Re: Elon Musk NeuraLink Update: August 28th
@15
There's a difference between the state of the art today, and the state of the art in 20 years. Yes, cochlear implants aren't great. yes, the current artificial eyes aren't great either. But if you don't want V1 or V2, just wait until V3. This entire field is advancing at an incredible pace, literally faster than computer science did. The real problem isn't V1 is worse than sighted vision and I can't get V2 because I got V1. It's going to be V4 lets you see wi-fi, have a minimap, connect to your car via bluetooth, and also you can use it for fully immersive VR experiences and have telepathy, but shame you got V3 which makes you merely human. Musk's timelines are unrealistic, but Musk's idea of this being something that fundamentally changes the world isn't--it's just more like 50 years away for human-AI superbeing fusion thing, not 5.
Cochlear implants are actually not in the brain, if I recall, and also for the most part they're from before computers could just be stuck in your ear, and also that entire field has been advancing as well.
The biological cures aren't universal. When you say biological is better you're disregarding that brain implants are rapidly beginning to not suck, but more importantly it's going to take 20 to 30 years per disease, and the best you can hope for is to stop whatever it is from getting worse in most cases. People are excited about the brain implants because it's the closest thing we have to a universal blindness cure, and getting from here to there takes less effort than handling everything one by one. You're talking about 100 million dollars or so minimum start to finish for insert-blindness-cause, with a timeline of 20 or 30 years. For much of it, it'd be closer to half a billion, or higher. For those of us such as myself with super, super rare stuff where no one will ever put in that money, too bad. Or we chase the brain implants on the same timeline for a fraction of the cost and get everyone in one go.
And before someone says but if I connect to my car via bluetooth, can't I be hacked? Yes you could, and this is why I'd probably not buy that one myself.
This is just so frustrating though, to see people making this mistake. I already used the room-sized computer vs. laptop analogy, but it's really apropos. The brain implant people are showing you the room-sized computer version and saying laptop in 20-50 years and everyone's just kind of like "but that's impossible/will be worse" despite us already having done similar things. We've done the same thing with AI: surely computers won't be able to write poetry or compose original music, and now they can, and rather than say "hey, you know, that's interesting" we just move the bar higher and say but it's not actually doing what it claims, and there's no way to improve it. Over and over and over. I don't understand why people are so bad at understanding scientific progress.
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