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Elon Musk Wants To Put An AI Hardware Chip In Your Skull (itmunch.com)

"iTMunch reports that Elon Musk apparently believes that the human race can only be "saved" by implanting chips into our skulls that make us half human, half artificial intelligence," writes Slashdot reader dryriver. From the report: Elon Musk's main goal, he explains, is to wire a chip into your skull. This chip would give you the digital intelligence needed to progress beyond the limits of our biological intelligence. This would mean a full incorporation of artificial intelligence into our bodies and minds. He argues that without taking this drastic measure, humanity is doomed. There are a lot of ethical questions raised on the topic of what humanity according to Elon Musk exactly is, but he seems undeterred. "My faith in humanity has been a little shaken this year," Musk continues, "but I'm still pro-humanity."

The seamless conjunction of humans and computers gives us humans a shot at becoming completely "symbiotic" with artificial intelligence, according to Elon Musk. He argues that humans as a species are all already practically attached to our phones. In a way, this makes us almost cyborg-like. The only difference is that we haven't managed to expand our intelligence to that level. This means that we are not as smart as we could be. The data link that currently exists between the information that we get from our phones or computers is not as fast as it could be. "It will enable anyone who wants to have superhuman cognition," Musk said. "Anyone who wants."
As for how much smarter humans will become with these AI chips, Musk writes: "How much smarter are you with a phone or computer or without? You're vastly smarter, actually," Musk said. "You can answer any question pretty much instantly. You can remember flawlessly. Your phone can remember videos (and) pictures perfectly. Your phone is already an extension of you. You're already a cyborg. Most people don't realize you're already a cyborg. It's just that the data rate [...] it's slow, very slow. It's like a tiny straw of information flow between your biological self and your digital self. We need to make that tiny straw like a giant river, a huge, high-bandwidth interface."

10 of 362 comments (clear)

  1. Lots of trust by NettiWelho · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Are you sure the chip isn't capable of turning your power switch to off position?

  2. TO DO list by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He seems to have this list of things he thought were important when he was 17 and is simply going down that list.

    Unfortunately eternal September happened. The chip in your brain better have some good filtering capability and come fully loaded with ad block, no script and blacklist any site where you might be influenced by anyone in the negative or median IQ range. So essentially all of it.

  3. He's right of course, but many here won't like it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Whenever AI is discussed, AI researchers chime in: "the AI we have is not AI, merely brute statistics", "this chip is extremely crude", "think of all the down sides", "the current implementation is a joke", etc.

    AI researchers are too close to the problem. If you are at the cutting edge of X, and have tried and failed to solve X a thousand times, naturally you see X as unsolvable. But step back. Some other guy is bypassing it. Decade by decade, machines are getting better at doing stuff. Eventually they WILL either get our abilities, or make our unique skills irrelevant. At that time you better hope you are wired in.

    As for the argument that "humans will always be needed, because our economy is built around humans", wake up and look at the rest of the universe. Stuff happens without humans. Once machines don't need you, they don't need you.

    Still reading? You haven't downvoted me yet? You're slipping.

  4. Oh my dear Elon.... by Computershack · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Being able to get an answer from Google or a calculator doesn't mean you're smarter Elon, in fact it often means the opposite. Its no good being given an answer if you don't know what to do with that information.

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    1. Re:Oh my dear Elon.... by Katatsumuri · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You don't have to be so condescending. It may not make you an omniscient space opera superintelligence, but just being able to learn a language quickly, or remember a unique password for every website is a useful upgrade. Use your imagination, there are thousands of useful applications for a neural interface that can save you the time and unnecessary mental effort, allowing you to think more about "what to do with that information", effectively making you "smarter" by many practical definitions.

  5. Re:One job at a time by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually a little before the Wright Brother's famous flight, in the same year, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices. It was the first serious proposal to explore space, offering a somewhat practical method of doing so.

    He went on to design things like multi-stage boosters and life support systems. It's incredible to think that there were people seriously thinking about exploring space when powered flight wasn't even possible yet.

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  6. Smarter? by Registered+Coward+v2 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    "How much smarter are you with a phone or computer or without? You're vastly smarter, actually," Musk said. "You can answer any question pretty much instantly. You can remember flawlessly.

    .

    Of course, since Google searches only return correct information, Wikipedia is never wrong. Everything you read or see on the internet is true.

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    I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
  7. Re:Smarter? by MitchDev · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Phones and computer don't make anyone smarter, they just give you access to more information. Not necessarily real or accurate information at that....

  8. Re:Smarter? by DarkOx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Exactly Musk (and he is smart enough to know better) is conflating intelligence with access to information. They two are not the same. While its true the most intelligent person in the world still can't make good decisions without access to timely, and correct information; it does not work the other way round.

    You can't give just anyone access to information and suddenly expect them to be smart. Stupid is as Stupid does. There are lot of smart phone running around this country and all I have to do is flip on the news for 5min to confirm its NOT making people wiser, if anything they are just letting people do more stupid faster.

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  9. Re:Smarter? by TrekkieGod · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Exactly Musk (and he is smart enough to know better) is conflating intelligence with access to information. They two are not the same.

    Although you are correct, it's more difficult to draw the line than you'd think. You show up to your grandparent's place, they ask you to fix the computer. Maybe they have a Mac, and you don't use a Mac. But you have experience, you know your away around computers, you know how to Google. And you have their problem fixed up in a jiffy. They immediately say, "our grandson, he's so smart..."

    Turns out knowledge, experience, and access to information allow you to accomplish things that people without those things can't accomplish. Similarly to how greater intelligence might let you accomplish things others can't. I say might, because a "dumber" person who applied themselves to acquire a lot of knowledge and experience will accomplish more than a highly intelligent person who is lazy and lacks ambition. And now you ask, "is the other person more intelligent, because they planned their life better?"

    In some ways, the answer is yes, and now we're getting into different kinds of intelligence. You take a Rain Man style idiot-savant who can do very complex math in their heads, but can't take care of themselves. Are they more intelligent than you? In mathematics, sure. But now you have a chip in your head, and that hardware can do the complex math for you. Did you become more intelligent? Chess programs are unbeatable by our best chess Grandmasters now, are they intelligent? We used to claim that would be a big milestone in hard AI, but it turned we can make a really dumb, but specialized machine for that task. So we moved the goal posts. I had the opportunity to play Lubomir Ftacnik in a group game when he came to my University's chess club, and the most impressive part wasn't that he beat everyone in the simultaneous game. It's that he sat down with each person later and went over their game with them, talking abut different things they could have done. Every move. From memory. I've later come to find out this is common among chess Grandmasters. Is that type of chess eidetic memory sufficient to make someone into a grandmaster? No. Is it beneficial? Apparently so, since so many of them have it. And that's easy to supplement you with.

    You can't give just anyone access to information and suddenly expect them to be smart. Stupid is as Stupid does. There are lot of smart phone running around this country and all I have to do is flip on the news for 5min to confirm its NOT making people wiser, if anything they are just letting people do more stupid faster.

    Yeah, but now it's not a smartphone, it's in your brain. What if you don't see it as data, but see it as thought. When you're playing chess, it computes a bunch of possible moves, but you're not consciously aware of all those choices, just the ones it deemed best and fed them back to you. When you make a decision, it computes which has the best expected value, and now you get a "good feeling" about the option with the best expected value. This is the best case scenario, imagine the dystopian one. Instead of getting a good feeling about the option with the best expected value, you get a good feeling about the option the chip manufacturer gets paid to promote.

    Basically, it's not the question of what is intelligence and what is not that bothers me. I think the chip can be undoubtedly be used to make us all either more intelligent or sufficiently emulating higher intelligence, whatever that means. What bothers me is that this is root access to my personality. I can be subtly controlled, not know it, and not care once I do find out.

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