the center of the shed. Bors stood directly before her, flanked by Wyeth and Rebel, while Nee-C lounged in the doorway, tensely eyeing the girlchild’s back. Rebel couldn’t help staring at where the child’s arms should have been. The flesh was smooth there, and unblemished. Her shoulder blades jutted slightly to either side, like tiny wings. Rebel looked down, found herself staring at the child’s crotch, at her innocent, hairless fig, and looked quickly up again.
The child seemed such a perfect avatar of helplessness that it was hard to think of her as the focus, as she had said, of perhaps a billion Comprise, as massive a point source of attention as Earth ever needed to assemble. “Get to the point,” Bors said roughly.
The girl smiled a knowing smile, full of irony and sophistication, that looked horribly out of place on her young face. “It is not a simple offer we wish to make,” she said, “and you won’t accept it without understanding what it entails. We fear this is the quickest way about it.”
Outside, the guardian machines had turned away and were stumping back toward the rings. Bors nodded brusquely. “You must understand that AIs existed for decades before we became conscious. They were old stuff—though they were simple creatures, scarcely more intelligent than their human masters. Hardly worth the effort. Even the human-computer interface was not exactly new. You do understand how an interfacer works, don’t you?”
“It’s a device that allows direct communication with machines,” Bors said. “Mind to metal. It hasn’t exactly been wiped out of human space, but most people consider it an obscenity.”
“No doubt,” the girlchild said dryly. “An obscenity that is especially difficult to eradicate, since it is the heart of the programmers that you use every day. We doubt your civilization could exist without it. But the point you should understand is that it is simply a tool for transferring thought, only slightly more efficient than, say, a telephone. It can take a thought from one mind and insert it into a machine or another mind, but that is all. By itself, it in no way dissolves the barrier between organic thought and electronic, or even between mind and mind.
“The day we were born, the mind sciences were still young. Most people did not realize their potential. Some few did. Among those who did were the thirty-two outlaw programmers who formed the seed about which we crystalized. At that time there was a planetwide computer net, a kind of consensual mental space, through which all artificial systems interacted. It was, among other things, the primary communications medium. At any given instant hundreds of millions of people interfaced throughthe net, with machines and with each other, working, gossiping, performing basic research.
“There were many desires afloat in the net. The potentials of machine intelligence had never been tapped.
There were always entrepeneurs, hobbyists, researchers and occultists trying to create direct mind to mind communication—usually involving the inability to lie—with varying degrees of success. Others wished to create an AI that would finally fulfill the possibilities inherent in artificial thought—a transcendent intelligence, if you will.
What you might call a god. These were the hungers that surfaced when we tried to define ourselves. To a degree, they were our definition.
“On the hour of our birth, thirty-two engineers, AI architects, witches, and cryptoprogrammers—brilliant people, the best of their kind—entered interface together.
They applied the new mind technologies together with a computer strategy known as hypercubing. It was an outdated method, even then. You took thirty-two small computers, connected them to each other as if
I nominate Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates as guinea pigs for the experiments.
> technology that might fuse human and artificial intelligence
Is this some kind of an advertisement for the upcoming Hollywood adaptation of GITS, with Scarlett Johansson (butt-naked) in the lead role? Supposedly to open macross cinemas worldwide on March 30th.
"neural lace" is hardly a new term or one invented/pioneered by Musk. Am I the only one who remembers talk of this from the late 90's? Does anyone else realize the USAF has already gone on record about using electrical trans-cranial stimulation to enhance learning rates by ~50%?
Billionaires have always had the biggest toys (Yachts, mansions, etc). Once they can buy intelligence, they will also be the smartest living beings. Most likely, they will be the only ones that can afford it also, leaving everyone else permanently fucked.
Will I be able to edit the "hosts" file to block tracking and advertising? And if I save a typo, will I die?
...and it's our right to mock them. Mocking is an important social need for the mockers, and a grudgingly acknowledged social good for the mockees.
Seriously, what do you think that Carnival is based upon? Why is there a European tradition of a Topsy Turvey Day? Why did nearly every monarchial court have a Fool?
We have an established social order, with the privileged and the lesser privileged. Yet the poor still have brains and the rich still have foibles. Having a day where the social order is subverted, with the understanding that it's time limited, allows a social safety valve.
Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers
Even then.. better than nothing.