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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   35697 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've had an idea in the back of my head, which is essentially to have the human brain "train" an attached, minimal, and highly plastic (compared to the brain) ML model through some direct high bandwidth connection (not targeting any particular objective function). The hope would be, once the ML model has converged to some near equilibrium state, it would have learned most of the distributed representations that comprise human values. That model could then be scaled up the much higher compute and used as a foundation model that is then highly aligned with (that particular) human's values.

Aside from being really speculative, it seems very likely to me that this would require feedback connections to actually work. And so the model is training the brain at the same time the brain is training the model.

Well, thousands of brains for sure.

I don’t want my AI to have a predisposition for dom / sub relationships or a foot fetish.

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