Elon Musk's craziest idea is the AI-beating Neural Lace
RANCHOS PALOS VERDES, California — Are you ready to interface with your digital self at neural level? Elon Musk wants you to. In fact, he thinks it's the only way we can prevent becoming our artificial intelligence overlords' house cats.
Musk laid our this wild, new digital vision during a late evening chat at the annual Code Conference.
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Earlier in the talk Musk made it quite clear that he believes " not all AI futures are benign." He's especially concerned that AI could take "a direction that would be not good for the future."
Musk launched OpenAI to prevent such a future, but it does not appear that he has all that much faith in the plan, since he's already thinking of at least one way that humans can stay ahead of artificial intelligence that he believes will leave us so far behind as to "be like a pet or like the house cat" for the AI.
The way around this, Musk explained, is something called a Neural Lace. It's essentially an artificial intelligence layer for humans.
"You have the limbic system, the cortex and a digital layer above the cortex that could work well and symbiotically with you," he said.
The idea is to solve what Musk sees as humans' fundamental input/output limitations. He said our hand input, say thumbs on a virtual iPhone keyboard, is incredibly slow. On the input side, we're a lot better because we have a high-bandwidth visual interface.
A digital layer, though, would "effectively merge in a symbiotic way with a digital intelligence," said Musk.
The how of getting this digital layer into humans is also interesting -- and a little terrifying. Musk said it would not take surgery. Instead, the digital layer could enter through the arteries and veins, which is roadway to the neurons Musk wants to tap into. That might, though, involve entry through the jugular vein.
It's just an idea for now and not one that anyone, even Musk, is pursuing. But he believes someone should and "If somebody doesn’t do it than I think I should do it," said Musk, thereby potentially adding another major project to his already full plate.
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Topics Artificial Intelligence Elon Musk
Lance Ulanoff was Chief Correspondent and Editor-at-Large of Mashable. Lance acted as a senior member of the editing team, with a focus on defining internal and curated opinion content. He also helped develop staff-wide alternative story-telling skills and implementation of social media tools during live events. Prior to joining Mashable in September 2011 Lance Ulanoff served as Editor in Chief of PCMag.com and Senior Vice President of Content for the Ziff Davis, Inc. While there, he guided the brand to a 100% digital existence and oversaw content strategy for all of Ziff Davis’ Web sites. His long-running column on PCMag.com earned him a Bronze award from the ASBPE. Winmag.com, HomePC.com and PCMag.com were all been honored under Lance’s guidance.He makes frequent appearances on national, international, and local news programs including Fox News, the Today Show, Good Morning America, Kelly and Michael, CNBC, CNN and the BBC.He has also offered commentary on National Public Radio and been interviewed by newspapers and radio stations around the country. Lance has been an invited guest speaker at numerous technology conferences including SXSW, Think Mobile, CEA Line Shows, Digital Life, RoboBusiness, RoboNexus, Business Foresight and Digital Media Wire’s Games and Mobile Forum.
