Tim Urban looks at the magic wizard hat of the future
Tim Urban looks at the magic wizard hat of the future, i.e. How and why we will connect our brains to the digital AI world. It's worth printing out and reading a couple of times if you haven't though about it before, although it's a little slow getting past the initial background on neurobiology if you don't know it (I generally did but hadn't though of the napkin sized cortex analogy before). I like Tim's blog Wait but Why? because he is good at trying to understand big almost existential questions. The only downside is the reality that sometimes doing a long detailed post takes time, so it can be a few months between posts. It turns out Elon Musk also likes him, and gave him a heads up about his latest company (amongst other things). The idea is that our communications and intelligence will be much much faster and better if our brains interfaced directly with computers. Whilst its best not to think Star Trek Borg, its a good fun description of the ideas and crazy possibilities. My favorite paragraph (and one of the themes of this blog):
"(Musk quoted by Urban) The thing that people, I think, don’t appreciate right now is that they are already a cyborg. You’re already a different creature than you would have been twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. You’re already a different creature. You can see this when they do surveys of like, “how long do you want to be away from your phone?” and—particularly if you’re a teenager or in your 20s—even a day hurts. If you leave your phone behind, it’s like missing limb syndrome. I think people—they’re already kind of merged with their phone and their laptop and their applications and everything."
And also this one from Tim Urban:
"People also love to hate the concept of new technology—because they worry it’s unhealthy and makes us less human. But those same people, if given the option, usually wouldn’t consider going back to George Washington’s time, when half of children died before the age of 5, when traveling to other parts of the world was impossible for almost everyone, when a far greater number of humanitarian atrocities were being committed than there are today, when women and ethnic minorities had far fewer rights across the world than they do today, when far more people were illiterate and far more people were living under the poverty line than there are today. They wouldn’t go back 250 years—a time right before the biggest explosion of technology in human history happened. Sounds like people who are immensely grateful for technology. And yet their opinion holds—our technology is ruining our lives, people in the old days were much wiser, our world’s going to shit, etc. I don’t think they’ve thought about it hard enough."
But I haven't even discussed the main idea - that communication between humans is too slow, and the only way to dramatically speed it is direct brain machine interfaces. - Give it a read!