What is Neuralink Really For? | Rob Braxman
Summary
Transcript
If you follow current events, you may have heard of Neuralink, one of Elon Musk’s projects. Depending on your politics, you may react to this video based on your feelings about Elon, but set that aside, as that will just be a distraction. Neuralink just announced a few days ago that it is now authorized by the FDA to do human trials. In case you don’t understand what this new is, the core product, as it stands today, is chip implantation in your brain, presumably to help people with some neurological failure, like spinal cord issues, for example, paraplegics and quadriplegics.
I’ll explain what Neuralink will actually do, at least today. But spoiler alert, Neuralink was imagined by Musk to have something to do with AI. If you take this at face value, it seems mildly interesting, but when you actually dig deep down into what I think Elon envisions, then we’re going into a very deep rabbit hole, and we have just heard the first shots across the bow about a future you will likely be super worried about.
It’s a very serious warning. If you want to find out what this warning is, stay right there. Norlig sounds really benign when you hear about it. It’s all about doing good with medical devices. The idea of planting a chip in the brain is not actually new. Currently, there are already around a dozen people or so with implanted electrodes in the brain using a device called the Utah array.
Basically, it’s a grid of electrodes that are pushed down into brain tissue, and then this is hooked on to an external device plugged in outside the person’s head, and that’s used to listen to electrical impulses in the brain. And this is sent to a computer for interpretation. The general name for this kind of connection is a BCI, or brain to computer interface. Obviously, the Utah array is pretty invasive, and the only subjects who have volunteered for this are quadriplegics.
Inserting this device in the brain does cause some loss of a small amount of brain matter, and scarring does occur, so the procedure needs to be repeated every few years using this technology. You can see examples on the Internet where the Utah array has been used to enable some sort of speech direct from the brain to the computer. There it appears that thoughts are being transferred. Neuralink is a huge enhancement to the Utah array, as explained by Musk, because instead of pushing large electrode pins into the brain, neuralink uses much finer thread like wires.
There’s a lot more wires to capture more data, and they envision more wires in the future to increase the bandwidth these wires are attached by a robot very accurately, and because they don’t actually cause bleeding, it is thought that body rejection would be less of an issue. Now, they’ve attached duralink to a lot of animals at this point, so this is beyond theory. And as I said, human implantation has now been approved by the FDA.
Once embedded in your skull, underneath your hair, the idea is that there would be no trace of it. No one would know you had a neuralink surgically installed. Sounds like some Sci-Fi movies, right? The unit is charged by induction, just like your phone, supposedly every night, and then using bluetooth, low energy, or ble, it communicates with your external device. Right now, the current version talks to an app on your phone just to show how this can be a commonplace tool.
Elon demonstrated several pigs and showed one with a neuralink implant and one with the neuralink implant removed. The pig with the removed neuralink appeared to behave normally. This was shown to eliminate the fear for mass adoption, because, in essence, it was important for musk to prove that it is not a dangerous device. Since implantation is reversible, since brain signals are merely electrical signals, the tech can be used to bypass the spinal cord.
Let’s say, in case of a spinal cord failure, brain signals could be sent to the rest of the body by repeating the same electrical signals via some sort of single shunt past the failure point. He then listed a bunch of diseases that could be helped by a Neuralink solution. Musk then went on to explain how neuralink is actually a device with read write capability. And this is the part that is least discussed.
Neuralink can write data to the brain as well as read data. For example, with one of the neuralink neurosurgeons at his side, he stated that it would be possible to download memories from the brain and upload it to your brain at a later time, or even transfer it to a robot. This is now getting closer to what he originally imagined neuralink to do. Basically, this idea of saving humanity by helping people with neurological issues is just a profit center, a way to monetize this technology early on.
But the more enhanced future is what Musk is expecting. Well, what is he expecting? The basic concept he had for the neural lace was for an AI to be integrated to his brain. So basically, your normal intelligence would be enhanced by the AI. The AI could dump knowledge content from an external source to your brain. We all know how AI is used today. AI is being used to solve problems.
You can, for example, have the AI construct ideas for you. Students are getting good at cheating their teachers by having the AI write their term papers. AI is making complete YouTube videos. The AI can even do programming. Just present the problem, specify the programming language, and it will write the code for you. This can be used in so many industries now to supplant the human. But if you’re equipped with direct communications with the AI via a neural lace, then you would have this gigabit speed of intelligence provided by a supplementary AI.
Apparently, Elon foresees a world of super intelligent humans, all provided with a supporting computer at all times, without using any visible user interface. Now, why do you think he imagined this? What Elon envisions to start with, and it’s actually happening today, is the concept of AGI, or artificial general intelligence. In these early stages of AI, the computer is fed information, and then it learns patterns on its own, to the point that it begins to emulate the source information.
For example, instead of telling a computer how to drive a car by a large number of programmed if else statements, the computer just watches what a human would do and basically copies that. The problem that I’ve understood for a long time is that this method of learning really has no limits, and humans really have little understanding of what the computer can do. I’ve made past videos explaining how AI actually thinks, and it is not, as I said, programmed by a human.
In our classical understanding of programming, the computer makes its analysis and arrives at its own set of rules. These internal rules, stored in its neurons, can get so massive that we don’t really know what the computer has learned. The risk is reaching the stage called AGI, where the AI basically is intelligent on its own. A Google scientist at Google, DeepMind, Jeffrey Hinton, quit Google so he can focus on warning us about AI.
He and others like Elon Musk, have signed the warning message in the future of Life open letter, which talks about the fact that the AI could be an existential threat pretty much at the level of a nuclear catastrophe. To remind you of a recent event, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was briefly fired by the board of directors because of some rumored discovery in the AI that brought fear to them.
That’s swept under the rug now, and we don’t know what this discovery is that caused such a major move as firing their current leader. Now, what exactly is the big picture concern with AI? Well, the problem is that the AI will continue to learn beyond what its creators teach it. It will get to the point of self learning. And though this was thought of as a possibility in the evidence of this is showing up today.
Apparently GPT four can currently beat 90% of the human test takers of the uniform bar exam. And in case you think this is solely about knowledge, the bar exam is mostly a test of reasoning. Google’s Alpha Zero AI apparently learned to beat every human in chess in just 9 hours of learning. Self learning. This is what happens when the AI reaches this AGi level again. Artificial general intelligence.
This AI will then quickly get to the point that it would be smarter than a human and then that would evolve to be smarter than humanity. Ais don’t need to sleep now. The scariest part is that the AI could give itself its own goals. Goals not provided by its creator. This is not hyperbole by the way. That’s the problem with those that open Pandora’s box. No one is caring.
Not dissimilar to the many dangers I talk about regarding technology. Only the short term benefits are examined and no one thinks about the long term. And there’s no big move to set limits on the AI. Stop it before you can no longer stop it. The long term does not look too far from the Terminator movies. Actually, I will tell you how it will differ, and it will be a little different because of neuralink.
As you all know, robots are being built today, and some, like the Tesla robot, moves like a human. Or you’ve seen videos of the Boston dynamics robots that can make acrobatic moves. As much as this can be mildly interesting today, the main problem is when the AI can begin controlling things in the physical world rather than just in the virtual world. For example, there’s been this push towards autonomous weapons, and without humans in the middle, the AI could control objects and equipment.
I’ve said this before. In fact, it was in my last video. An AI can develop its own goals, and it would have at its disposal the data of all of humankind with all the history to date. It would show the inherent flaws of humanity, with the never ending attempts at gaining an upper hand over other humans, or the advantage of power. It would show the vulnerability of humans to control messaging.
From dictators of the past that enforce thoughts on the populace, to today’s version of subtle social media amplification, deampplification, and censorship. Basically mind control. The AI would know how to use all these tools, and then it would be able to interact with the physical world and take over again, just like the Terminator movie. What’s coming, folks, is an AI initiated war against humans, and we can’t stop ourselves from causing this, just like we can’t stop ourselves from using technology, even when it eliminates our privacy completely.
In today’s world, this future would be a terrible thing to behold, because AI would be unbeatable. No human would have the capability to think of all the possibilities, like machine. We would be at a huge disadvantage, and we would be like John Connor in the movie, trying to fight the AI with punitive little guns while we are bombarded with laser equipped drones guided by the machine. But Elon Musk’s version of the Terminator movie is a little different.
You see, he realizes that a war is coming, an AI war. And the only way to fight the AI is with another AI. I admit, it took me a while to understand his motives here. The new world Order isn’t a single AI, but multiple ais, each one representing some dominant group. Currently, this is OpenAI Xai from Elon and Google, DeepMind. I’m sure China is developing its own AI among other countries.
Think about this. It could be a war not just between an AI and humans, but between multiple ais. But Elon is thinking differently here. The idea is that humans cannot be powerless against an AI if the AI is interacting with the human directly. In other words, Elon wants to create a bunch of superhumans. By the way, this need not actually be humans, since he can upload his memories to multiple androids, and they can then replicate his vision as his human soldiers in the AI war.
Wow, this is pretty crazy, right? Here we are barreling nonstop through new technologies, and no average person actually stops to think where we are going. Today, I’m warning you about technologies that invade your privacy. But in the next generation, some new Rob Braxman would be warning you about technologies that will physically invade your life. Knowing what’s coming, I’m now not sure how to look at Neuralink. Is this some privacy invasion of our brain by an external AI, or could it be the only thing that stands between us and extinction? Elon Musk is thinking ahead.
Apparently, maybe a martian colony is needed to get away from it all. But the real answer, even applying this to current technology, is knowing when to stop. Privacy is a major tool. We have to fight against the control of a machine, but it will not come to you automatically. Unfortunately, we have to work at it. And that’s why I started a company, to help the average person do this more easily.
The main threat currently is the Google ID, which is on your phone. There are hidden communications between the common phones and big tech, which reveal device identifiers and locations that point to you. The solution to that is to have a degugle phone which prevents the machine from attributing your data to you, thus making you disappear. We sell various models of Dgoogle phones in our store. These phones are around $400 so they are cheaper than normal phones.
We have device VPN service which I started a few years ago. The purpose of a VPN service is to hide your IP address. Secondarily, it provides encryption to hide your traffic from anyone listening. This protects against maninthemiddle attacks, especially caused by governments and corporations. Our VPN service is unique because it includes ad blocking via a pihole server which also serves to anonymize your DNS. We have worldwide coverage and is provided by an entity known to you me, hopefully someone you can trust.
We have a Braxmail service that hides identity information from your email and prevents you from showing up on contact lists. It also eliminates IP addresses from showing up in the header or in logs. We offer unlimited aliases, seven domains and webmail. Check that out for $50 a year. All these are on my store on Brax. May sign up on there and you will not be asked for personal information to sign up.
I also want to remind you that I’ve moved my live streams to rumble androbraxman locals. com. These live streams are on Thursdays 08:00 p. m. Pacific time. Join me there if you want to ask questions live. Thanks for watching and see you next time. .
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