Elon Musk wants to merge humans with AI. How many brains will be damaged along the way?

jeffw@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 129 points –
Elon Musk wants to merge humans with AI. How many brains will be damaged along the way?
vox.com
47

I hope he experiments on him self and it goes horribly wrong

Ha, You don't think that's already happened?

Nah, I think his brain damage is from all the K he’s zooted out on

At the same time, I feel like we shouldn't let that happen because imagine if he actually succeeds? And then we just have immortal crackhead Lex Luthor with a hallucinating ChatGPT whispering further delusions directly into his brain. That can't be good for any of us.

Brain chips from the people who “move fast and break things”. This can only end well.

If anyone is dumb enough to put anything from that dude into their head, that brain was already damaged!

If definitely seems dystopian, but hopefully this ends up helping some people who are quadriplegic.

There’s a shit ton of people I’d trust more with this work than Elon

Absolutely. However through his maniacal adventures he may find where this technology should NOT go to progress.

Hopefully the people elon's persuading to do this work are better aligned.

It will for sure.

In the short term.

The problem is the implants can and very likely will cause very serious complications in the long term.

My SO is a neurologist who visibly cringes wherever I mention brain implants as we discuss emerging tech (my wheelhouse).

3 more...

Your brain would have to be damaged already to agree to this.

Maybe we should find prison volunteers. Get us some Lawnmower Man shit

He's obviously desperately trying to revive the image of being a genius again. But everybody knows what kind of charlatan he is.

It's too bad, if he stayed off Twitter (not just not buying it but not twitt either) people who still believe he's a genius.

I think he still has millions of worshippers out there.

Oh just want we need, a hive mind of morons. Together they may be able to reach average

He should grow balls and be the first person to have neurolink implanted in his brain.

Sacrifice yourselfers for the eternal future Emperor God Elontron Musk.

He will insert his X in all of our hearts.

Why the fuck would anyone want this?

Advertisers would absolutely love to augment your reality with ads or even just the ability to accurately confirm you've actually watched a traditional ad along with how you "felt" about it.

At that point people would absolutely sign up for free implants so they can access ad supported services that may otherwise become unaffordable within a society further strip mined of wealth by the then trillionaire class.

Knowing advertisers, at least here in the US, they would bypass confirming you watched ads by just beaming them straight to your implant and making it impossible to get rid of the ads.

It's not the advertisers doing that, it's the publishers.

The advertiser has no real say in how a publisher decides to pimp their audience other than lining up with cash on hand like an eternally and unhealthily addicted John.

In fact, on the advertiser side it's mostly a prisoner's dilemma driving their addiction, pushed to spend money on poorly converting and too wide channels out of fear that if they don't and their competitors do that they'll lose market share.

Advertisers suck for a variety of other reasons, but let's not turn a blind eye to the publisher greed either.

Advertisers would absolutely love to augment your reality with ads or even just the ability to accurately confirm you've actually watched a traditional ad along with how you "felt" about it.

Your reality is already augmented with ads most places you look, and advertisers already do have significant ability to accurately identify how a sample feels about the ads.

Most don't bother because they don't actually care, and because it's easier and cheaper to just run an ad mix self-optimizing around sales results or conversions than to try and over-engineer the advertising impact.

Anyone betting on neural implants to make money because of 'advertising' is going to lose a lot of money themselves.

You may be underestimating the role of targeting in conversion optimization, and I'm not sure how you could better target individuals than based on what they're thinking at any given moment (literally).

For instance, it's not hard to imagine a future where gen-ai inserts product placement for a drug like ozempic into your favorite show, just for your view, while you're actively paying attention, even though you didn't realize at that moment you're still a bit upset about a negative comment someone made about your weight earlier that day. An advertiser didn't have to select this scenario, but instead you were targeted by an ML algorithm at that moment based on brain activity correlated with others who ultimately were successfully nudged to have a conversation with their doctor about their weight. Simultaneously, another ML optimized the product placement generation to minimize viewer disgust while maximizing its visibility. Your behavior becomes immediate feedback to further optimize these algorithms, as you're tracked for how much attention you paid to the placement, what was your emotional state before and after, did you schedule an appointment with your doctor over the next 3 days, were you prescribed ozempic, etc.

That is just a simple example which isn't that far removed from advertising approaches today. I'm certain there are plenty of clever techniques to turn your thoughts and perceptions into conversions far more effectively once advertisers have real-time access to your brain.

What do you think the install base for neural implants is going to be such that Madison Ave is going to bend over backwards to rework multiple ad platforms to support it.

You are overestimating the industry.

Why would anyone want the cybertruck? Yet at present, it'll take them over a year to clear their backlog.

Some people are just dumb - that applies doubly for those that love Musk because he speaks the Nazi conspiracism Truth™.

The general technology seems very useful for people with severe disabilities.

Even just being able to "speak" or move in a wheelchair is something that millions of people in the world can't do.

Of course the money will be in mass implanting this on the general public, for that I'm not sure they will manage to convince me

None, the people who volunteer, or worse pay for this, already have brain damage!

Do we count those as negative numbers when the implants help them recover?

I’m not entirely convinced that The Boer’s own brain isn’t already damaged

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Of all Elon Musk’s exploits — the Tesla cars, the SpaceX rockets, the Twitter takeover, the plans to colonize Mars — his secretive brain chip company Neuralink may be the most dangerous.

Former Neuralink employees as well as experts in the field have alleged that the company pushed for an unnecessarily invasive, potentially dangerous approach to the implants that can damage the brain (and apparently has done so in animal test subjects) to advance Musk’s goal of merging with AI.

The letter warned that “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity” and went on to ask: “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?

If the intravascular approach can restore key functioning to paralyzed patients, and also avoids some of the safety risks that come with crossing the blood-brain barrier, such as inflammation and scar tissue buildup in the brain, why opt for something more invasive than necessary?

Which perhaps helps make sense of the company’s dual mission: to “create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow.”

Watanabe believes Neuralink prioritized maximizing bandwidth because that serves Musk’s goal of creating a generalized BCI that lets us merge with AI and develop all sorts of new capacities.


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