Innovation

¿Le gustaría ser un cyborg?

May 16, 2017 Agata Sagan and Peter Singer

VARSOVIA/MELBOURNE – ¿Deseó alguna vez poder añadir más memoria a su cerebro? Tal vez Elon Musk pueda ayudarlo.

Musk dirige la compañía cuyo producto más conocido es el Tesla, el auto eléctrico líder de la industria. También es director ejecutivo de SpaceX, una empresa que está creando cohetes para que los seres humanos podamos vivir en Marte. Ahora Musk reveló que es fundador y director ejecutivo de Neuralink, una startup que quiere crear implantes cerebrales que convertirán a las computadoras en extensiones directas del cerebro y mejorarán así nuestra inteligencia y memoria.

Los variados proyectos de Musk apuntan todos a un mismo objetivo general: proteger el futuro de la especie. Los autos eléctricos nos ayudarán a evitar niveles peligrosos de calentamiento global, y una colonia permanente en Marte reduciría el riesgo de que el cambio climático (o también una guerra nuclear, el bioterrorismo o la colisión con un asteroide) eliminen a la especie humana.

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Agata Sagan

Writing for PS since 2009
6 Commentaries

Agata Sagan is an independent researcher living in Warsaw, working on ethics and the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union.

Peter Singer

Writing for PS since 2001
219 Commentaries

Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, is Founder of the nonprofit organization The Life You Can Save. His books include Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason), Rethinking Life and Death, The Point of View of the Universe, co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, The Most Good You Can Do, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, One World Now, Ethics in the Real World, Why Vegan?, and Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction, also with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek. In April 2021, W.W. Norton published his new edition of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. In 2013, he was named the world's third "most influential contemporary thinker" by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 11 Comments on this article

Nathan W May 22, 2017

Let's have an arms race where the only way to compete is to turn ourselves into robots.

Yeah. We couldn't just try to be smarter in development of supercomputers.

Anyways, the technical demonstrations might prove useful in legitimizing allocations for risk mitigation related to present covert uses or related technologies.
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Nathan W May 22, 2017

Multiple studies a week are coming out in established peer-review journals on many related subjects. Apparently the author has limited awareness of the extent of this.
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Nathan W May 22, 2017

It is incorrect to say that scientific breakthroughs are strictly needed, per se, although perhaps his specific technological vision nevertheless renders the statement true enough for practical purposes.

Rather, existing scientific breakthroughs with widespread covert and involuntary use, which operate via remote sensing (neural monitoring) in conjunction with expansive scientific knowledge in areas of "event-related potentials" and others. Definitions of numerous related terms and indications of the scope of scientific literature can be found in documents downloadable from A-B-L.org.
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Nathan W May 22, 2017

A regular impulse that ensures the heart, a pacemaker, is not at all similar to putting computer chips/memory into your head. Among other things, hackers, product designers and others could have significant potential to end up controlling users, or otherwise influencing them in nefarious ways other than advertised.

The word usage of "pacemaker" in a neural context is thus of major concern, in this act of purporting general similarities between things that keep hearts beating, and things that may control or heavily influence the brain.

For example, it might attempt to prevent access to memories and recollection, or thinking processes, which would enable to properly and fully elaborate on the various degrees of stupidity that are highly likely to be involved.

In particular, with respect to cognitive liberty.
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Prashant Kotak May 21, 2017

There is no coherent way to demarcate between allowing *any* technological research and allowing humans to re-engineer themselves to the point where they are... no longer what they were, no longer human. The only thing that stands in the way is engineering - in genetics, bioscience, nanoscience - which are all rapidly advancing in any case. Even though the mechanisms that create sentience are not understood (if indeed those processes are mechanistic), there is nothing preventing the causality of sentience being probed - it's just hacking genetic codes, an order of magnitude more complex than hacking algorithmic code perhaps, but not really different, especially with the aid of machine intelligence platforms.

Ultimately, that which emerges from all this will bear no more resemblence to us than we do to an amoeba - we will share *something*, but not much.

At the extremes, the alternatives on offer seem to be between a global, ossified, ISIS-type quasi-religious dystopian society forbidding all technology, back to the horse and plough - or a tech-driven maelstrom where humans finally have no choice but to metamorphose themselves just to survive in some form, in order to avoid being superseded by their own inventions, be it us injecting machines into us or us injecting us into machines (I include genetic re-engineering of ourselves via our own stem cells in "machines").

The truly spine-chilling thing about these scenarios is that they are no more than a half a dozen to ten decades away.
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Robert Kolker May 19, 2017

What does having a colony on Mars have to do with climate change on Earth?
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Steve Hurst May 17, 2017

Can we have a bit of proportion about Musk

Tesla is based on the aluminium floorpan of the Lotus, somebody elses electrification concept, and Chinese battery tech. Musk has undoubtedly achieved but electric cars are not going to save mankind

SpaceX has made strides but the business is designed to undercut NASA's costs. NASA which is deliberately geographically dispersed for political not economic reasons and therefore inherently inefficient

There is no logic is saying that living on Mars saves the Earth

'His favored strategy to save us from being eliminated by super-intelligent machines is therefore to hook us into computers'. Nice Gothic horror story but not much more. The solution is apparently the man with two brains one grey matter and one silicone alma mater with dialogue, with the issue being dialogue. Anybody who know humans are irrational would be concerned with this. Irrationality is being human

Inserting micro chips into people is not becoming a cyborg. Micro chips are inserted into pets and nobody calls them cyborgs

I am not saying I do not respect Musk's achievements but they are often overstated in the media and he is presented as being a Tony Stark
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Gerry H May 17, 2017

Intelligence is the product of whole brain operation and is not defined by a single function. An extension socket will not increase anyone's intelligence. Memory however is an entirely different subject, but it also not a localised function but one of many centres, regions and processes not fully understood at all. Having said that, a solid state memory extension that could reliably record and recall whatever it encounters will be irresistible and find widespread application and adoption.
Until machine intelligence is proven to be possible it could just as well turn out to be a phantom. We may pride ourselves of our intelligence but so does a dog, a wolf, cat or mouse. Observe an amoeba through a microscope and you will see a creature in it's own environment, reacting to stimuli, avoiding hazards and pursuing prey which it will devour by engulfing it. But the most powerful supercomputers, information systems, online knowledge encyclopedias, the most convincing chatbots, not the slightest shimmer of anything resembling "consciousness". There is no AI to compete with us, none we have to fear because there is no AI that is self-aware. We are alone and must make use of the tools that are available to us, extension sockets included.
- Steve Hurst May 28, 2017
  
  Roland
  
  Why would anybody need this other than a guvnt wanting to know where everybody is
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- Ronald Crossland May 25, 2017
  
  I suggest an brain augmentation that allows any person to automatically have answers to complicated, if not complex, mathematical calculations could be contained on a very, very small chip and would be far more enabling that loads of static memory chips. Add a GPS located to it and that might be a lot more convenient than constantly consulting a pocket computer via thumb or voice activation.
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Michael Public May 17, 2017

Certain technologies go against the general sense of what is right and thus meet public resistance. Nuclear technology, GMO foods and cloning, for example. Brain implants is going to be another one.
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