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Comment by nikkwong | Hacker News Reader

To me it's just unfathomable to imagine what the future of humanity looks like if everyone has superhuman intelligence available at their fingertips. I imagine we will no longer be differentiable based on our articulacy or own personal genius, which would effectively undermine the decade long mastery that many people took to hone their crafts. I also wonder if people would become more homogeneous as our own superintelligence shows us the faults in our own eccentricities. The future of work, and creative work, which I find most interesting, is kind of scary to speculate about. But, guess we'll just have to see where the science takes us :)

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Even in the early 90's people would imagine the vast intellectual expansion that the Internet would bring once electronic access to libraries would become ubiquitous. I'm afraid we'll descend even more into a Huxleyan 'Ow my balls' intellectual sinkhole, but I hope you are right.

The Internet is still pretty awesome, though.

Like all such tech advances, there will be a mixed bag. Best to pick and choose the advantages while avoiding the bad parts. Well-curated YouTube videos versus digital heroin.

People would still need to desire to get better. This is a pretty lacking trait in the majority of humanity.

That is so true. Something like this would be so enabling for someone like me who has always had serious interest in complicated domains (physics, complexity theory, etc..), but probably neither the mental facilities or excess time to fully understand them. I wonder if these types of technologies will pave a path to more easily 'downloading' and then understanding such topics. That would totally change my life.

The weirdest part (both good and bad) of digitally hacking the brain will be hacking desire itself.

Step two: assimilation into a collective.

We already curate the people we hang out with, and to some extent the people we disagree with, but listen to.

If one day we can really really scan brains, how do we resist the temptation to eat them (figuratively) and become something ... more ...

Tools are only as effective as the minds that utilize them. Human experience isn't becoming more homogenous now, despite everyone having similar access to the internet.

Life will change with advanced BCI, but it's difficult to anticipate how.

Humans driving cars is probably unfathomable to chimpanzees.

Yeah. In such a sense we could just imagine this potentially being one of the largest paradigm shifts we've ever experienced as a species.

I guess my bias is that I feel like my own personal mind-map or world lens is my own personal competitive advantage against the rest of the world and that's what I use to differentiate and make money. Taking that advantage away seems like a life-deranging experience as it defines who I am.

But that's how incumbents always feel when they get disrupted. I suppose victors always have defined themselves by their ability to adapt to change.

I don't think it is taking an advantage away. New inventions mean new opportunities and doors opening not closing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=603826

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