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Elon says it, so it must be true:
Humans must become cyborgs and develop a direct high-bandwidth connection with machines or risk irrelevance and obsolescence, says Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
Musk's latest cheery thoughts were imparted at the World Government Summit in the UAE. "Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence," Musk said, according to CNBC.
The main thrust of Musk's argument seems to hinge on the limited bandwidth and processing power of a single human being. Computers can ingest, transfer, and process gigabytes of data per second, every second, forever. Meatbags, however, are severely limited by an input/output rate—talking, typing, listening—that's best measured in bits per second. Thus, to risk being replaced by a robot or artificial intelligence, we need to become machines.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 15 2017, @07:47PM
or risk irrelevance and obsolescence,
I will theorize that the level of processing required decreases as bandwidth increases.
So if my grannie wanted to slow cook a beef stew she had a rough time of checking the gas stove setting on a periodic basis. I use a PID controller (maybe its even dumber than that) in a dedicated slow cooker. My grannie's grannie had to select the right kind of wood for her wood stove to pull off a slow cooked beef stew. I mean, yeah with bionics I could slow cook a beef stew with really fast reflexes using a steel cutting torch, or a rocket engine, but that is really stupid in an era of 20 cent microcontrollers and heating elements and stuff.
Likewise the megs of HD content are trash no better than the meg of SD content on TV in the old days.
Or how about my grandpa old enough to have cars back in the manual carb choke lever era, that burned some bandwidth to get the carb setting just right but my fuel injector computer does all that for me now.
In WWII thousands of navy AA gunners shot at incoming aircraft. Thats pretty high bandwidth. Now they're replaced by a microprocessor that never makes a mistake and most ships have just one or at most a few CIWS guns. Now AA gunning is a zero bandwidth human problem. Flick the switch to auto and hope there's no friendlies nearby.
I'd extend my theory that high bandwidth tasks being stupid makes the market destroy them turning them into 20 cent microcontrollers that no longer require any human bandwidth at all and do better than ever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 15 2017, @07:53PM
... is about figuring out how to get back to drinking alcohol and making love.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday February 15 2017, @10:32PM
That works fine until the Cylons hack your cruiser. Now you're dead in the water with no guns.
What makes us fundamentally better than our machines is our adaptability. I might not want to cook a beef stew with a steel cutting torch under ideal circumstances, but if that's all I've got it would sure be nice to make do.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?