Brain machine interface chips

tuff_wizard, 10 months ago

Somehow, despite this being a thought you had in the shower, I don’t think it’s a “shower thought” as this sub defines it.

CynAq, 10 months ago

Sure! It is also a three week old thread, and the second ever to be posted on the sub, after the sub creator posted the first one asking for engagement from the subscribers.

tuff_wizard, 10 months ago

Whoops. I definitely didn’t feel like I’d scrolled back 3 weeks during that session. The dangers of a new platform I guess.

arkcom, 11 months ago

Your showerthoughts can stream to the fediverse realtime as you think them.

Lianrepl, 11 months ago

The technology is really cool but also pretty scary

CynAq, 11 months ago

Something that will actually interface with your brain at a degree which enables audiovisual streaming at the quality we're used to, and can be applied without major, multiple stage surgery is so far in the future, we'll probably have a different relationship with our technology anyway.

Think how difficult to apply and use a cochlear implant is. It takes hours of difficult surgery, weeks of recovery, months, even years of adjustments to get something usable out of it, which still is far behind in quality compared to healthy hearing. We don't even have a functioning visual implant technology similar to the cochlear one.

I'm trying to say, it's too early to be scared. A healthy consideration of possibilities, both positive and negative, should be enough for now I think.

Lianrepl, 11 months ago

Yeah, you're right. But also looking at how fast technology is improving, I'm pretty confident I'll see some scifi cyborg level stuff in my life time. It's exciting but I'm also thinking maybe we should slow down a little with all the AI and brain implant stuff.

It's almost like we're trying to bring to reality everything that movies and books have already invented and I don't know how to feel about it.

CynAq, 11 months ago

I'm not really that worried. The LLM breakthrough was quite sudden and provocative due to the nature of it. It's a machine quite convincingly simulating perhaps the most human instinct of all, language. It's the thing most people see as what's separating human from other animals.

However, while the breakthrough is so striking at a surface level, much of the marketing hype around it fails to mention this was expected since the 60s when the first theories were formed as to how machine learning would function. It took this many years for the computing power in our hardware to catch up with the theory so a few approaches could be tested for real, and one of them worked a bit better than everyone expected.

I recommend reading "How the Mind Works" and "the Language Instinct" from Steven Pinker. You may or may not agree with the man's politics but these two books are magnificent at explaining the mind through a computational theory, and inevitably making the connections between how our brains work and how our machines work. These books are not recent, therefore there will be sections declaring something difficult verging on impossible, which has already been done, but they are still great at showing you how the researchers working in these fields think.

Personally, I think we're getting ahead of ourselves with how much faith we're putting in the intelligence skills of our current best AI's.
I think it's good and healthy to be weary, but giving into the hype and disregarding the importance of looking at how good these things objectively are might be more detrimental to our ability to protect ourselves from our technology when the need is actually imminent.

Otherwise, it might create this boy who cried wolf situation and we might get caught off guard.