Tesla’s gonzo co-founder went on a podcast, said he’s probably a few months away from announcing a human-computer interface called the Neuralink, and then he got high.<\/b>
\nTesla\u2019s gonzo co-founder went on a podcast, said he\u2019s probably a few months away from announcing a human-computer interface called the Neuralink, and then he got high.
That only barely scratches the surface of all the Elon Musk headlines from this week, let alone some of the news-making items that came out of his appearance Thursday on Joe Rogan\u2019s podcast.
Elon, who\u2019s famously been on the \u201cI\u2019m absolutely terrified\u201d end of the artificial intelligence discussion, said he\u2019ll be announcing \u201cin a few months\u201d a mechanism by which people can effectively merge themselves with computers. It\u2019s a kind of dystopian symbiosis that really just takes what\u2019s already a reality now, the fact that we\u2019re so tied to and connected with our phones, and elevates that to the next level.
\u201cHow much smarter are you with a phone or computer or without? You\u2019re vastly smarter, actually,\u201d Musk said during Rogan\u2019s podcast. \u201cYou 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\u2019re already a cyborg. Most people don\u2019t realize you\u2019re already a cyborg. It\u2019s just that the data rate, it\u2019s slow, very slow. It\u2019s 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.\u201d
This is a kind of \u201cif you can\u2019t beat AI, join it\u201d line of thinking, apparently. Elon even goes so far as to say with this kind of neuralink, we could conceivably upload our non-biological selves, including memories and so forth, into a new \u201cunit\u201d of some sort. The \u201cmerge scenario with AI,\u201d Elon says, \u201cis the one that seems like probably the best.\u201d
When Elon really ramped up talking about all this last year, The Verge did some reporting that stopped just short of calling this idea \u2014 not so much crazytown, but very, very far out.
\u201cNeuroscience researchers say we have very limited understanding about how the neurons in the human brain communicate, and our methods for collecting data on those neurons is rudimentary. Then there\u2019s the idea of people volunteering to have electronics placed inside their heads.\u201d Then again, Elon has an army of fans who hang on his every word, so who knows at this point.<\/p>\n

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