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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   36366 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.

What abilities are they describing as "telepathy?"

I think its the same kind of telepathy we all have, where you move things with your mind that are connected to your mind via electrical signals.

"Tele," as a prefix, means "at a distance" and "pathy," as a suffix, generally means disease, though "telepathy" is generally a sci-fi term for transmission or detectionn of thoughts. I think the word for "where you move things with your mind that are connected to your mind via electrical signals" would be something like "electrokinesis."

and "pathy," as a suffix, generally means disease

So, what it actually means is “suffering”, or even just “feeling” or “experience” more generally. The usage in telepathy is analogous to the usage in empathy or sympathy, more so than it is to uses in the names of afflictions.

Good point - me only including the medical meaning was myopic. But, if anything, the multiple meanings of the suffix and the imprecision of the latter meaning underscores the problem with the "Muskian" use of "telepathy" to describe... whatever this is.

Precision with language only really exists in poetry. Definitions are descriptive not prescriptive and all. It's not very elegant I agree, but everyone can guess what Musk means and it's way more important from a business standpoint to tap into the zeitgeist than it is to be elegant.

What's confusing to me is why people are calling this "telepathy," not "telekinesis." From scifi/fantasy, generally the former refers to communication between minds without a physical medium, while the latter refers to causing physical objects to move purely through one's mind.

I think the platonic sci-fi "telepathy" describes turning people's internal monologues into dialogs. But I think that will be complicated in practice because not everyone has an internal monologue.

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