- The major trajectory upgrade happens for two reasons. Each generation can learn a lot more new things when they can talk to each other, compare notes, and combine their individual learnings (that’s why the blue bars are so much higher in the second graph). And each generation can successfully pass a higher percentage of their learnings on to the next generation, so knowledge sticks better through time.
Knowledge, when shared, becomes like a grand, collective, inter-generational collaboration. Hundreds of generations later, what started as a pro tip about a certain berry to avoid has become an intricate system of planting long rows of the stomach-friendly berry bushes and harvesting them annually. The initial stroke of genius about wildebeest migrations has turned into a system of goat domestication. The spear innovation, through hundreds of incremental tweaks over tens of thousands of years, has become the bow and arrow.
Language gives a group of humans a collective intelligence far greater than individual human intelligence and allows each human to benefit from the collective intelligence as if he came up with it all himself. We think of the bow and arrow as a primitive technology, but raise Einstein in the woods with no existing knowledge and tell him to come up with the best hunting device he can, and he won’t be nearly intelligent or skilled or knowledgeable enough to invent the bow and arrow. Only a collective human effort can pull that off.
I've been reading this, digesting it slowly over several days and loving it! The author says you need to read all 6 chapters to get up to speed just to understand the amazing project underways. I'm on chapter 3 now and getting a feeling for where this is going...
I found myself enjoying reading it, while also withholding my disbelief, The author does a good job of drawing analogies in the development of species. It's relatable and provides a nice advertisement for neuroscience. Reading this as somewhat possible science fiction is fun. The author also has a boner for Elon Musk that gets annoying.
I know that Tim Urban is excited about where this hypothetical invention is taking us, but to be honest, it's pretty terrifying that someday with the aid of this device you could have your perception of reality tailored - hell, altered radically - without your knowledge or consent. Hell, I can easily imagine some sort of malevolent code that would override specific commands to the nervous system and make it impossible for you to will your arms to take it off. Boom, you're permanently jacked in whether you like it or not, and will continue to suffer the effects of the corrupted hardware feeding input straight into your brain. Hack a device to make someone experience an irresistible urge to do something. Boom, instant Imperious Curse a la Harry Potter. Multiply that effect and you have an army of body snatchers, slaves to your will. Got an enemy? Hack their visual cortex to give them signals that the brain interprets as terrifying imagery, maybe for a few minutes a day, maybe for the entirety of their waking lives. Boom, instant Black Mirror episode / permanent sleep paralysis. I guess my point is that there are a lot of ways this could go wrong, and I think it could go a lot more wrong than Tim writes. Maybe that's paranoid of me. But for me to adopt something like this I'd have to be convinced that the security of such a device would be miles above any consumer electronics product currently on the market.
...wait, that's already a Black Mirror episode, you can't do that. I'm with you, though. I've already taken the liberty of thoroughly wrecking my personal mental vessel, and I'll happily maintain my monopoly on doing so. I'd need to see the technology demonstrated on people/guinea pigs for a full generation before I adopted it. With any luck, by the time they can preserve my consciousness forever, it's absolutely useless, but there are ordinances in place preventing my termination. That's my long term plan for stickin' it to the man. Not good odds for me, I think.
The thing I hate about Wait But Why is he's got this whole "explain like you're five" thing going on but he writes like he's fucking Charles Dickens. And nowhere does he get to the point. Here's the point. If you unplug a USB cable and plug it into a hub, you can plug another USB cable and suddenly you have a USB interface between the two things that were plugged together. Isn't that nice. Do this with video cables and suddenly you have a character generator or a graphics engine or one of those cool swoopy things that allows the weatherman to push clouds around while standing in front of a green screen and wouldn't it be awesome if we could do that with, like, brains? But anybody who so much as performs minor surgery knows that if you "unplug" any part of any tissue, the first thing that happens is it bleeds. The next thing that happens is it gets inflamed as a whole bunch of antibodies and white blood cells and platelets and shit jump on board to repair the injury. The next thing that happens is the body knits the wound site closed as best as it can and attempts to correct the damaged site, which it does imperfectly, which leads to scar tissue which is a shitty substitute for whatever was there initially but still trumps the ever loving fuck out of anything we've come up with to compete with it. And anybody who has so much as talked to a cranky elder with a hip replacement knows that if you shove a foreign body in there before the body can do its thing, the body never truly stops attempting to close the wound. It makes a pearl of scar tissue over the invader. It hammers it with antibodies and platelets and white blood cells. The body no more accepts and gets used to implants than trees get used to nails and screws in them for tree houses. And obviously Elon Musk is Einstein in a suit and obviously visionary billionaires know more about these things than mere scientists and obviously if he spent money on it it's clearly going to be a great success but here's a list of things Elon Musk lacks experience with: - surgery - medicine - biology - anatomy - implantable medical devices - wound care - neurology - neurobiology - pediatrics I've been in the labs where we put metal in animals. I've been part of the research where we attempt to trick the body into accepting an artificial substance as its own. I've talked to the guys attempting to map thoughts to cables. And you can want all this? And you can spend money to make it happen? But anatomy and bioengineering don't follow Moore's Law. And it's fuckin' great to put 300 cartoons on 10,000 words clear back to "in the beginning there were cavemen talking about rocks" but take it from me - this is the sort of bloviation you resort to when you want to obscure the fact that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about and I'm sorry, but one does not credibly write about "the wizard era" without making at least the briefest attempt at skepticism. This guy's explanations actively make people stupider.
The words "magical future" are in the title. I opened the link yesterday, scoffed, and went about my business. Totally agree.