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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 urza9814 on Thursday February 16 2017, @08:37PM
The human brain is pretty good at learning to use new inputs. You can strap a vibration motor to someone's belt, or electrodes on the tongue or even directly in the brain, and the brain will figure out how to use it and eventually should integrate it just as well as your natural senses. We don't analyze the brain to figure out how to program these things, we program them in a way that makes sense for the computer and let the brain figure out the rest.
So why would a human-computer interface be any different? Of course we need to do some of the work to know where and how to connect everything, but ultimately I suspect the interface is going to be much more organic than just reading and transcribing your conscious thoughts. It won't be "Oh hey, there's a ringing in my ear, and now I'm going to pretend to talk to someone and they'll hear my pretend conversation". Nope, it's going to be "Oh hey I needed to meet with John and we both just happened to know to go to this coffee shop at the same time today". And if you consider the *purpose* described in the article, the direct transcription method has some obvious flaws. If talking is too low bandwidth, I'm not going to get extra bandwidth by pretending to talk, and even just thinking the words instead of saying them would only gain a couple percentage points (and might make matters worse -- I expect I'd need a very good brain backspace...). The way I'm going to get a higher bandwidth interface is if it's doing some kind of DMA to dump relevant information into my subconscious mind while I'm not even paying attention. I suppose you *could* do that by spending years researching how to craft and implant false memories directly into someone's mind...but I think it's going to be a lot easier (and therefore developed sooner) to take a more Borg approach of wiring up your mind and letting the brain sort out how to use it. Which then means you would use it more like you use the connections between your brain and your arm rather than the way you use the connection between your hand and your smartphone...
I expect the end result of such an approach would feel more like dropping acid than interfacing with a computer. Which might also have some rather profound effects on issues of wealth and power that others have been discussing in these comments. People with stronger and more flexible minds would be the new ruling class. But at the same time they would rule over nothing, because a hive mind isn't multiple organisms, it's one.