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Inside Elon Musk's New Company Neuralink Which Aims To Fight Brain Conditions And Help Humanity Survive in the Age of AI (waitbutwhy.com)

Posted by msmash on from the Mr.-Elon-Audacious-Musk dept.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has confirmed plans for his newest company, called Neuralink Corp, revealing he will be the chief executive of a startup that aims to merge computers with brains so humans could one day engage in "consensual telepathy." In an interview with explainer website Wait But Why (36,000-word), Musk said Neuralink aims to implant tiny brain electrodes that first would be used to fight brain conditions but later help humanity avoid subjugation at the hands of intelligent machines. From the report: "There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing," Musk said. "That's what language is, your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer. If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person." Musk says he expects the project to take eight to 10 years before being usable by people with no disability. He anticipates tons of regulatory challenges in his way.

63 comments

  1. help humanity avoid subjugation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yea, OK. Like I want Captain Hairplugs leading our forces against Skynet.

  2. If you're nice, it's consensual telepathy ... by Ihlosi · · Score: 2
    ... but if you're not, they'll turn it into involuntary telepathy.

    Have a nice day.

    1. Re:If you're nice, it's consensual telepathy ... by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Insightful

      ... but if you're not, they'll turn it into involuntary telepathy.

      Elon has three main obstacles:
      1) understand the brain
      2) figure out how to engineer an enhancement system
      3) perfect computer security

      I don't know who else is more up to those challenges, but boy are they huge challenges (electric cars and rockets do seem like warm-up practice).

      Without 3) I'm not interested. With 3) we advance as a society way more than just the neural lace will provide.

      Regardless, the endeavor should yield significant progress in all three areas, so even if this Holy Grail isn't achieved, the effort will be worthwhile nonetheless.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    2. Re:If you're nice, it's consensual telepathy ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      consensual telepathy? how about consensual 'go **** yourself'?

    3. Re:If you're nice, it's consensual telepathy ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I thought I was on Slashdot, not Yahoo news.

    4. Re:If you're nice, it's consensual telepathy ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "3) perfect computer security"
      That's pretty easy.. Secure the way in with a preshared 256-bit encryption key. All encrypted messages would also need to be signed.
      Sure if someone manages to get some random code on one the other parts they could inject data, but if you have physical access you could just replace the devices.
      If you want to take it further.. Writing secure code is not hard, but it takes alot of time.. What you can start with is to allow the brain to output data.. This data can then be parsed and acted upon. The receiver of the data would then sanitize all input from the other device before processing it. Ie if you are using your brain as "keyboard/mouse input" (btw, HID .. that's funny :) ) .. If you are set in that mode you will not accept anything else from there.. If we are talking input back to the brain you could classify it as "images" "audio" and so on.. Sure you could probably cause a epileptic seizure with just those two things, but if you do pairing and don't pair with unknown devices you will be safe..

      Problem is not computer security... Problem is people with the mindset "i just want it to work so i disable all types of security here" or the "i got this .exe file in my mail that says i have $2M waiting for me in some random bank in some country i never visited so i clicked on it."
      You can never protect against stupidity..

  3. Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism. It's often considered to be a form of mental illness that affects one's logic, reasoning, and the perception of reality. A lot of people have been affected by this malady, but perhaps there is hope for them yet. Please, Elon, do what you can to help these people regain their ability to be productive, contributing members of society.

    1. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by blackomegax · · Score: 0, Troll

      You misspelled conservatism. I will admit the neoliberal left are...mentally deranged.. We need to correct everybody to an acceptable communist viewpoint. While we're at it, we can eliminate greedy impulses and corruption and actually have true functional communism!

    2. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I am your god, Capital (remember to not worship any others). :D I am here to disclose to you (under NDA, so don't consider becoming a profit... um, prophet) the true cure for Leftism. :D

      The cure (drum beat) ... is an advanced form of ultraliberal socialism in a post-scarcity society.

    3. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by mean+pun · · Score: 1

      There may be some slight disadvantages to writing with your left hand, but geeez, don't exaggerate.

    4. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Pray tell us how you will keep the flames of capitalism when the currency system has collapsed and the productivity of an individual is amplified so high that there is no need to hire 9 out of 10 people.

    5. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by GameboyRMH · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's when it's killbot time. The natural end-state of unrestrained capitalism is the killbot-powered genocide of at least 99% of the human population. It will make communism's death toll look like a rounding error. I, for one, would like to avoid this.

      --
      "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
    6. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      You fool. Like so many others before you, you clearly haven't learned a damned thing from history. You put the power to alter people's minds en masse into the hands of a government? They'll turn their citizenry into mindless zombies who do what they're told to do, when they're told to it, unquestioningly, even if it means they die. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the ability to alter people's minds represents absolute power over a population. I'm not even getting into what out-and-out criminal organizations would do with this sort of technology. This is not the sort of power anyone should have, ever, for any reason. It'd result in a Dystopia that would make all the fictional dystopias ever conceived look pleasant.

    7. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2

      The cure (drum beat) ... is an advanced form of ultraliberal socialism in a post-scarcity society.

      'Ultraliberal socialism' is an oxymoron.

      'Liberal' implies individual freedom. 'Socialism' implies subjugation of the individual to the collective. They're opposites.

      From Venezuela to China, from the USSR to Burma, and even now in Cuba, societies advance towards post-scarcity when they're highly liberal (in the real sense of the word) and individuals can organically save for and invest in the capital goods that enable higher production. When they go in the direction of socialism (e.g. Venezuela) they lose the capacity to produce even the essential goods of life.

      Have a look at the article linked on the other post today about neural lace for more on productivity or the recent Freakonomics episodes on Earth 2.0 for current thinking on such topics as production and organic growth.

      The net is that to achieve post-scarcity you need a) high productivity and b) high-wealth, and capitalism (cf. crapitalism), as demonstrated empirically by every society that has tried either or both.

      A post-scarcity society is a laudable goal, so don't shoot yourself in the foot on the path there.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    8. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      That's when it's killbot time. The natural end-state of unrestrained capitalism is the killbot-powered genocide of at least 99% of the human population. It will make communism's death toll look like a rounding error. I, for one, would like to avoid this.

      Capitalists don't kill off their customer base - at a minimum they would have no profits. Are you thinking of the Progressive movement and their eugenicists and "human cancer" types? Are they building AI's to grow their food? They tend not to understand economics or how anything works for that matter (except for their corrupt government systems) so it's possible that some of them think that way. Otherwise your post doesn't make any sense at all.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    9. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 0

      the productivity of an individual is amplified so high that there is no need to hire 9 out of 10 people.

      I remember the 1870's* when the Industrial Revolution was to mean "the end of employment" and the USPTO was thinking of shutting down because "everything had already been invented that needed to be". This will never be true until Man has no unfulfilled desires.

      History doesn't repeat itself, but boy does it echo loudly.

      * I don't remember it, but I read history so I don't have to be ignorant of it.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    10. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by GameboyRMH · · Score: 2

      I am thinking of capitalists and not your strawman progressives.

      They're not killing off customers because people who the economy doesn't need work from can't pay for goods. If the 1% are doing nearly all of the producing (through ownership of robotic factories) and consuming (because they're the only ones who have discretionary income), and the 99% is just surviving on welfare and fuming at the 1% for hoarding everything, what do you think is going to happen? The 1%ers who produce things for mass consumption like food, energy and housing will have to take a hit to their business, but I'm sure the 1%ers could work out a compensation scheme among themselves...or just pool those 99%er-dependent services into the hands of a few fall guys and take them out first.

      --
      "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
    11. Re: Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh, there are plenty of projects that aim to employ affordable automation in order to enable communities to become self-sustainable. Most of them led by progressives and leftists. Sadly work is slow because no sane corporation or their puppet regimes would ever allow the public to not rely on the 'goods and services sector'. So they starve those projects of funding and you can understad why. How would Monsanto, McDonalds, Unilever and the like survive with whole communities capable of growing their own food cheaply, efficiently and with no prior knowledge of farming or necessity to spend the entire day tending to crops and animals? It's every capitalist's nightmare. They'd much rather throw stones at windows to keep the glass-makers in business.

    12. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by WrongMonkey · · Score: 1

      Let's suppose kill-bots were to kill off 99% of the global population right now. That still leaves 70 million people alive. That's more than population of the UK; more than sufficient to have a self-sufficient internal economy among the surviving capitalists.

    13. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by blackomegax · · Score: 1

      Have you *SEEN* human nature lately? Shit needs correcting, fast. Doesn't matter who does it. Government bodies are just collections of people, once they're corrected, said body will operate in a way even you agree with.

    14. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      You apparently aren't listening: No one should have the power to rewrite people's minds. EVER. NO GOOD WILL COME OF IT. EVER.

    15. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What! no even to produce docile sex slaves?
      what good is science for then?
      Jokes apart I always wondered what would happen if a group of kids were connected to themselves and to the web since birth
      How they would develop? one feasible consequence could be that they would take their non connected parents for a ride, every time

    16. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Scandinavian countries tried socialism and are doing quite well. Funny they never get mentioned whenever the topic of socialism is discussed.

    17. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They wouldn't likely 'develop' at all, they'd probably all end up severely autistic, completely incapable of relating to real people in the real world. In other words, they'd be like 4chan/b/ at it's absolute worst.

    18. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by ivrogne · · Score: 1

      'Socialism' implies subjugation of the individual to the collective.

      No, that's communism. Socialism means everyone is well taken care of. The rich still get richer, but the poor get less poor. It is harder to get it to work because it requires balancing everyone's interests, but it works, and leads to societies which are better by most metrics.

    19. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ability to alter people's minds? Like the news posting lies or half-truths? Like our leaders telling us half-truths/lies? Like talking to anyone that is expressing their view on something? We already have this capability thru speech, and that will still be the easiest way to influence people.

      With even the most advanced version of this it would be next to impossible to "rewrite" a brain... Would most likely be easier to do brainwashing the same way as cults do it..

      The computer-brain-interface would most likely be to output things.. Typing text.. Sending over a visual representation of what you are thinking about to the other person's visual cortex (or maybe just a display over the eye since that would probably be easier to implement)

      I do not claim or know what will come from this.. But i don't see it as a problematic technology anytime soon..

      Just some food for thought. Imagine if you could actually "write" to someone's mind.. Imagine if you could dump all the experiences from a 70 year old professor and write all that knowledge into a 20 year old person, all without having the person spending a day in school... Imagine if you could dump all the experiences from a hundred 70 year old professors and write that into a 20 year old person's mind...Imagine a world where you could apply for a job, and all the needed information could simply be downloaded into your mind in a few minutes..
      Imagine a world where everyone would have instance access to knowledge (with hundreds of years of experience) in any field they wanted.
      In a world like this we would not have poverty in the same way we do today.. All countries would be on the same level of development and possibilities in producing goods. Just imagine.. if you Indian support-guy would actually know what they were talking about. (sorry, could not resist :)
      In a world like this we could all make decisions based on facts instead of basing it on the filtered down versions our leaders/news-outlets tells us.

      I do think that something like this would far outweigh the downsides, and it would probably be a lot of pushback during the emergence of the technology. But it's all probably a quite long way there (50-100 years?) before we start seeing anything close to the above.

      And as a recommendation.. Read the 3 books in the Nexus series ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/... ).. They take it a step further with nanobots that you inject into your brain to allow you to communicate with others and then plays on how the world reacts to these things..

    20. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      2 of those 9 people would start their own businesses because they could not find a job anywhere else.. each of those would hire employees, and with a high unemployment the salaries would be quite low... The less unemployed people you have the higher salaries will get for unqualified work.. The more unemployment you have the lower the salaries will be for unskilled workers.. If you are using robots to do the work because they are cheaper today, at some point it will again start being more profitable to hire people based on price of the robots and the amount of produced goods that you can sell.

      It's quite a self-balancing system, because for a place to be profitable with robots means that they must mass-produce things. If there are no masses to buy those things it will stop being profitable to produce things in mass with robots and we revert back to producing things in smaller volumes where it's better to use humans.

      Now if you are referring to a "post-scarcity society" that means that everything necessary is so dirt-cheap that you don't have to make as much money either.. So even a low salary would be enough to live on.

      And if we go into a "real" post-scarcity society where food, electricity and housing would be free there is no strict need for anyone to make money either..

    21. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And who builds those robotic factories? Or the roads to and from those factories? Or the power-lines or power-plants used to power those factories?

      The benefit with robotic factories is that you can produce a lot of things cheaply.. If you cannot sell those goods to the 99% it would be more expensive to produce things with robots than hiring some of the 99% unemployed because they would almost accept any salary.. Then when you get a few more employed you need to produce a little more so you hire a few more people and requires more goods and on it goes, until it hits the limit where it's cheaper to produce things with robots and down it goes again...

      Instead of talking about "universal income" etc like most of the left seem to be i would much rather see a system where a companies would pay taxes based on the number of employees they had.. Like no tax if company makes less than $X per employee. 20% tax on anything between $X to $Y and 40% tax on anything between $Y to $Z and so on up to 100% tax on the profit on anything above $P..

    22. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Writing my summary here since i seemed to have started rambling... The current system in Sweden is falling apart during many reasons.. I myself have been thinking about moving away from here since there is no way to make a decent living and be able to save money after everything has been paid.
      Same job i have here could bring in 5-10 times the money (after tax and living-costs) if i lived in the US or UK.

      That's not really true.. We don't have "real" socialism.. What we have in Sweden is socialised healthcare and socialised unemployment and we also have capitalism.

      The base taxation is that for every 100SEK someone earns 63.42SEK will be paid in taxes.
      So lets say company 1 pays 100SEK for having me employed. I get 36.58 in my hand, and then i buy something and pay 25% VAT on that resulting in 27.43SEK reaching the next company.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      But the taxation here is ridiculous since we "need to finance our welfare system" that is currently being overrun with things it was never meant to handle.
      Illegal immigrants gets to sends their kids to school, free of cost.
      Illegal immigrants gets free healthcare. (including prescriptions and dental care that still costs money for swedish citizens that work and pay taxes)
      Illegal immigrants don't have to pay taxes.
      (https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/About-the-Migration-Agency/Facts-and-statistics-/Statistics.html)
      We brought in just above 160000 asylum seekers during 2015. 80000 during 2014 and 55000 during 2013. This to a country with a population of 9 million..
      Of of this about 4.9 million of these are employed. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/527454/sweden-number-of-employed-people/)
      This means that just for every asylum seeker 16.6 people would cover the costs for them here. Say each asylum-seeker costs 200000 per year that is 12000SEK for each working person in extra taxes, but with the high cost of apartments, healthcare and such it's probably at least 4 times that amount..

      And with illegal immigrant i refer to people getting their immigration or asylum request rejected but refuse to leave the country.
      I don't mind refugees or immigrants, as long as they at least try become productive members of society that contribute instead of just taking.

      The biggest issue here is that the Socialdemocrats that has been leading sweden for many years don't have a sustainable immigration policy or policy that works for the largest employer (small business) we have.. All they try to do is raise the taxes and make it more and more costly to live to be able to sustain their model.. All in the name of "making society equal" without regards to how hard you have worked to get to where you are..
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
      The average salary in Sweden is 30000SEK per month (or 3332.67USD) -- Actually it's 4379.79USD if you also count the "hidden" social fees the company has to pay.
      Of this the average salary after income-tax the person gets in his hand is 20400SEK (2266.21USD)
      On this you have cost of an apartment and that will be somewhere between 4000SEK-14000SEK for a 1 room (studio) apartment depending on where you live in Sweden. For a 2 room apartment that will be 6000SEK-20000SEK
      Cost of living in Sweden (food, clothes etc) will be somewhere 6000-8000SEK per month for basic living..
      Transportation will be another 800-1000SEK per month for bus/subway or 2000-4000SEK for a basic car that you drive to/from work.
      "A-kassa" to get the unemployment pay if you are fired. 100-150SEK and you get a maximum of 14500SEK per month.

      For more avarage prices see: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of... .. But remember that it depends on if you live in a big city or small city.. Apartments in central stockholm are really expensive.. Apartments in suburbs of stockh

    23. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      And who builds those robotic factories? Or the roads to and from those factories? Or the power-lines or power-plants used to power those factories?

      Other robots, presumably.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    24. Re:Please, Elon, find us a cure for Leftism! by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      I remember the 1870's* when the Industrial Revolution was to mean "the end of employment"

      Only if you were a Utopian Socialist. Meanwhile, the actual capitalists just used it to multiply their profits.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  4. Consensual, right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm sure companies will want and get backdoors into your thoughts.

    That's pretending this thing will even work.

    1. Re: Consensual, right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is musk we're talking about.

  5. If we can't handle 36K word articles... by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 1

    >> article on Wait But Why is 36,000-word long

    If we can't handle 36K word articles...then I welcome our AI overlords. Learn how to skim, people.

    1. Re:If we can't handle 36K word articles... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "The article on Wait But Why is 36,000-word long."

      What the fuck kind of a sentence is this?

    2. Re:If we can't handle 36K word articles... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's the second msmash article in 24 hours to have suffered from this malady. To msmash, pronouns and adjectives happen to other people; it's just as well these incoherent sentence fragments aren't being used as story descriptions on popular news sites or anything like that.....

  6. "Help Humanity Survive in the Age of AI" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sounds like the title of a Weird AI Yankovic movie.

  7. The biggest unknown to date? by wjcofkc · · Score: 2

    So the goals of the technology have been outlined. However, I don't think the totality of how this will be used can be guessed at outside of a flying leap. I suspect the outcome will be stranger than it's stated goals. Here is my flying leap, brains for hire:

    Imagine shifts running around the clock where all you do is come in and be rendered unconscious so your brain can be linked with thousands of others to perform massive computational tasks. After being revived you go about your business until your next shift.

    Philosophical problem: Can you be sure you ever actually woke up, or are you still sitting there in a dream that your are awake while your brain is still crunching numbers?

    --
    Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
    1. Re:The biggest unknown to date? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Imagine shifts running around the clock where all you do is come in and be rendered unconscious so your brain can be linked with thousands of others to perform massive computational tasks

      Someone has been reading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.

  8. Not exactly a neural lace by Robyrt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The parts of the brain that most of us would like to be technologically enhanced - memory, facial recognition, mental math - are very poorly understood. Even if we had a device allowing us to fire neurons on command, we have no idea how to write a program that helps with these problems.

    Musk is smart to focus on medical applications, where even an implant that functions poorly is much better than the alternative. It's a lot easier to make a pacemaker than to perform a heart transplant, and the same holds true for the brain.

    1. Re:Not exactly a neural lace by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Musk would be even smarter if he actually finished a project before starting another one. Most of what he does amounts to nothing.

    2. Re:Not exactly a neural lace by Thelasko · · Score: 0

      Musk is smart to focus on medical applications, where even an implant that functions poorly is much better than the alternative. It's a lot easier to make a pacemaker than to perform a heart transplant, and the same holds true for the brain.

      Musk is very good at taking seemingly impossible goals and breaking them down into more achievable ones. Medical implants for the disabled are likely a stepping stone for brain enhancement on healthy individuals.

      Another example of this method:
      1. Invest in a high performance, low volume, electric vehicle. Profit.
      2. Invest in a high end, luxury, electric vehicle. Profit
      3. Invest in a high volume electric vehicle. End goal.

      --
      One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
    3. Re:Not exactly a neural lace by istartedi · · Score: 1

      We may not have a good interface directly into the brain for memory, math, and facial recog; but that seems like a problem would could solve. After all, what are our eyes and a phone but a kind of klunky prosthetic for a deficient brain?

      What we really don't understand is how this impacts our state of being. If I have a cybernetic implant that allows me to preserve the memory of my family, I'm still alive, right? Simply having access to knowledge of my life doesn't steal my consciousness. Otherwise, family photo albums would make me legally dead.

      What we really don't understand is how all the stuff in our brain and body make us conscious human beings. We'll still die; but what does death look like? Is a machine with all my data still me? Will death just be a slight twinge of existential angst, followed by me no longer being a real human being? Or, is a full upload still conscious? What's going to happen? Real immortality, or just a slow transformation into a fancy animated corpse/memorial?

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  9. 'Subjugation at the hands of machines', LOL by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

    I used to think Elon Musk was the real-life Tony Stark; now I think he's closer to the real-life Nichola Tesla, but in Tesla's final years, when his mental faculties were clearly deteriorating. Elon Musk clearly needs to stop reading so many cautionary science fiction stories, stop watching so much television, and stay out of movie theatres, at least until he can learn to distinguish fantasy from reality again -- assuming that is he's ever known the difference in the first place. We're not going to be 'subjugated' by machines, or even threatened by such a nonsense idea, ever. Also, stay the hell out of my brain! Do. Not. Want.

    1. Re:'Subjugation at the hands of machines', LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Tesla actually invented things himself. Musk is a guy with money.

    2. Re:'Subjugation at the hands of machines', LOL by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 1

      Tesla didn't deteriorate in his later life, that's just the official narrative to conceal how he actually died (as part of a Navy teleportation experiment gone wrong commonly known as the Philadelphia Experiment.)

    3. Re:'Subjugation at the hands of machines', LOL by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      You forgot to end your comment with '', or 'LOL', or 'xDDDDD', or whatever it is you kids use these days to denote you're kidding around. ;-)

    4. Re:'Subjugation at the hands of machines', LOL by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 1

      Wasn't.

    5. Re:'Subjugation at the hands of machines', LOL by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      Oh, well, okay then. For future reference, you should probably close such comments like this:

    6. Re:'Subjugation at the hands of machines', LOL by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 1

      It's not.

    7. Re:'Subjugation at the hands of machines', LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So you think you are smarter than Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates?

    8. Re:'Subjugation at the hands of machines', LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You forgot to take your meds today, didn't you? Go tell the nice nurse to dose you, and to keep you away from the Internets, mmkay?

    9. Re:'Subjugation at the hands of machines', LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You forgot to take your meds today, didn't you? Go tell the nice nurse to dose you, and to keep you away from the Internets, mmkay?

      That wouldn't help. He posted here using a paperclip tapped on his tooth fillings.

  10. So Elon Musk is the creator of the Borg? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I always figured humans were more likely to become the Borg than the Federation. Now we know how it begins.

    1. Re:So Elon Musk is the creator of the Borg? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I was always waiting for some weird time-travel episode to explain that the Borg ARE the Federation.

  11. Tl;DR: by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 1

    It is meant to function much like the brain implant the main character of Farscape got which worked against his interests to extract information, only much much more clunky.

  12. DOS attack by Bengie · · Score: 1

    Someone smarter than someone else could flood the other person's brain. Doesn't even need to be overall intelligence, just in whatever part is creating the thoughts. What if I'm thinking about an n-dimensional problem where n is much greater than 3, and I try to transmit this idea to someone else? This is excluding my A.D.D.. Sometimes I think so fast I almost blackout. Many concurrent thoughts traversing many different paths, trying to solve a difficult problem.

    I recognize that the rate and quality of ideas transference is highly limited by traditional communication methods, but there is always going to be some amount of "[lossy] compression" going on unless two brains are identical.

    1. Re:DOS attack by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Snow crash
      Even better, ramsonware
      Breitbart in your dreams

      The possibilities are endless

  13. as a neuroscientist by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I think for one Elon bit off a little too much to chew.

    The brain is just so incredibly complicated and mysterious, I don't see 10 years as a time frame for the kind of progress Elon is predicting.

  14. Language by Geodesy99 · · Score: 1

    "... what language is, your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer." No, language isn't that. See mandatory South Park https://www.youtube.com/watch?... from "Marklars are wise and true", Starvin' Marvin episode.

  15. BORG by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I always thought that ST:TNG missed the opportunity to explain the BORG as a human invention. I generally hate time travel as done by TV/movie sci-fi, but since TNG had that cat pretty much out of the bag already, I thought it would be an interesting angle to explain the BORG as a human invention that got out of control in the future and time-traveled back to TNG era.

  16. Speech by manu0601 · · Score: 1

    They may discover that going through the speech channel forces the mind to refine throughs. What is a raw through that has not been verbalized?

    1. Re:Speech by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 1

      What is a raw through that has not been verbalized?

      Emotion. Or "I need to pee." One of the two.