Elon Musk will live a thousand lifetimes in the next 40 years

This blog post is meant to describe a potential application of the technology under development at Neuralink which could represent the most ground-breaking achievement in humanity’s history to date.

About Neuralink

With recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and Automation, we can foresee a time in the future where humans may no longer be competitive on the job market. Machines are already better than humans at many tasks, more and more tasks will be automated, and if ever an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) system is built, it could mean that all jobs will transition to be performed by machines.

Google claim to have created some sort of AGI with AlphaGo, but the reality is that true AGI’s still has yet to see the light of day, regardless it can be anticipated that it will eventually happen, wether it is in 10 years or 500 years. This eventuality triggered many people to fear that human beings will be left behind and led Elon Musk to commit $100M to Neuralink. Neuralink aim to build high throughput Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) to merge AI and human, enabling us to rival AI automation technologies by becoming superhuman cyborg.

Digital Copy of Memories

The interesting part of the Neuralink technology is that it could eventually reach a level of maturity where our entire memories can be accurately saved and accessed digitally outside our brain. It would then be possible to simulate our cognitive capabilities without our focused mind paying attention to a task. For example, the computer could use our memories and simulate the way we utilize them to perform actions such that we could work while we sleep without any mental effort.

Working while you sleep

Armed with the capacity to perform task digitally without our attention, it would be possible to simply clone this digital entity of ourselves a 1000 times and running various tasks in parallel. While the cost of operation could be great, it would be primarily focused on work-related activities to generate income. It is like having an assistant, except in this case the assistant has all your memories and simulate exactly the way you would do things.

Additionally, the work done digitally without your attention could even be re-incorporated in your brain, such that the memories would be available to recover, it would be like living multiple lives at once and remembering them all. “What have you done yesterday? … around 1PM I was programming a new app, negotiated a contract with a client, sold my house, gave a talk at a conference, spent the day on the beach, learned Tae Kwon Do and read a book!!”. You would not have the burden of doing the task, but you would be able to recall it whenever a sensory pattern would trigger the memory to emerge.

Shedding your Biological Shell

If the possibility of living multiple lives at once doesn’t get you excited, consider that this would even enable us to entirely shed our frail biological shell to become immortal digital representation of ourselves. Overall, if the memories (data) stored in our brain is the fuel used to train an Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), we can feel a lot better that this ASI will share our human values… at least of the person it is simulated on.

Collective Intelligence

The next step could be to digitally link multiple minds together forming the equivalent of a collective consciousness as represented in Star Trek with the Borg collective. Human communication is currently limited in part by the speed of muscle contraction mediating our voice. With a way for two minds to communicate without our voice, hearing, and eyesight, we could achieve much higher throughput of communication and reach the clarity of seeing through someone’s eyes. This is a super exciting concept to think about when considering the work currently under development.

Conclusion

In Today’s market, it is very exciting and motivating to see individuals striving to bring humanity closer into the future. There are too much brain power spent on trying to sell products to people who don’t need them, so I applaud the dedication of anyone working on ground-breaking technologies such as Neuralink.