Awesome write up, I've only made it about 1/4 the way through.<p>It's a huge article and wonderfully approachable.<p>Loved the image of the speed of signal transfer with and without mylin sheath and how why that causes the issues that MS patients have (it's under note 13) [0]. A friend has MS and it's great to be able to better understand the condition.<p>> Multiple sclerosis is caused by a glitch in the body’s immune system that causes it to destroy the myelin sheaths of neurons, which as you can see from the GIF below, would seriously disrupt the body’s ability to communicate with itself. ALD, the disease in Lorenzo’s Oil, is also caused by myelin being destroyed.<p>[0]: <a href="http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ezgif.com-optimize-2.gif" rel="nofollow">http://28oa9i1t08037ue3m1l0i861.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...</a>
They seem to have also updated the homepage of Neuralink with specific job opportunities. Last week or so it was still showing only an email link.<p>Check it out! :)
<a href="https://neuralink.com/" rel="nofollow">https://neuralink.com/</a><p>"Neuralink is developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers. We are looking for exceptional engineers and scientists. No neuroscience experience is required: talent and drive matter far more. We expect most of our team to come from other areas and industries. We are primarily looking for evidence of exceptional ability and a track record of building things that work. All positions are full time and based in San Francisco."
<p><pre><code> Neuralink co-founder Flip Sabes doesn’t get it.
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It's not so much that I'm worried about <i>me</i> getting ahold of one of these things. I'm really just worried about other people having them. Rotten people. Terrible people. The people out on the street, that if I had to share a room with them, I'd jump out a window.<p>There's this idea that these things will make them better people. What a can of worms that concept is.<p><pre><code> But to Elon, the scariest thing the Human Colossus is
doing is teaching the Computer Colossus to think.
</code></pre>
This is the brute-force hack to achieve the same outcome. One way or another, the equation is the same. Humans and machines collaborating, to produce an outcome.<p>We can either level the playing field, so that each of us has implicit, private, immediate, instant interaction with our own implanted systems, or, we can defer to intermediary system administrators holding the keys to machine rooms around the world, portioning out bandwidth that permits each to siphon off some compute time from a massive cluster, be it for algorithmic day trading, personal medical diagnostics, nuclear fission/fusion detonation simulations, image processing for astronomical observations, winning a Go tournament, or whatever.<p>But if an implant changes a person, from what do we derive our concept of self, and authenticity? Without that, how do we know we haven't died? How do we know that others are not animated corpses? What prevents us from becoming pzombies?<p>What's the difference between a truly convincing Real Doll, and a person after this?
This may come across as ridiculous as the people who thought our bodies couldn't handle the high speeds of trains in the 1800s, but I wonder if there is a speed limit inside our brain. The post keeps bringing up bandwidth as the issue, but I still think our brain needs time to reflect on what has happened.
In the middle of reading this, and can't help think about the Nexus trilogy <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nexus_Trilogy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nexus_Trilogy</a>
I'm also only about 1/4 through. Cool to see that the first piece on Neuralink with quotes from significant numbers of the actual team chooses to be long form and in depth.