5/17/17, 3(12 PMElon Musk Just Outlined How He'll Merge The Human Brain and AI

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Elon Musk Just Outlined How He’llMerge The Human Brain and AIMusk’s History of AI Concerns

Elon Musk has made it clear that he is concerned about the extremeadvancements being made in artificial intelligence (AI) research. Ultimately,he fears that AI will, one day, overtake humanity. Over the years, this fear haspushed Musk to make moves that will help ensure that our artificialintelligences don’t turn humans into second class citizens.

One of the first instances of such action was back in 2015, when Muskdonated $10 million to the Future of Life Institue, an organization that givesmoney to researchers who are working to mitigate the existential risks facinghumanity, particularly, existential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.

"“It’s best to try to prevent a negative circumstancefrom occurring than to wait for them to occur andthen be reactive.” –Musk"

Around the same time, Musk, Stephen Hawking, and more than 20,000 otherexperts signed an open letter calling for an autonomous weapons ban. Theletter explains, “If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapondevelopment, a global arms race is virtually inevitable.” And this was just thebeginning of Musk’s work.

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In December 2015, Musk took his first major action, and announced theformation of OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company that hopes toadvance digital intelligence in a way that will benefit humanity as a whole.Less than a year later, Musk spoke out against AI on Twitter. In this instance,he noted the ways in which super-advanced AI could be used to target theinternet through DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. calling it agreat threat to the internet. He claimed that it’s only a matter of time until wesee a massive AI attack on internet infrastructure.

At the time, Musk spoke out and called artificial intelligence it a major threatto the internet itself. He also claimed that it’s only a matter of time until wesee a massive AI attack on internet infrastructure.

Only a matter of time before advanced AI is used to do this. Internet isparticularly susceptible to a gradient descent algo.https://twitter.com/theeconomist/status/794196455405875200 …

5/17/17, 3(12 PMElon Musk Just Outlined How He'll Merge The Human Brain and AI

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— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 9:31 AM - 3 Nov 2016

A Plan to “Save” Humanity

So what’s Musk’s plan for saving us from killer robots? Ironically, it’sbecoming one with the AI.

Just a few weeks ago, details leaked asserting that Musk is backing a brain-computer interface venture that was founded in order to allow humans tokeep up with the advancements made in machine intelligence. At the time ofthe leak, the company – called Neuralink – was still in the earliest stages ofdevelopment. To that end, it had no public presence at all.

What we did know is that the company’s ultimate goal is to develop a device(a brain-computer interface, to be exact) that could be implanted into thebrain in order to augment (see: improve) human intelligence. It’s acontroversial idea Musk initially put forward back in 2016. At the time, hecalled it a “neural lace;” an idea he revisited earlier this year at the WorldGovernment Summit in Dubai. Since the computing powers of AI areexpected to surpass that of humans in rather quick order, the neural lace ismeant to push our cognitive performance to a level that is comparable to thatof AI.

"“Creating a neural lace is the thing that reallymatters for humanity to achieve symbiosis withmachines.” -Musk"

Shortly after details leaked regarding the new venture, Musk took to Twitterto acknowledge that the reports were true. Musk confirmed his plan via atweet in which he also promised more details – details which would be

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coming the week of April 10th thanks to Tim Urban at the the website WaitBut Why.

Today, those details finally came to light (This summary highlights keypoints directly from Urban’s post):

The business side of Neuralink is a brain-machine interface developmentcompany. They want to create cutting-edge BMIs—what one of themreferred to as “micron-sized devices.” Doing this will support the growthof the company while also providing a perfect vehicle for putting theirinnovations to use (kind of the way SpaceX uses their launches both tosustain the company and experiment with their newest engineeringdevelopments). As for what kind of interface they’re planning to work onfirst, here’s what Elon said: “We are aiming to bring something tomarket that helps with certain severe brain injuries (stroke, cancerlesion, congenital) in about four years.”He said that he met with literally over 1,000 people in order to assemblethis group, and that part of the challenge was the large number of totallyseparate areas of expertise required when you’re working on technologythat involves neuroscience, brain surgery, microscopic electronics,clinical trials, etc. Because it was such a cross-disciplinary area, helooked for cross-disciplinary experts. Key people include Paul Merolla,who spent the last seven years as the lead chip designer at IBM on theirSyNAPSE program; Vanessa Tolosa, Neuralink’s microfabrication expertand one of the world’s foremost researchers on biocompatible materials;and Max Hodak, who worked on the development of somegroundbreaking BMI technology at Miguel Nicolelis’s lab at Duke.Musk has an 8 to 10 year timeline for use: “I think we are about 8 to 10years away from this being usable by people with no disability … It isimportant to note that this depends heavily on regulatory approvaltiming and how well our devices work on people with disabilities.”

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More Than Musk

As previously mentioned, Musk isn’t the only one concerned about the impactthat AI will have on the future of humanity. Many experts and tech giantshave spoken extensively about their fears regarding the development ofsynthetic intelligence.

In a video posted by Big Think, Michael Vassar – the chief science officer ofMetaMed Research – stated that, unless we are careful, any truly sentient AIthat we develop will likely kill us all (literally): “If greater-than-humanartificial general intelligence is invented without due caution, it is all butcertain that the human species will be extinct in very short order.” Similarly,Stephen Hawking famously stated that AI is one of the biggest threats tohumanity:

The development of AI could spell the end of the human race. It wouldtake off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate.Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete,and would be superseded.

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And this is just the start of the experts who are concerned with AI. LikeMusk, Braintree founder Bryan Johnson’s company Kernal is currentlyworking on a neuroprosthesis that can mimic, repair, and improve humancognition. If it comes to fruition, that tech could be a solid defense against theworst case AI scenarios. After all, if we are able to upgrade our brains to alevel that is equal to that of AI, we may be able to at least stay on par with themachines.

“Being able to systematically and intelligently work with our neural code isthe most consequential and pressing opportunity in the world today. All thatwe are, all that we do, all that we become will be a result of our progress,”explains Johnson.

Notably, while advancements like those that Johnson and Musk are workingon could allow us to merge with machines, they could also allow us to literallyprogram (or reprogram) our neural code, which would allow us to transform

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ourselves in ways that we can’t even imagine. In short, we could programourselves into the people that we want to be. The experts are ready. Thequestion is, are humans prepared to adopt the technology?

Disclosure: Bryan Johnson is an investor in Futurism; he does not hold aseat on our editorial board or have any editorial review privileges.