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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   35707 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Neuralink has caused a bit of a storm on X, taking off after claiming that three humans have what they call "Telepathy":

Today, there are three people with Telepathy: Noland, Alex, and Brad.

All three individuals are unable to move their arms and legs—Noland and Alex due to spinal cord injury (SCI) and Brad due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). They each volunteered to participate in Neuralink’s PRIME Study,* a clinical trial to demonstrate that the Link is safe and useful in the daily lives of people living with paralysis.

Combined, the PRIME Study participants have now had their Links implanted for over 670 days and used Telepathy for over 4,900 hours. These hours encompass use during scheduled research sessions with the Neuralink team and independent use for everyday activities. Independent use indicates how helpful the Link is for real-world applications and our progress towards our mission of restoring autonomy. Last month, participants used the Link independently for an average of 6.5 hours per day

Assuming this is all true and the kinks will be worked out relatively soon, this is... big news. Almost terrifyingly big news.

AI tends to suck in most of the oxygen around tech discourse, but I'd say, especially if LLMs continue to plateau, Neuralink could be as big or even bigger. Many AI maximalists argue, after all, that the only way humanity will be able to compete and keep up in a post-AGI world will be to join with machines and basically become cyborgs through technology like Neuralink.

Now I have to say, from a personal aesthetic and moral standpoint, I am close to revolted by this device. It's interesting and seems quite useful for paraplegics and the like, but the idea of a normal person "upgrading" their brain via this technology disturbs me greatly.

There are a number of major concerns I have, to summarize:

  • The security/trust issue of allowing a company to have direct access to your brain
  • Privacy issues with other people, hacking your Link and being able to see all of your thoughts, etc
  • "Normal" people without Neuralinks being outcompeted by those willing to trade their humanity for technical competence
  • LLMs and other AI systems being able to directly hijack human agents, and work through them
  • Emotional and moral centers in the human brain being cut off and overridden completely by left-brained, "logical" thinking

Does this ring alarm bells for anyone else? I'd imagine @self_made_human and others on here are rubbing their hands together with glee, and I have to say I'd be similar a few years back. But at the moment I am, shall we say... concerned with these developments.

I believe that the only way to survive the technological advancements for me, even if only for a vanishingly small part of me, is by being subsumed into a giant blob consisting of the humanity melted whole, so I welcome this development.

I believe that the only way to survive is to not do that and avoid it by any means necessary. Humanity shall endure as humanity, or shall not endure. Subsuming oneself into a larger whole that dissolves one's individuality isn't transcendence, it is death.

I guess we'll meet on the battlefield.

I can respect the "shall not endure" position, but I'm a coward myself.

Why is destroying yourself in the way you described any better than suicide?

Because it's only 99.9% of death.

That's an awful lot of the way to death! Then why not just live your life? Do you think that all normal humans are about to be exterminated within your lifetime?

It's likely. I think that the probability of that is exactly the same, and not by a coincidence, of an AGI arriving within my lifetime. There are only two reasons for the people with power to keep the people without around: utility and threat, and both will be negated by it.

Not by coincidence? Why should those match?

I think many people with power care for those without.

Sorry, it's still kind of crazy to me that you describe your preferred path as 99.9% as bad as simple destruction. If that's still your preference, that's a remarkably strong confidence that you'd be destroyed otherwise.

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I wish I could convince you that cowardice is an inferior option to total resistance, but I believe Heidt when he says that people are all wired to value different things for evolutionary purposes.

If this turns out to be good and not actually corrupt humanity in any way, I get to be an irrelevant pariah and you get to have progressed humanity further.

If this turns out to be a terrible idea, you get to zombify yourself and I get to try to make sure the species survives.

I just hope that nature's apparent allocation of 20% of inflexible contrarians is always enough to let us avoid dire consequences.

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