Elon Musk Wants To Put An AI Hardware Chip In Your Skull (itmunch.com) 362
"iTMunch reports that Elon Musk apparently believes that the human race can only be "saved" by implanting chips into our skulls that make us half human, half artificial intelligence," writes Slashdot reader dryriver. From the report: Elon Musk's main goal, he explains, is to wire a chip into your skull. This chip would give you the digital intelligence needed to progress beyond the limits of our biological intelligence. This would mean a full incorporation of artificial intelligence into our bodies and minds. He argues that without taking this drastic measure, humanity is doomed. There are a lot of ethical questions raised on the topic of what humanity according to Elon Musk exactly is, but he seems undeterred. "My faith in humanity has been a little shaken this year," Musk continues, "but I'm still pro-humanity."
The seamless conjunction of humans and computers gives us humans a shot at becoming completely "symbiotic" with artificial intelligence, according to Elon Musk. He argues that humans as a species are all already practically attached to our phones. In a way, this makes us almost cyborg-like. The only difference is that we haven't managed to expand our intelligence to that level. This means that we are not as smart as we could be. The data link that currently exists between the information that we get from our phones or computers is not as fast as it could be. "It will enable anyone who wants to have superhuman cognition," Musk said. "Anyone who wants." As for how much smarter humans will become with these AI chips, Musk writes: "How much smarter are you with a phone or computer or without? You're vastly smarter, actually," Musk said. "You can answer any question pretty much instantly. You can remember flawlessly. Your phone can remember videos (and) pictures perfectly. Your phone is already an extension of you. You're already a cyborg. Most people don't realize you're already a cyborg. It's just that the data rate [...] it's slow, very slow. It's like a tiny straw of information flow between your biological self and your digital self. We need to make that tiny straw like a giant river, a huge, high-bandwidth interface."
The seamless conjunction of humans and computers gives us humans a shot at becoming completely "symbiotic" with artificial intelligence, according to Elon Musk. He argues that humans as a species are all already practically attached to our phones. In a way, this makes us almost cyborg-like. The only difference is that we haven't managed to expand our intelligence to that level. This means that we are not as smart as we could be. The data link that currently exists between the information that we get from our phones or computers is not as fast as it could be. "It will enable anyone who wants to have superhuman cognition," Musk said. "Anyone who wants." As for how much smarter humans will become with these AI chips, Musk writes: "How much smarter are you with a phone or computer or without? You're vastly smarter, actually," Musk said. "You can answer any question pretty much instantly. You can remember flawlessly. Your phone can remember videos (and) pictures perfectly. Your phone is already an extension of you. You're already a cyborg. Most people don't realize you're already a cyborg. It's just that the data rate [...] it's slow, very slow. It's like a tiny straw of information flow between your biological self and your digital self. We need to make that tiny straw like a giant river, a huge, high-bandwidth interface."
Lots of trust (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lots of trust (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep, trust is the issue. I'd love to have a built in clock/calendar and calculator, but I'm not sure I'd trust anyone to make one for me.
Then again implants are going to become more and more common, e.g. pacemakers and other kinds of regulators to deal with specific conditions. Given the choice I'd probably accept one, rather than live (or die) without. I'd prefer if they could disable the wifi function though.
Re: Lots of trust (Score:4, Interesting)
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An Of Course These Chips Are "Unhackable"... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: An Of Course These Chips Are "Unhackable"... (Score:2)
...or less maliciously,, what about simply being outdated?
I mean this would be great in a utopia where there are such things as un hackable chips, but even then, how would you feel today having, say, a 2011 era chip buried in your skull?
Re: An Of Course These Chips Are "Unhackable"... (Score:5, Funny)
I remember the 2019-era brain chips. It's a sad story. Completely non-removable and the fatal....
Never mind, I've said too much already.
-Time Traveler
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you just use a socket adaptor, you don't mind a big bump on the side of your skull right?
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What happens when the AI chip in your brain gets compromised by a hacker?
That is easy to answer. The Hacker will control you. Either directly (if the hardware allows it) or indirectly by feeding you the properly adjusted information. The brute force information overload is a minor issue. It is like the virus pranks from the times of early internet. Current internet spread viruses are more subtle.
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All I need the chip to be is fast access to an external device. The kind I can turn off or reboot if I need/want to. The ai can run on that.
TO DO list (Score:4, Insightful)
He seems to have this list of things he thought were important when he was 17 and is simply going down that list.
Unfortunately eternal September happened. The chip in your brain better have some good filtering capability and come fully loaded with ad block, no script and blacklist any site where you might be influenced by anyone in the negative or median IQ range. So essentially all of it.
eyePhone (Score:2)
Reminds me of this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:eyePhone (Score:5, Informative)
In actuality it'll be more like the BrainPal from the Old Man's War series, I guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:eyePhone (Score:4, Funny)
One job at a time (Score:2)
Re:One job at a time (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually a little before the Wright Brother's famous flight, in the same year, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices. It was the first serious proposal to explore space, offering a somewhat practical method of doing so.
He went on to design things like multi-stage boosters and life support systems. It's incredible to think that there were people seriously thinking about exploring space when powered flight wasn't even possible yet.
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But where is the Principle of the Mind [or Theory of the Mind, if you will]? AI can't be done without it.
Throughout history, there have often been practical benefits to technology long before the theoretical basis was understood. The Romans knew how to temper steel, cure cement, and ferment wine, but knew nothing about the chemistry behind these processes.
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Maybe focus on actually making an AI first before worrying about chips in your head, also, no thanks. This is like him creating spacex but only just after the wright brother made their flight.
Honestly would prefer a dumb chip in my head that can instantly supply me with facts and do computations instantly that takes my bio-brain too long to do (and often makes mistakes with). Expert AI like that I'm all for, and exists today. I'm not looking to change my CPU, just add a peripheral.
It's when you throw in t
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Fuck off, dumbass. That's my job.
Oh my dear Elon.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh my dear Elon.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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You can get phone apps that let you measure things just by pointing the camera at them. Accuracy isn't as good as a ruler but it's good enough for a lot of purposes. Imagine being able to just look at something and have it's dimensions and a 3D model stored...
Actually sounds like a privacy nightmare. Dashcams for people, they never forget anything.
Re: Oh my dear Elon.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Every day, Elon and Donald prove that intelligence and wealth are uncorrelated. Musk said you can't achieve anything significant in less than 14 hours of work a day. Only a sleep deprived idiot who can't work intelligently would say that, and putting a chip in his head wouldn't help with that misperception in the slightest. A couple moments if actual thought would lead to the realization that intelligence has very little to do to with humanity's chances of survival. In fact, it's the second biggest risk
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I think a calculator, dictionary or just a copy of wikipedia would make you smarter if the access was just as natural as remembering your own name or the capital of France. It would free up a lot of resources for actual smart thinking and possibly the ability to make new brain connections between topics. So, yeah, I would love to have direct brain access to a classical computer (assuming no safety and security issues).
An AI on the other hand... um... why? I can already accurately recognize a cat. I don't ne
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As a practical matter there may be limits to the speed we want to interact with the world around us. Just think of Twitter without the fraction of second delay between composing a message and tabbing over to the post button... Sometime a little friction is a good thing
Re: Oh my dear Elon.... (Score:3)
What a stupid idiotic snappy answer. You are an imbecile.
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So, if an implanted chip could s
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We we could use is more compassion and empathy.
No, we could use a lot less emotional bullshit and a lot more logical and reason. Your feelings at best could described by a fuzzy logic with a lot of hysteresis. It is very lousy system for making any kind of decision.
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Your emotions should never take over control of your body. If this is an issue for you, please remand yourself to psychiatric care immediately, you are a danger to yourself and others.
Emotions have a place, their place is to inform, not to decide. They may be very powerful and very compelling, but higher reasoning should always be in charge. Are you an animal or human?
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Your emotions should never take over control of your body.
If only. You can get angry, sad, happy, moody... and it absolutely impact your decisions.
If this is not the case for you, please remand yourself into nearest robotic overlord reclamation facility, your human emulation matrix is malfunctioning.
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We evolved to knee-jerk emotionally overreact to about anything, because at some point our ancestors had to be afraid of tigers, snakes, and large predatory birds and false negative was fatal. None of this is relevant today, but neurological mechanism are still in place.
Optimal response strategy balances false positives and false negatives trying to m
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Emotional response is along "Lets get worked up about our feelings, the lash out at perceived injustices" lines. Rational response is along "Lets consider available evidence and determine most beneficial possible course of action".
I stand by my original point that we can use a lot less emotional and a lot more rational decision making.
It's official... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: It's official... (Score:5, Funny)
What happens when he is not pro-humanity?
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He is not wrong (Score:2)
However, the smartphone is easier to upgrade and it's easier to secure it if you don't trust it.
And as it stands in the current climate, I don't see any reason whatsoever to trust anyone. So unless I acquire the knowledge to thoroughly check such a chip's specs and am enabled to actually do that, I don't think this is going to be a thing for me.
OTOH, if they ever build a better digestive system or bionic eye, I'll probably get one of those but then my biological factory devices are rather suspect already.
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I agree that actually implanting the complex hardware into the body seems foolish. Having the computer implanted makes upgrading, and patching it monumentally harder. Why not just install a dumb neural interface that provides for an external port or something. Then the chip or computer could be a very small wearable device that can be upgraded, patched, repaired, or even replaced without any more inconvenience to the user than unplugging it.
Not needed to save humanity (Score:2)
Humanity can get along fine without implanted supercomputers, but they would make capitalism viable for longer.
Just a rehashed old interview (Score:2)
Also, I think "AI hardware chip" is just a made-up clickbait title. It is more about an interface. One may lead to another, but this misrepresentation makes the Neuralink mission sound more outlandish than it is. There are already "we are nowhere near true (general) AI" trigger responses in this thread.
we're already cyborgs (Score:2)
The idea is to have a higher data transfer rate, because the transfer rate of the current phone input-output mechanism is not fast enough.
I would argue that most people will not be able to handle the speeds at which data will be delivered if they need to manage that real time.
Smarter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, since Google searches only return correct information, Wikipedia is never wrong. Everything you read or see on the internet is true.
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With my phone I am able to perform more tasks and perform them faster than without a phone. I would say that would fit the meaning of 'smarter'.
"I'm still pro-humanity" (Score:5, Interesting)
"I'm still pro-humanity"... until I'm not. I have tunnels under your cities, satellites over them and rockets able to strike anywhere on earth. "You will be assimilated, resistance is futile!"
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MLJ (Score:2)
I think that the device Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen is creating is a better technology, because it's a lot less invasive, and can be removed by hand without the use of surgical tools:
https://www.openwater.cc/techn... [openwater.cc]
We use an utterly unconventional approach that enables us to leapfrog MRI technology by using the scattering of the body or the brain itself to focus infrared light to scan the brain or body bit by bit or voxel by voxel. This is enabled by LCDs with pixels small enough to create reconstructive holographic images that neutralize the scattering and enable scanning at MRI resolution and depth coupled with the use of body-temperature detectors. These LCDs and detectors line the inside of a ski-hat, bandage or other clothing.
Call out to Tesla employees (Score:3, Funny)
Can someone at Tesla please get a urine sample from Mr. Musk? My daughter, a chemist, would like to run an analysis on it to see what the hell is in his coffee.
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Yeah, this is an especially odd comment coming from him, considering that he's been warning about a hostile AI takeover for awhile now.
Maybe Joe Rogan spiked his blunt with something.... I don't know.
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Why do you think it's odd? If AIs can be super-AIs because of man-made hardware, then perhaps humans can pull the same trick and not end up with the short end of the stick?
All he's saying is that for this to actually work, we probably need a better hardware interface than eyeballs and keyboards.
Elon wants a pony (Score:2)
Elon Musk Wants To Put An AI Hardware Chip In Your Skull
And I wanna fuck Angie Dickinson. Let's see which one of us gets lucky first.
Very necessary. Will help Tesla a lot. (Score:2)
Direct to brain advertising (Score:3)
Is that what you want?
Go right a head... (Score:2)
Go right ahead and stuff one in your head sir. You try it first, I'm going to sit back and watch the show.
Like the failed experiment we knew as "Google Glasses" didn't really take off after all the hype, so this little idea will go. Some folks will try it, others will scoff at them while the majority will realize how foolish the idea is and ignore it all. However in this case, what are you going to do with it when technology upgrades and the chip in your head ages like an unfortunate tat?
Yes on Chip; No on Elon (Score:2)
How much? (Score:2)
Is that where Musk got the idea? Because that's exactly what he describes.
why? (Score:2)
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Social processing unit (Score:2)
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Elon, you so crazy (Score:2)
Seriously, Elon Musk, I'm not at all con
We already know better right? (Score:2)
We hardly knew ye (Score:2)
Interesting juxtaposition (Score:2)
In my view of the site this is right next to an article on a data breach involving hundreds of millions of people.
Obviously nothing like this would happen with Musk's technology...
No, hell no! (Score:2)
Oh no (Score:2)
"make us half human, half artificial intelligence," "My faith in humanity has been a little shaken this year," Musk continues, "but I'm still pro-humanity."
A year ago he said something about AI destroying mankind. I think he's turning on us!
Bigger picture: Post-scarcity & aesthetics (Score:3, Interesting)
In a post-scarcity world full of abundance of most basics and no big need to work if you don't want to (like with a basic income or a gift economy or 3D printers and personal robots), why do some unaesthetic and likely unpleasant thing to your brain like stick some hackable chip in it? Why not accept some reasonable limitations put in place by millions of years of evolution about how to have a stable mind and brain? Musk is missing the bigger post-scarcity picture here -- as are most technologists.
A different world view is possible:
https://www.pdfernhout.net/pos... [pdfernhout.net]
Merely another way to push advertising (Score:2)
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it would be possible to get imaging data from a person's eyes, through their brain out to the AI chip and then to the world. Stuff that a person would have no control over and no abili
Musk is exploiting the media for advertising (Score:2)
This stuff gets you in the news and gets people thinking of you as being visionary and it it doesn't take much effort to do it once you've got people's ear... you try to keep that impression going. The image helps business. Edison did it like crazy and Tesla probably not even on purpose.
Sad to see Musk's view on being smart is such that having a smart phone makes you smarter. It's quite functional; that is, his definition is functional. Having tools makes you more capable and perform/function better. Y
Not everyone will want this (Score:2)
That said, how long will it be until those who are part of this network collective decide that their way of doing things is obviously superior, and therefore try to force those not part of it into their collective?
Resistance is futi
The question remains... (Score:2)
Is Elon looney tunes or batshit crazy?
he is "special" (Score:2)
Musk is one of our times greatest dillusionaries.
A reallllllll jerk! (Score:2)
It will have to have hardware safety governors (or firmware not updatable sans extermal stimulation, and ideally both) to prevent "real jerks" not just from messing around, but also from launching a secret zero day attack during a war.
Common sci-fi theme ..... (Score:2)
This has been a concept (or even a dream) for many people for decades. Cyberpunk novels treat this idea as almost a staple item in their fictional societies, and that goes back as far as at least the 1980's.
I think all of this augmented reality tech you see on smartphones and past projects like "Google Glass" also point to a desire to head in that general direction.
The fact is though? We really have no idea how to tie our electronics in to the human brain so they'd seamlessly inter-operate. Modern medicine
They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back (Score:2)
The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!
Move My Legs Again... (Score:2)
I'd try this, if I could move my legs again...
Just kidding, my legs are fine. But seriously, there are some disabilities / diseases / problems that the risks associated with letting Elon Musk split open your skull, and start adding hardware, might be worth it. The cochlear implant is effectively such a cyborg implant, and many (formerly) deaf people are very grateful for this piece of technology.
I believe these types of decisions are best left to the individual, or the individual's parents, and not to gover
Argument from ignorance (Score:2)
AI researchers are too close to the problem.
Oh so we should listen instead to people (like yourself I'm guessing) who aren't involved in AI at all? You could substitute AI researcher with Physics researcher and your argument would be basically unchanged and equally bogus.
As for the argument that "humans will always be needed, because our economy is built around humans", wake up and look at the rest of the universe. Stuff happens without humans. Once machines don't need you, they don't need you.
You see a lot of machines out there in the universe doing stuff? You are making an argument from ignorance [wikipedia.org]. Just because you can imagine some dystopian future doesn't mean it's actually possible for it to happen. I can imagine warp drives and teleportation and photon torpedos a
Religion ... (Score:2)
This is your religion here. Spoken from faith in .... 'humanity'... or technology and in no way connected to hard science or objective evidence.
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After decades of research on cognition, computation, philosophy, and ethics we have managed to create an AI that will follow you into the break room with cake.
Huge success
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Huge success
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction
No (Score:3)
The cake is a lie.
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If you think about what he's proposing, it's going to be much closer to the Bynars [wikia.com].
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> And when that happens what role is left for humanity?
What role is left for animals? Do we go around killing ALL the animals on the planet simply because we are superior? Of course not.
Humans 1.0 (Flesh) and Humans 2.0 (Cyborgs) are unique life forms. They serve a purpose. The _medium_ is irrelevant.
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Re:Smarter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Phones and computer don't make anyone smarter, they just give you access to more information. Not necessarily real or accurate information at that....
Re:Smarter? (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly Musk (and he is smart enough to know better) is conflating intelligence with access to information. They two are not the same. While its true the most intelligent person in the world still can't make good decisions without access to timely, and correct information; it does not work the other way round.
You can't give just anyone access to information and suddenly expect them to be smart. Stupid is as Stupid does. There are lot of smart phone running around this country and all I have to do is flip on the news for 5min to confirm its NOT making people wiser, if anything they are just letting people do more stupid faster.
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Exactly Musk (and he is smart enough to know better) is conflating intelligence with access to information.
He is combining the two. The biobrain will supply the intelligence. The embedded chip will supply the information. So you get the best of both. Human intelligence with immutable memory, ability to lookup any information with just a thought, rapidly perform complex calculations, and find patterns that would not be perceptible to an unaugmented brain.
Distracted pedestrians walking into traffic are a good example: Elon's chip would fix that problem. The human brain has difficulty focusing on more than one
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Fundamentally I agree with this, I would like to point out that having brain access to something that recorded perfectly what you saw and heard, access to the internet, and a few ai programs that were trained to solve spacial acuity problems would pretty much guarantee that you blew any iq test that you took out of the water.
Personally, I don't believe that I.Q. test are a conceit that we will look back on like phrenology, but I know a lot of people on here believe in them. I just wanted to underscore that
Re:Smarter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly Musk (and he is smart enough to know better) is conflating intelligence with access to information. They two are not the same.
Although you are correct, it's more difficult to draw the line than you'd think. You show up to your grandparent's place, they ask you to fix the computer. Maybe they have a Mac, and you don't use a Mac. But you have experience, you know your away around computers, you know how to Google. And you have their problem fixed up in a jiffy. They immediately say, "our grandson, he's so smart..."
Turns out knowledge, experience, and access to information allow you to accomplish things that people without those things can't accomplish. Similarly to how greater intelligence might let you accomplish things others can't. I say might, because a "dumber" person who applied themselves to acquire a lot of knowledge and experience will accomplish more than a highly intelligent person who is lazy and lacks ambition. And now you ask, "is the other person more intelligent, because they planned their life better?"
In some ways, the answer is yes, and now we're getting into different kinds of intelligence. You take a Rain Man style idiot-savant who can do very complex math in their heads, but can't take care of themselves. Are they more intelligent than you? In mathematics, sure. But now you have a chip in your head, and that hardware can do the complex math for you. Did you become more intelligent? Chess programs are unbeatable by our best chess Grandmasters now, are they intelligent? We used to claim that would be a big milestone in hard AI, but it turned we can make a really dumb, but specialized machine for that task. So we moved the goal posts. I had the opportunity to play Lubomir Ftacnik in a group game when he came to my University's chess club, and the most impressive part wasn't that he beat everyone in the simultaneous game. It's that he sat down with each person later and went over their game with them, talking abut different things they could have done. Every move. From memory. I've later come to find out this is common among chess Grandmasters. Is that type of chess eidetic memory sufficient to make someone into a grandmaster? No. Is it beneficial? Apparently so, since so many of them have it. And that's easy to supplement you with.
You can't give just anyone access to information and suddenly expect them to be smart. Stupid is as Stupid does. There are lot of smart phone running around this country and all I have to do is flip on the news for 5min to confirm its NOT making people wiser, if anything they are just letting people do more stupid faster.
Yeah, but now it's not a smartphone, it's in your brain. What if you don't see it as data, but see it as thought. When you're playing chess, it computes a bunch of possible moves, but you're not consciously aware of all those choices, just the ones it deemed best and fed them back to you. When you make a decision, it computes which has the best expected value, and now you get a "good feeling" about the option with the best expected value. This is the best case scenario, imagine the dystopian one. Instead of getting a good feeling about the option with the best expected value, you get a good feeling about the option the chip manufacturer gets paid to promote.
Basically, it's not the question of what is intelligence and what is not that bothers me. I think the chip can be undoubtedly be used to make us all either more intelligent or sufficiently emulating higher intelligence, whatever that means. What bothers me is that this is root access to my personality. I can be subtly controlled, not know it, and not care once I do find out.
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Exactly Musk (and he is smart enough to know better) is conflating intelligence with access to information. They two are not the same.
Although you are correct, it's more difficult to draw the line than you'd think.
True, and I can tell you that if I had the chance to essentially make everything an open book test with the "book" being any information I can find, I'd take it. That being said, I have taken plenty of open book tests where the professor would let you bring anything you wanted (except for another person) as an aid, because if you didn't understand the subject ahead of time, all the raw knowledge in the world wouldn't help you.
Black Mirror (Score:2)
Phones and computer don't make anyone smarter, they just give you access to more information.
That was my initial reaction too but phones can process information as well and the ability to process and sift through information is arguably a component of intelligence. For example, while an embedded chip in your head has many serious problems, if you could perform mathematical calculations rapidly or instantly recall details of memories you might appear smarter. This does not happen with a phone because everyone can see it is the phone, not you, doing the work.
Black Mirror already covered some of t
Become a Borg IS great! (Score:2)
It's not so much a loss of control but a loss of individuality. No different than how your billions of cells have given up "control" as they are part of the collective of your body.
It's easy to argue that your body is capable of accomplishing things several orders of magnitude more complex than any of your individual cells can accomplish. I think almost by definition it's impossible for us to begin to imagine what a collective of people is capable of.
Favoring our own individuality over what we're capable
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The problem with a collective is that, over time, it would tend to deteriorate towards the lowest common denominator - everyone would eventually be mediochre, and very little, if any, new accomplishments would be achieved from inside of it.
Like global thermonuclear war, the only way to win is not to play.
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He hired 1000 battery engineers and one guy that worked at a body shop once. Teslas are poorly designed and built crap vehicles.