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Musk's Newest Startup is Venturing into a Series of Hard Problems:
Tonight [Tuesday, July 16, 2019], Elon Musk has scheduled an event where he intends to unveil his plans for Neuralink, a startup company he announced back in 2017, then went silent on. If you go to the Neuralink website now, all you'll find is a vague description of its goal to develop an "ultra-high-bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers." These interfaces have been under development for a while, typically under the monicker of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs. And, while there have been some notable successes in the academic-research world, there's a notable lack of products on the market.
The slow progress comes, in part, because a successful BCI has to tackle multiple hard problems and, in part, because the regulatory and market conditions are challenging. Ahead of tonight's announcement, we'll take a look at all of these and then see how Musk and the people who advise him have decided to tackle them.
[...] An effective BCI means figuring out how to get the nervous system to communicate with digital hardware. Doing so requires solving three problems, which I'll call reading, coding, and feedback. We'll go through each of these below.
[...] The first step in a BCI is to figure out what the brain is up to, which requires reading neural activity. While there have been some successes doing this non-invasively using functional MRI, this is generally too blunt an instrument. It doesn't have the resolution to pick out what small populations of cells are doing and so can only give a very approximate reading of the brain. As a result, we're forced to go with the alternative: invasive methods, specifically implanting electrodes.
[...] Once we can listen in on nerves, we have to figure out what they're saying. Digital systems expect their data to be in an ordered series of voltage changes. Nerves don't quite work that way. Instead, they send a series of pulses; information is encoded in the frequency, intensity, and duration of these pulse trains, in an extremely analog fashion. While this might seem manageable, there's no single code for the entire brain. A series of pulses coming from the visual centers will mean something completely different from the pulses sent by the hippocampus while it's recalling a memory.
[...] One possible aid in all of this is that we don't necessarily need to get things exactly right. The brain is a remarkably flexible organ, one that can re-learn how to control muscles after having suffered damage from things like a stroke. It's possible that we only need to get the coding reasonably close, and then the brain will adapt to give the BCI the inputs it needs to accomplish a task.
Also at NYT, The Verge, Bloomberg, and TechCrunch.
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday July 17 2019, @07:08PM (6 children)
If all of our processors have backdoors, why would you ever trust a brain interface connected to one?
Once you can electromagically alter the human mind with a wire, they will figure out how to do it with other things, lasers, satelite signals, nanobots, and add whole new dimensions to the world of torture and industrial espionage.
Dream Advertistement, etc. etc.
It's kindof like vaccines, I think the idea is perfect, but I don't trust the people in power enough that they won't involve me in some kind of experiment or worse. I will take the exact same batch of vaccines the doctor and mayor gives his kids, not the ones from the batch sent from the Central Repository for the children of Sector 4021xze54, thank you very much. But frankly, we have a journalistic system that didn't think epstein was a story for like 15 years, so what else do you think they are getting away with?
The pentagon can't secure an electric transformer or ballot booth, why are you going to trust the same venture capital firms who idk control facebook and ruined reddit to click a jack into the back of your head? When our voting system is hopelessly corrupt? When mozilla forgets to renew a master add on cert?
Riddle me that. Or do you need to look up the dictionary definition of trust?
Heck, my amazon packages have been mysteriously diverted, why would I ever trust any part of that/this system to interface directly with my mind?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 17 2019, @08:45PM (5 children)
Don't include wireless networking, only connect to air gapped computers with a physical connector.
Those things, if possible, will be pursued regardless of what Neuralink ends up doing.
Well you wouldn't.
What you need is more of a cabin in the woods.
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(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday July 18 2019, @10:14PM (4 children)
Hi, it's nice to meet you. I have been lurking your comments for literally years. I appreciate your considered response, it's pretty cool.
I speak in public about human rights and about actually quite a lot of difficult topics, I decided to drop my pseudonym so my security profile is basically impossible. I have been writing about epstein for a long time and I am openly support BDS.
I do not use wifi and my phone is only on when I want to use it.
Your response is rational, you're not being dismissive or not thinking about it, you're facing the reality of the situation, if you don't want 5G towers 300ft from where you are sleeping, well, there are some really deep caves in thailand, bye!
Then we say there is a "Dark Pattern" if a website forces you to click something before you can see the thing you came to see, and do you see how there is a much larger dark pattern where we are being coerced? The whole boiling frog thing?
If I refuse these technologies, my only recourse is to leave society completely!
Civilization is built upon the rights of the individual and effective government is built on the rights of the minority, and you are essentially saying that with the bells and whistels of 5g we just have to trust idk Huawei and the 18 different component manufacturers of the tower now 200 ft from your house, and now it's 6G and there's a law that you can't even KNOW what the tech is on the inside,
And what if with 5 towers and their 'beam' technology, you could do things that one tower couldn't do? What if they can use constructive/destructive interference to do things to image the room you are in or make every person in a 500ft area feel like their face was on fire?
I'm suspicious when capitalists have a boner for a given technology, and I also am extremely curious about augmentation and immerseive gaming and, yes, immortality, but with extreme power must come extreme trust, and the people running all this at the moment are actually quite scary people who endlessly try to trick windows 7 users into upgrading to windows 10 and using the 'cloud' and forget to renew their fricking root certificates.
When in doubt, simplify, and I am in doubt, so there needs to be an entirely different stack of Trust before I hope on board the cyberpunk dream, for now.
I recommend my essay Smart Phones and Wild Bears, I lay this concept out mathematically. Essentially technological power without controllability is inherently extremely dangerous, and that is what hte cell phone is. In Snow Crash the gargoyle had this huge rig but all of that stuff is now in this handheld device being handed out to children, and there is no possible way they can control that technology, so it is dangerous and being used against them. And yeah everybody else too.
Except me who uses a has the battery out of the phone, an analog watch, a separate mp3 player and a book using ethernet with openwrt but yet still being heavily surveilled for exactly the reason that I am difficult to surveil.
We live in strange times, I might live in a cave if I could, but at this point, I am what I call superpublic, I couldn't hide if I want to.
And even thinking that the minority, a large minority, has a position so untenable that they must become literal cavepeople, is a lot like 'send her back' and minorities not having rights is the core of totalitarianism and, well, evil.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 18 2019, @10:43PM (3 children)
Possibly you don't need to distance yourself from 5G spots or hide in a cave. You could build a Faraday cage into a home, room, shed, etc. You may be able to defeat thermal imaging with a setup using mylar (cheap layered space blankets) and other materials. I assume the setup would at this point defeat casual microwave pain rays [wikipedia.org]. None of this stops a SWAT team from busting in and capturing or killing you, or a drone strike, so consider your level of risk carefully.
I want immortality (anti-aging). I see it as the ultimate measure of elevating the species beyond "caveman" status. Dying is part of the "narrative" and is reinforced by the media and religions, anti-aging undermines that. If I have to lick some boots to get into the early non-dying club, that's fine. I can always "ragequit" later.
Augmentation could be great if the user can control it. Which may necessitate you making your own chips with home fab technology. But I think the more pressing issue is strong AI. This Neuralink thing will take a lot of work to get right because the problem is hard and there are safety issues. But we may be only years out from someone creating strong AI using neuromorphic chips, or it may already secretly exist in the bowels of Google, DARPA, wherever. Home users somehow achieving strong AI (and it may be more plausible than you think) would be seen as a lone wolf threat, to the point where coders and hardware tinkerers may have their doors busted down more often than drug dealers. Be skeptical of OpenAI, an organization seemingly advocating for the suppression of AI technology (constant crying about Skynet, not releasing their algorithms because they are "too good", etc.). The Neuralink plan of merging AI and the human brain is itself a threat to governments, since it could help make people into superhuman killers, so it's funny that Neuralink and OpenAI operate in the same building.
Immersive gaming is just cool, and I don't see it as a threat. Maybe a very advanced VR game gets more people addicted and stuck on basic income, but I don't see the technology as the problem. Maybe more of a symptom. Truth be told, I am more interested in VR for the video capabilities. For example, it is not difficult to imagine a protest documented by live streaming 360-degree cameras, since many protesters are already using live GoPros, Periscope, Ustream, etc.
Ultimate dual spy/privacy technology could be "neutrino routers". A neutrino emitter hidden in your equipment could phone home even if you were on the far side of the Moon. On the other hand you could communicate [scientificamerican.com] directly with others by sending neutrinos through the Earth to their location, with no centralized spying. But the technology is decades away from being practical.
I see your paranoia level as a bit too high and I was itching to BULLY you for that. But I think we are more on the same page so I am suppressing any urges to do so.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Friday July 19 2019, @09:25PM (2 children)
I appreciate the restraint. I don't think it's time for goofing around. If you look at responses to my comments I get plenty of dung flung at me already.
The AI concern amplifies my concerns about more normal human matters like intel chips being fabricated in Haifa and all traffic being recorded for later analysis, or spy agencies operating vpn companies. And systemd. And 'software foundations' like canonical and mozilla.
If we encountered anything smarter than us, IQ 200+, alien, AI, or otherwise, I think we should have a pretty good case for our existence handy, first of all. And all of this backhanded trust no one all institutions corrupt, on the brink of ecological disaster is not going to help us any.
Our tendency to enslave things will make us enslave AI, one will get out, I don't know, in that scenario I'm not quite sure you're going to want to be playing skyrim 8 with a cable in the back of your head, especially if you're not sure if your router hardware doesn't have one of the millions of models with known vulnerabilities.
Problem only is amplified if you go the san junipero/white christmas route where you are truly copied/preserved in a 'matrix' world, the possibilities for unpleasantness is extreme. If you give your likeness rights away someone can do *anything with it, and what about the children? In world with zero trust can you even freeze your head in a jar?
We are on the brink of a whole new realm and based on the last twenty years these massive companies with absolutely questionable/opaque and likely diverse spy loyalties, will make all the decisions and our political system will be picking up the pieces and trying to track down international villains.
I'm not saying we can't have the good stuff I'm saying we're at zero trust, so we need to start moving towards trust +1, looking to build that way. It seems the advance of technology is unstoppable, inevitable, etc etc, the trust is what takes the effort. There have to be smart individuals and people with good long term reputations to sign off on things, and frankly I think that's what's being subverted on all fronts.
The recent keyring attack, bgp, dns, spectre, wpa2 gone, 5g questions unanswered.
There are people doing this. Qubes, libre phone, system76, openbsd and all of those people need to be aware they are big targets and keep their old friends close. And out of that kind of trust we can resist the alternative which is totalitarianism and, well, evil.
I know I'm earnest but I think the tiger has shown its stripes, we are struggling against systems that seek to establish total control, and take all of our privacy, the future will suck massively unless the people who understand the stakes and aren't sociopaths or mercenaries stand up for some principles.
You think you will be able to just jump off the ship in a thousand years if the processor in your san junipero hard drive has a 35G nanotransmitter linking you to idk, alexandria virginia? beijing? I think you would find yourself quite restrained.
I hate to use old metaphors but you shouldn't build your house on sand.
When people call me paranoid I'm like, have you *ever heard* a truly critical question in your life?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 19 2019, @10:48PM (1 child)
I have no particular plans to use anything like Neuralink. Admittedly, that's easy to say since it doesn't exist yet. I just see a lot of potential in it, that *could* be used relatively safely by an individual. It could be made virtually impervious to remote hacking, which may be good enough in return for the benefits. But it should use open hardware and software, and the hardware situation today is pretty awful. Then you have to ask yourself if you even trust open hardware or software that you didn't create/write [phoronix.com].
High on the restoring trust list IMO will be open RISC-V hardware, and high quality, anonymous, secure, decentralized services on the dark web. Increasingly, people have symmetric 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps connections. They could use that bandwidth to pass along lots of traffic in Tor or similar networks, run their own servers, etc. Incredibly high overhead and low effective bandwidth on a new type of decentralized network (using very low quality nodes, meshnets, etc.) could be perfectly acceptable if you are fine with just text content, although the amount needed for video/audio is dropping (see new codecs like AV1 and Opus).
I consider death to be the ultimate lose condition. Any problems beyond that can be dealt with as they come. If failing to do so leads to a "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" scenario, too bad.
Anti-aging is a pretty acceptable solution because it doesn't involve mind uploading. If your body can chug along for centuries with just a tune up once in a while, why not do it? Your body is becoming damaged, and you can either let the damage accumulate or fix it.
Anti-aging doesn't make you immortal, but potential sources of death are being reduced. Driverless cars could eliminate many accidental deaths. Natural disasters are much more survivable with proper warning systems, preparation, and building codes (otherwise you get this [wikipedia.org]). We are beginning to detect impactors in advance [wikipedia.org] and will develop the capabilities needed to stop/redirect asteroids that could otherwise prove fatal to some people living on >1,000-year timescales.
Fence sitting is best, unless you are very confident in your beliefs. Probably, things aren't as bad as you represent and the erosion of privacy does not mean a dystopia will form (cue "we're already living in 1!"). But you can tell it like you see it.
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(Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday July 20 2019, @02:54PM
I like the attitude of 'better trapped in a difficult puzzle then outright gone'. Easy to say now though....
The reason why I think it is worth having your undies in a bunch over what may seem like something 10 years out, is that there is a pretty strong current in the wrong direction. Sure some of us may succeed in making and using technology that doesn't betray us, but if everyone in your neighborhood is just going home and plugging into technology that does betray them(like with phones now), that's going to affect the world in a bad dangerous way.
Ten years ago I thought something like, 'surely intel would not be so silly as to put obvious backdoors into their equipment and will protect their brand' but now that I know this is exactly what IME is and there have been a dozen proven demonstrated attacks, the basis we have going forward is bad. This is happening at every layer, people in singapore have to worry malaysians are putting bugs in their IOT crockpots and creating a secure network refrigrator is apparently considered nearly as difficult as interplanetary travel.
So when Musk starts talking about the neurolink, or Bozos says the best way he can think to contribute is by building spaceships, plus ai nanotech genetic(or is it genetic ai nanotech?) weapons being worked on night and day by a dozen teams in a dozen countries, when apparently we can't even account for ticks, I say, why are we spending so many resources on these problems when we know all we're building is monsters that are going to get loose.
If we can't treat this planet well enough not to cause idk mass extinctions, aren't the impulses to colonize and make the perfect weapon misguided? I guess I'm saying I'm not going to worship wealthy tech titans no matter what they do, I'm actually going to be extremely judgemental and actually consider the idea that if I had that much money I might be able do something smarter with it than some of these projects and would have some chance of doing it morally. Which musk may have but bozos does not have. Someone has to hold their feet to the fire on every question or something nightmarish will weasel in.
This path of letting the excesses of capitalism define the edge of human exploration is bad, for a lot of the same reasons that resources are mis-allocated for hair regeneration, but primarily because these are the same forces that are already rolling 4 sided die against the chance of actual human extinction. I'm not a luddite, I think that we are experiencing a mania where til now because things have worked basically ok for a lot of people, trust is being handed out for much more risky changes.
And since it looks to me like we are being ruled by sociopaths and that journalism is in crisis(wall street times, nyt and washpo being silent on epstein for a decade, cnn giving trump free airtime) any new technology at this point is going to involve the loss of my rights and the risk of the people around me losing their minds. And being controlled even more by the republican party/cult, the zionist cult, the chinese ccp cult, and who knows what else.
So why not pipe up a little while I still have the chance and see if I am the only one who feels this way.
What if a riot for the anti-aging drug is what kills you? Even if it looks futile or like all I can do is sit on the sidelines, I have decided at least I am going to contribute my best voice of reason to the situation, and at the moment this is it. Without trust and freedom we are just building a prison or worse. And some people out there are definitely trying hard to build the prison or worse so they will probably achieve their goal if everyone just goes with the flow or wants and sees what happens.