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Comment by bpyne | Hacker News Reader

Actually, EM was very much talking about the merging of individuals with machines. I can't take the following quote in any other way.

"Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem," Musk explained.

I find it terrifying that people are out there who are so myopically focused on merging machines and people. The major issues facing humanity aren't going to be solved by quicker analysis of data as EM seems to desire. I'm not saying they won't be helped by data analysis. I am saying that quicker analysis of terabytes more data isn't going to do it.

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> The major issues facing humanity aren't going to be solved by quicker analysis of data as EM seems to desire

You can already see the results of a society where data comes in too quick for the "average" citizen to process. Fake news, hoaxes, Trump, climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, etc.

This technology cannot come soon enough.

"Fake news, hoaxes, ..., etc." These issues are all symptomatic of people who FEEL increasingly left behind by society. While a small percentage of the population you allude to are probably not capable of separating truth from fiction, far more are fearful of a society shifting any further from what they grew up with. Specific to the US elections, they looked for someone like President Trump to act as a patriarchal figure who would tell them "everything is going to be okay". They WANTED and continue to want the message that they won't be left behind.

Moving yet further into a society of "machine-people" is not going to allay fears at all. To the contrary, it will push them further in the opposite direction.

Missing from the discussion of AI's integration into society is that people want to feel socially useful, part of the pack if you will. It gives them a connection to their society: the feeling that they have a place in it. Taking away their jobs and leaving them without this connection, I fear the consequences of that backlash.

Sorry to stray slightly from the topic, but these thoughts have been ruminating in my head for the past couple of years. While I think AI applied to specific problems will lead to advances in medicine, for example, that will be of great social benefit, I think we need to treat its use in society with kid gloves.

My problem is that this has all happened before and we have survived. The printing press alienated non-readers, advances in agriculture killed farming jobs, etc. Its Darwinism, no?

No, it's not Darwinism. Social Darwinism has nothing to do with Darwinism except for its name.

Jesus when I see how you dare look down on people who lack basic needs and discard their opinion, yet in another comment state such bullshit as that, I can't help but look down on your, and I feel sort of bad for it. Help yourself, educate yourself on what Darwinism.

I'm not looking down at anyone. Get off your high horse

Oh Jesus. Fake news has been around since there's been news. Deniers of truth have been around since people have had Truths.

You missed my point. I realize we're talking about merging the individual with the technological. My point was that you reference your preferences about seeing your daughter chipped. Your preferences are 100% irrelevant because they're based on today's norms.

Individual preferences are at the heart of the matter: machinery inside the human body is creepy. But, I concede wholeheartedly that benefit exists. For example, using robotics to replace a severely damaged limb. It shouldn't be hard to think up more examples.

Directly integrating with the human brain is another matter. I can see some possibility of a chip helping people with dementia or stimulating nerves to get paralyzed limbs working again. EM sounds like he wants it to go far past that. Aside from the medical experiments gone wrong in order to learn enough to make integration possible, there are the real possibilities of a computer overriding a human's own thoughts or a bug causing great neural damage. And for what gain?

We need to accept, as technologists, that the human race's biggest problems are not going to be solved by technology. Education, cultural exchanges, politics, and time will ultimately bring us to a better point than today. We can assist by providing better tools, but we aren't going to be the heroes coming through with the miracle fix at the eleventh hour.

We need to accept, as technologists, that the human race's biggest problems are not going to be solved by technology.

we aren't going to be the heroes coming through with the miracle fix at the eleventh hour.

I really don't know what you're talking about. Technology will continue to progress. Except for temporary pauses, technology has always advanced and always will. If you don't adopt it it doesn't matter. Your children will.

I don't know what this stuff about "we aren't going to be the heroes". Who said anything about that? I think you need to read Musk's words again. He isn't saying, "We have to do this because it's good." He's saying, "We'll be forced to do this to keep up."

And he's right. If you don't you'll be left in the dust, relatively poor and powerless while alive, and soon dead and irrelevant. It's not about right or wrong and there are no heroes.

That's a rather Malthusian assumption.

>Technology will continue to progress. Except for temporary pauses, technology has always advanced and always will.

That's not really true; just ask the ancient Romans. When the Roman Empire collapsed, technology took 1000 years to get back to what they had. That's a bit more than a "temporary pause".

> When the Roman Empire collapsed, technology took 1000 years to get back to what they had.

No, it didn't; overall, the cutting edge of technology continued to advance from the Roman period during the 1000 years after its fall (wherever in the typical 117 CE to 476 CE period you want to mark as the "fall"), even in the region where Rome had been dominant, although the distribution of some technologies and techniques suffered.

This is completely wrong. The Romans had aqueducts, they could even fill up the Coliseum with water for water shows. The Romans had concrete, and built many buildings with it. What did Europeans have after the collapse? They went back to building stuff out of wood and brush. Even castles and cathedrals were built of simple blocks, not concrete.

When the Empire collapsed, there was a massive loss of institutional knowledge. Specialization of labor completely disappeared: people left the city and their specialized labor jobs to work as feudal serfs. They did this even though Roman law forbade it, because the imperial leadership saw what was happening, but people preferred to go live as serfs so they could eat rather than starve in the city.

Name any technology which actually advanced during the Dark Ages. There aren't any. There's a reason it's called the Dark Ages: literacy plummeted and people stopped writing things down.

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