These days, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) seems to be a hotter and hotter topic in Silicon Valley and beyond, as digital developments are made and technologies are advanced. Speaking of rising temperatures, one billionaire entrepreneur, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has been notably hot and cold when it comes to the potentials of A.I. According to an INC article, Musk has claimed that A.I. poses the “biggest existential threat” to humankind, and expanded on the precise dangers of advancing these technologies in an interview with Vanity Fair. “Let’s say you create a self-improving A.I. to pick strawberries,” he mused, “and it gets better and better at picking strawberries and picks more and more and it is self-improving, so all it really wants to do is pick strawberries. So then it would have all the world be strawberry fields. Strawberry fields forever.”
Although his dystopian Beatles scenario may be a strange and seemingly comical one to imagine, Musk has a point about artificial intelligence becoming too intelligent – and thus, too powerful. “I’m not sure I’d want to be the one holding the kill switch for some super-powered A.I.,” he revealed to INC, referring to the notion of a “big red button” that would allow humans to stop a dangerous A.I. in its tracks, “because you’d be the first thing it kills.”
All this doomsday talk aside, Musk seems to have changed his tune about the potentials of A.I. with his recent launch of Neuralink; in fact, the “brain-computer interface venture” which, according to The Verge, intends to “[create] devices that can be implanted in the human brain, with the purpose of helping human beings merge with software and keep pace with advancements in artificial intelligence” demonstrates a total 180 degree flip for the previously petrified Musk.
Although the company is in its infancy stage, Musk’s renewed outlook on A.I. seems to have shifted his focus on how it can help humans rather than hurt them. According to The Verge, Musk has said that, “over time we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence,” signaling his surrender to the futile fight against the machine. He added that the benefits of this mering of two worlds – the natural and the artificial – could improve “the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output.” Essentially, these new technologies would up your natural bandwidth and make your human brain “faster, smarter and more wired”.
What Neurolink and similar brain-computer ventures aim to do specifically is “the reading and writing of neural codes”; in other words, something that has never been done before. In an interview with The Verge last year, Braintree co-founder Bryan Johnson – whose company created the startup, Kernel – expressed his desire to “work with the brain the same way we work with other complex biological systems like biology and genetics.”
If the idea of sticking a digital chip into your brain is a little eek, don’t worry just yet; according to The Verge, “these types of brain-computer interfaces exist today only in science fiction.” PHEW. However, electrodes and other implants of the sort are used in medical cases today to help elevate symptoms associated with Parkinson’s, epilepsy and other neurodegenerative diseases, so it’s only a matter of time until brain-computer technology and the likes catch up with, well, time. The million – er, excuse me Mr. Musk, billion – dollar question is: will we be ready for it?
Cover photo obtained from: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-its-like-to-work-for-elon-musk-2014-6
Article photo obtained from: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601519/how-to-create-a-malevolent-artificial-intelligence/