A Quote by Ramez Naam
Everything good and bad about technology would be magnified by implanting it deep in brains. Is the risk of brain-hacking outweighed by the societal benefits of faster, deeper communication, and the ability to augment our own intelligence?
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Implanting a microchip inside the brain to augment its mental powers has long been a science fiction trope.
Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we'll augment our intelligence.
I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can't just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it's really in how the technology is used. What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we're going.
The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore, the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.
Suppose there are some things that we don't understand about the universe, but if you understand human intelligence and you understand the gaps in our abilities to think about things, maybe we can engineer in a computer more advanced intelligences that can help augment our ability to think.
I think cities are the primordial forests of our time. We evolve faster as a species in cities. Cities are chaotic, liminal places where the many aspects of human potential, good and/or bad, are most readily magnified.
I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the Internet in the first two years. It can be addictive, and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around 'Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains.
Often, very talented technical people find it extraordinarily difficult to take the viewpoint of customers, who are often ignorant about the technology and who may have strong and perhaps incorrect prejudices about it. The technical people may believe, deep down, that they know better what customers "should" need. Customers, of course, have a different perspective. They want products that will solve customer problems and provide other customer benefits, and will do so without undue risk or cost. Not infrequently, customers view advanced technology itself as a risk.
Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it's very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they're doing.
I think our brains does have a tendency to be true to its own ideas and statements. Everything we do and everything we think about is a belief. Until we get to the point where we look beyond our own ego-self, and to some degree beyond our own mind, we are always going to make assumptions and have beliefs to make our brains feel more comfortable. And if we can get to a point where we embrace that uncertainty and doubt, and be willing to learn from that and to explore that, I think that that could be a very positive experience.
In general, the men of lower intelligence won out. Afraid of their own shortcomings and of the intelligence of their opponents, so that they would not lose out in reasoned argument or be taken by surprise by their quick-witted opponents, they boldly moved into action. Their enemies,on the contrary, contemptuous and confident in their ability to anticipate, thought there was no need to take by action what they could win by their brains.
Imagine something a million times more powerful than your smartphone that is the size of a brain cell interfacing with your biological neurons. That will be the complete symbiosis. That will be when we augment our brains at the level of the neuron.
As computer intelligence gets better, what will be possible when we interface our brains with computers? It might sound scary, but early evidence suggests otherwise: interfacing brains with machines can be helpful in treating traumatic brain injury, repairing spinal cord damage, and countless other applications.
Everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone's list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last.
I've always been interested with the idea of technology and the way technology affects our ability to communicate - our ability to have a rewarding experience with technology versus a kind of dehumanizing experience with technology.
Psychologism holds that logical assertions are percolations of brains. Thus logic is a set of rules for how healthy brains operate. Aside from the infinite regress of a brain determining whether a brain is healthy, we have the infinite regress of the idea 'All concepts are brain percolations' being itself a brain percolation, on its own terms.
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