The Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Lex Fridman

Thoughts on 8 possible long-term futures of Neuralink.

Neuralink might help alleviate human suffering.

Alleviating human suffering

The brain is the source of both physical and psychological pain.
Neuralink could possibly identify the signal going to the brain and interact with it.
We might be able to accelerate our understanding, treatment, and control of the internal environment of the mind.
The hope is that at the individual level you’ll be able to aid in the alleviation, in some degree, of all the sources of neurological suffering.

Neuralink could possibly allow people to save and replay memories. You would have the ability to modify, alter, or delete memories.
It’s basically converting our prior experiences into data, and once it’s converted into data, that could be used for all kinds of applications.
There’s also the possibility of saving mental states, which would be a form of digital immortality.
You can imagine being able to save the contents, or at least the critical contents, of your mind in digital form and then being able to transfer it to other systems.
You could then reload your content into a robotic or biological system

Neuralink will help scientists understand how the brain works at a functional level (memory, perception, cognition, etc.)
That information may help humans build better AI
It’s possible that it will inspire or instruct us on the engineering side of how to build smarter and smarter artificial intelligence systems.
Neuralink could also help us understand what is consciousness and where intelligence emerges

Sooner or later, humans will engineer systems that are far smarter than ourselves. Although this sounds great, it could backfire.
There might be a set of dimensions where an intelligent system is able to generalize better than humans in a set of tasks that can lead to existential risks for human beings.
The AI could see humans as a threat or competitor, whether directly or indirectly, and may try to destroy humans
One path humans to make sure the human race endures is to merge with AI
One way to ensure our survival is to expand the capacity of the human mind, to communicate with AI, and to use the AI to communicate with the human mind.

Neuralink will help people regain the ability to move parts of their body
It can also help people regain the ability to see by stimulating the visual cortex or even lead to superhuman level vision (ex: ability to see infrared light)
Neuralink could also augment reality and replace the need for smart glasses
We may use virtual reality headsets for now, but as technology improves, Neuralink could replace the need for such headsets
There’s also the possibility of creating virtual experiences that mimic the same experience people get some psychedelics

Neuralink has the possibility of enriching the communication bandwidth, by both quality and quantity, between two consenting human beings
Imagine communicating multi-dimensional mind maps when you’re trying to reason through a problem
You could also communicate creative ideas like art