INFOGRAPHIC: Human-AI Symbiosis: How Elon Musk's Neuralink aims to drive human evolution
“Your phone is already an extension of you. You are already a cyborg. Most people don’t realise they are already a cyborg – that phone is already an extension of yourself.”Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a tiny implant device, aims to eventually serve as a high bandwidth interface to the brain such that we can be symbiotic with AI.Borrowing from the Ray Kurzweil view of Singularity, Musk sees the best case scenario for humanity as one where people merge with technology such that AI begins to serve as a tertiary cognition layer. Just as our ancestors evolved through the development of a symbiotic relationship between the limbic system and the cortex, this new cognition layer would need to serve the cortex in a similarly symbiotic way.“How much smarter are you with a phone or computer than without? Vastly smarter – you can answer any question or calculation instantly. You can remember anything flawlessly.”So if we already have devices that serves to complement our existing brain, what is the barrier to human-AI symbiosis?The premise is that we have a bandwidth problem between our human brain and technology, limited by our eyes and ears as input devices and what seems like a regression to using thumbs as our output devices. Musk argues that if there’s enough bandwidth between the cortex and the AI version of yourself, this symbiosis could radically change our capabilities. It would theoretically enable any willing person to have super-human cognition.“It's an interface problem. A data rate problem.”The current limitation is seen as the communication rate between humans and the cybernetic version of themselves. For example, if our phone is the current extension of ourselves, then the relative data exchange rate is slow – very slow. Musk describes it as a tiny straw trying to transfer information between our biological selves and our digital selves. If that straw can resemble something closer to a giant river, a huge interface with high bandwidth, the limitations melt away and a truly symbiotic relationship can take place.Solve the data rate problem and we hang on to human-machine symbiosis in the long term. This is the problem that Neuralink seeks to solve – and in doing so might well serve as a critical step in the next evolution of the human brain. Find out more about Neuralink: https://www.neuralink.com/Or get a great video download of Elon Musk’s views on human-AI symbiosis on the Joe Rogan Experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5pgAM26wuM&t=21s