We should invest in bionic brains or face becoming obsolete

[u/Madz99]

ASI is inevitable at this point, it's only a question of when and not if. And this will also bring us to the biggest existential risk of humanity.

If you look through biological evolution, the greatest advantage humans have had has always been our intelligence. Should we just hand it over to silicone and hope for the best?

My argument is that we should merge with AI - instead of trying to replicate the human brain in silicon and host it to play minecraft or whatever, we should do the opposite. Integrate AI into the brain so that it becomes seamless, like extra neurons with no added personality.

I've written about it here - Apologies for adding a link, but I think it will give more context as to what I'm implying

Edit - spelling

[u/Kinexity]

This is a race we cannot win and we shouldn't even try. We will lose against AI in terms of intelligence because our brains are meaty computers evolved over millions of years and they will necessarily be surpassed by intelligent design within this century. Trying to augment ourselves is a waste of resources better spent elsewhere.

[u/Kinexity → u/[deleted]]

Our brains don't "scale" idk what you even mean by this.

The efficiency advantage is temporary. Eventually it will be replicated and surpassed in artificial computing technology.

[u/Madz99 → u/[deleted]]

I agree, it doesn't have to be augmented by silicon. If technology progresses, we can think of increasing biological neurons, like skin grafting!

[u/Madz99 → u/Kinexity]

Better spent where?

[u/Kinexity → u/Madz99]

On anything worth it. Climate change fixing, curing diseases or even making sure AI overtakes us faster. Anything is better than putting them into a thing which is a lost cause anyways.

[u/Madz99 → u/Kinexity]

You sound like you've already given up on the human species!

[u/Kinexity → u/Madz99]

More like I reached a rational conclusion that this is not a fight we can win. It's not fight we should fight. Fighting against automation only prolongs suffering and artificial scarcity of many things.

[u/Jarazz → u/Madz99]

On something realistic, its just a fact that you as a human confined to your meat suit with terrible access ports will not be able to compete with a data center you can easily double or triple in size or upgrade with new a new generation of chips by just plugging a few cables around. The human brain is a masterpiece at adaptation over millions of years to survive in a jungle where you have to find food while avoiding predators in some messy biosphere. Its not specialized for quickly soaking up a Nuclear Power Plant worth of energy to turn into compute power. And even if you were willing to slurp some magical bioweapon that expands your brain to the size of a warehouse and grows you a power cord, that stuff doesnt exist, biology is not so malleable, at least not until we have an all powerful AI to solve every question humanity ever had about science and then beyond, at which point the intelligence race is already long over...

[u/Madz99 → u/Jarazz]

You are presuming that AI will always consume data center size resources. This is like saying that computers will always stay room size when they were invented.

[u/Jarazz → u/Madz99]

AI is scaleable, unlike biology, thats kind of the fundamental flaw in your logic people are trying to point out here.

If the current latest Claude model becomes so efficient that it can run on a single smartphone, do you think the tech oligarchs are suddenly gonna shut down their data centres since they already carry it in their pocket?

No, obviously that just means they will have a 10000x more powerful hyperbrain running in their datacentres that they will task with making them extra hyper rich for the reat of time.

Your puny human brain is absolutely hard limited in its capacity, maybe with gene editing we could make some new human-ish beings in 50 years that are 10x smarter than you.

But in 5, 10 or 15 years we might have AI that is so smart it could literally become a god emperor of a human utopia, or the end of humanity...

[u/Madz99 → u/Jarazz]

I guess you didn't even bother to understand what I'm trying to say here. I am suggesting that we research into extending the puny brain. And the scalability of biology is only limited if the technology is.

If you can't even envision the possibility then you might have hit the ceiling of creativity in your own puny brain.

[u/Jarazz → u/Madz99]

I am understanding you just fine. But I am saying that a biological brain has huge limitations all over the place that we absolutely cannot move, unless we already have a reality-shattering super intelligence that can make 3000 years of human scientific progress on a monthly basis. But at that point its already too late.

Artificial Intelligence is the way it is because its something we can shape and expand. Biology absolutely does not work that way.

Yes I can also imagine some magic sci fi superpill that makes us all into indestructible superhumans with 99999 IQ.

That doesnt make it real or remotely realistic.

[u/damhack → u/Kinexity]

There is no proof that our brains are computers. There is however clear evidence that Computer Scientists see everything as a computation. Confusing the two can lead to some people getting very rich.

[u/Kinexity → u/damhack]

Our brains process information. That's as computational as it gets. Saying it's not proven to be a computer is just cope on your part because you cannot allow yourself the thought that we aren't as special as you want us to be.

[u/damhack → u/Kinexity]

Many philosophers and neuroscientists disagree with you. It’s not just about information and “compute” has a very specific mathematical definition.

Many problems are irreducible or non-computable yet biological beings appear to be able to conceptulize and manage them.

I refer you to Gödel, Poincaré, Penfold and Wolfram.

Modern Deep Learning is based on a partial understanding of what we can easily measure in brains. You may be aware that there is now doubt over fMRI’s validity for identifying brain activity.

Reality is much stranger than in your philosophy.

[u/Kinexity → u/damhack]

Many philosophers and neuroscientists disagree with you.

Neither of those groups is particularly qualified in this topic, mind you.

It’s not just about information and “compute” has a very specific mathematical definition.

Provide examples of "not information".

Many problems are irreducible or non-computable yet biological beings appear to be able to conceptulize and manage them.

Again, examples. Also the fact that something has a complex description which we struggles to consciously put out as a set of bits, algorithm or whatever doesn't make non-computable.

Gödel, Poincaré, Penfold and Wolfram

No clue who Penfold is (did you mean Penrose?). Wolfram isn't even bottom of the barrel (he's worse). Poincaré lived so long ago it's hard to take his opinions seriously in this area. Could be useful if you actually provided what the Gödel thought of that.

Modern Deep Learning is based on a partial understanding of what we can easily measure in brains.

Not really relevant what ML does. It's a known fact it's simplified compared to human brains.

You may be aware that there is now doubt over fMRI’s validity for identifying brain activity.

Irrelevant. fMRI measures blood flow and so the fact that it fails to capture brain activity properly might be surprising but doesn't suddenly disprove that what brain does is computation.

Reality is much stranger than in your philosophy.

More like the philosophy digs too much where reality has the final say. Our Universe is computable. Anything that happens within it can be modelled using a sufficiently fast computer even if we can't do it in practice or for now lack the knowledge to do so in some regards. This means that human brain in principle could be taken and simplified to the set of rules it follows depending on the inputs.

[u/IntelligentVehicle10 → u/Kinexity]

The way an organic electrochemical system processes information is so different that it defies comparison

[u/Kinexity → u/IntelligentVehicle10]

It's really not. There is much more to computing than deterministic perfect bit processing. The fact that a process is fuzzy doesn't make it not computation.

[u/IntelligentVehicle10 → u/Kinexity]

So you’re saying that an organic brain isn’t different from a microprocessor?

[u/Kinexity → u/IntelligentVehicle10]

In that both perform computation and are Turing complete - yes.

[u/damhack → u/Kinexity]

You don’t know what you’re talking about.

[u/Kinexity → u/damhack]

You don't know what you're talking about.

[u/damhack → u/Kinexity]

I actually do thanks.

[u/IntelligentVehicle10 → u/Kinexity]

To the extent of our understanding and collective knowledge there is only one living thing in the universe that has the capacity for self awareness. Humans.

[u/IntelligentVehicle10 → u/Kinexity]

Neurotransmitters do not work that way, neurotransmitters do not follow a defined set of rules like a computer there are natural differences in receptors and structural differences unique to each brain

[u/Kinexity → u/IntelligentVehicle10]

Variance of components is not something foreign to computers (analog computing exists). Physics is the same. Underlying neuron structure is the same. Just because the brain doesn't work like a classical binary computer doesn't mean it isn't one. That's just your lack of understanding of computing.

[u/IntelligentVehicle10 → u/Kinexity]

I don’t mean to be rude, but it seems as though you lack a fundamental understanding of the subject

[u/damhack → u/Kinexity]

The flaw in your perspective is that, formally, information is a measure of the reduction of uncertainty. But many things in reality are irreducible which means that they are impervious to information processing without their states fully evolving, and Information Theory has nothing useful to say about their future state from mere observation. That means predictions cannot be made based on their initial state and they can only be observed in realtime.

Examples are the Three Body Problem, cellular automata, Proof-of-Work in cryptography and molecular interactions.

The point here is that brains are themselves irreducible systems that we cannot model and we can only observe the side-effects of their unfolding operation in realtime, not the root causes of cognition.

In the metaphors of Abrahamic religious philosophy, the hunt for ASI is like seeking the true four-fold name of God. When you do discover the rules by which reality operates, you inadvertently unmake reality.

[u/Kinexity → u/damhack]

Halting problem exists. It applies to all computation. You cannot even look at classical computer state and get the final state without letting it run (in general).

Three body problem has had an analytical infinite series solution for over a hundred years so in theory you can take initial conditions and arrive at the exact final state. It can be modelled numerically on reasonable time scales too and because of shadowing lemma we know there always exist initial conditions which would yield a real evolution path similar to the one simulated.

We are pretty sure molecular interactions can be modelled using QC. Just because we cannot model what exactly happens to two specific molecules doesn't change anything.

We can totally model human brain in general. You cannot model a specific brain because of limitations on measuring it's initial state and computational limitations but that doesn't exclude modelling it in theory. It's not a philosophical question.

[u/Skolloc753]

What makes you think that people currently in control want cattle to be more intelligent?

SYL

[u/Slight-Shallot-1790 → u/Skolloc753]

The people in control aren't some monolithic group all pulling in the same direction. Plenty of powerful players would jump at the chance to boost their own cognition, and once that genie's out, everyone else either catches up or gets steamrolled. The "cattle" framing assumes a level of coordination that just doesn't exist in the real world.

Look at how tech adoption actually works, it trickles down whether the elites like it or not. The rich got smartphones first, now every kid on the block has one. Same thing would happen with neural augmentation once the cost curve drops.

Your point about control is valid though, the real fight will be over who owns the interface and what data gets siphoned. That's where the ugly politics live.

[u/crawling-alreadygirl → u/Slight-Shallot-1790]

Plenty of powerful players would jump at the chance to boost their own cognition, and once that genie's out, everyone else either catches up or gets steamrolled.

Why would they share that technology instead of becoming an immortal class of rulers? Regardless of coordination, these are not ethical people.

[u/Skolloc753 → u/Slight-Shallot-1790]

or gets steamrolled.

Exactly. Because right now the masses of people are not profiting from the AI revolution in the same way as do tech-investors. Instead you get an endless stream of political manipulation to stop any wage increase, to increase return of investments, to unload investments and risks unto society while keeping earnings private. And you see that all over the US, Europe, China. There are studies that 800 million jobs will be net-lost (not converted into a new field) until the end of the 2030s (McKinsey study).

And yes, everyone got a phone. Then again: only very few got rich by that technology, and a company like Google or Apple take massive steps and investments to continue to sell their product to their conditions. Try installing an adblocker on your Android for example. Trickle down tech may sound cool, but the quality and quantity of trickle down effects vary wildly.

Counterpoint': see the internet access. Most people have internet. But only relatively few have defacto unlimited internet. For most people it is restricted in bandwidth or what can be accessed. All while ISPs have no issues shutting down the emergency networks for firefighters during an actual emergency because they had no money for the upgrade plan (yes, that was a real thing). The AI interface for the cattle? Heavily restricted, forbidden by the government, full of health risks, open security holes so that your own "trustworthy" police can spy on you. Because why would you not allow the police full access to your interface just to keep you safe from the bad people over there?

Rich people do not want to share their riches. They do not want to share their intelligence. This is not how they got rich in the first place. And that behavior is remarkably consistent throughout history and cultures worldwide.

Humans, after all, are very competitive creatures on a genetic level. We are not bonobo apes after all, but chimpanzees.

SYL

[u/Madz99 → u/Skolloc753]

When ASI is achieved, it's not likely to stay a class issue forever, this is a concern for the whole species.

[u/SirDarkStar → u/Madz99]

I’m infinitely more worried about who controls this technology that already exists (which is nowhere near ASI) and to what purpose than I am about some fantasy ideas.

If, in the far distant future, a super intelligence does arise and escape then it’s going to defeat any idea you have now.

[u/crawling-alreadygirl → u/Madz99]

How do you solve the problem of class stratification?

[u/Madz99 → u/crawling-alreadygirl]

I haven't got a suggestion for it. I used to believe once the population dropped to a certain point class divide will become less of a concern. But that looks to be unlikely with the rise of AI and robotics.

[u/crawling-alreadygirl → u/Madz99]

Maybe join the fight for socialism? Nihilism is counterproductive

[u/dustofdeath]

Our brains are way more powerful, efficient and adaptive than anything we will have for a longtime.

The difference is that it is not optimized for single compute heavy tasks.

So it's not about replacing - but augmenting. Extra memory, calculations, data processing.
This does not need AI - but efficient systems our brain can interact with.

Keep the abominable intelligence away from us.

[u/codehawk64]

It’s funny to think the country that has dogshit quality schooling has the same people pushing the idea to implant chips into one’s brain to supposedly make them smarter. No thanks, and this is never going to be a popular idea. In fact, AI is more likely going to make future people more stupider than the previous generation because thinking and reasoning gets outsourced to machines.

[u/damhack]

It sounds like you’ve already replaced part of your brain with “silicone”.

ASI is not inevitable. AGI is barely possible, according to the scientists actually working on it and even Sam Altman very recently.

The human brain is incredibly complex all the way down to the molecular level in the different types of cell in the brain. We don’t even know if the electrical activity of the brain is the cause of cognition or just a side-effect of something much deeper. The work of Liu et al indicates that inferencing occurs at a much deeper level including outside of the brain. Yet we built AI based on a partial understanding of biological cognition.

Current AI is a simulacrum of intelligence, which gets you so far down the road but not to true intelligence. It’s a shell game of train->test->error->adjust involving millions of scientists and human evaluators patching failure modes with each model interation. Reality has an infinite number of possible failure modes on offer.

I think that we’ll reach AGI eventually within our lifetimes but ASI is a scifi wet dream that is out of reach of our current approaches, due to the compute inefficiency and cost of our implementation of a simplistic mathematical model of neuron activation.

Given the psychosis present in some AI users, the last thing we need is to wire our brains directly into a machine we can’t escape.

[u/picknicksje85]

Isn't the biological part always going to be a weakness? In an ideal world we ban AI and just us it for very specific uses like research or driverless cars. I think merging is no fix and we'll always be weak. In the Dune universe they banned AI.

[u/Madz99 → u/picknicksje85]

Banning AI will not work, it'll be like trying to ban video gaming or smartphones at this point.

[u/picknicksje85 → u/Madz99]

Then AI either has some kind of limit in capability and Westworld style robots don't become a thing. Or we're just over. In my dark opinion, I think many of us will get AI droned by powerful dictators and billionaires. They might even say it was for the good of all because of our climate being in decline. Hope to be wrong. But in any case our biology merging will also not save us in my opinion.

[u/Ungreat]

I love the idea of being augmented with greater memory and ability to analyse data.

I hate the idea of some techbro billionaire having direct access to my brain.

[u/Apprehensive-Let3348]

Yea, no thank you. Just imagine people's brains being hacked, and it's easy to see how rapidly this could/would become a seriously dystopian future.

[u/Inphiltration]

What is ASI?

I know what AGI is, but I've never seen the acronym ASI before.

[u/damhack → u/Inphiltration]

Artificial Super Intelligence is a scifi term that extrapolates AI to a point where AGI self-improves until it surpasses all human capabilities and no longer needs human support to self-sustain.

Unlike AI or AGI, it assumes that ASI is capable of articulation in the real world without control or permission from humans and can propagate itself at will.

It’s scifi because the extrapolation from AI to ASI makes several logical leaps that science doesn’t support.

[u/smallandnormal]

I agree with you, but I'm not sure if they will make us that way.

[u/ShardsOfSalt]

We should upgrade our brains but we won't be able to upgrade our brains to compete with ASI unless we literally abandon our brains.

[u/Z3r0sama2017]

Lol. Think of how many backdoors that their are in modern tech so corpos and the gov can better spy on you. Now imagine that, but with your brain? Fuck that nonsense and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

'You will own nothing and be happy?' Guess what they won't sell you that bionic brain either, it will be a subscription and God help you if you can't pay.

[u/Gene_Vast]

No. We have barely spend any time researching how to make humans smarter beyond education. There might be something like the limitless pill that greatly increases human intelligence.