Wait But Why

“Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future” by Tim Urban convinced me that neural laces and their development is feasible, probable and imminently worthwhile. It made it clear that visionaries like Musk seem like total lunatics unless you break problems down into their absolute atomic principles. His drawings are also really funny. He blows the brain up to the size of Madison Square Garden and shows that at this scale each cubic meter has 40,000 neurons in it, a complex system in itself that becomes near incomprehensible once you factor in the rest of the blown up cortex that would take half an hour to walk around. You get a sense for the immense difficulty and yet deterministic physics of the problem.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html

You do the work for the money, but you don't invest yourself in the work: you care about the people who love you back at home. In the end, the work (caveat edge cases) will be meaningless. You're converting time into fiat you need to pay for life. You can always make more money, time is non renewable.

"Today is your last day." "Meh, whatevs, going home to my family."

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html

https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Top_Five_Regrets_of_the_Dying

(20+ years in tech, have been laid off twice, fired once, aware none of it really matters, we're all dead eventually, a blip in the cosmic timeline)

> This notion of freezing ourselves into the future is pretty science-fiction, and it’s naive

Being actually really dead, with your body physically no longer existing, is truly final. You won't be conscious ever again. No exceptions. This, on the other hand, gives you a chance to live again. The chance might be tiny, but it's still non-zero, so it's still worth pursuing.

Tim Urban has a cool article about it: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html, I agree with most of his points, except "No one ever will ever ever want to live forever". Because everyone actually does want to live forever, they're just afraid to openly acknowledge it.

It reminds me of WaitButWhy. [1] The guy had some awesome and insightful writings that eventually culminated in a story about SpaceX and Elon Musk that went way beyond viral. Everything after that went sharply downhill and I think the main reason is that the newfound minor celebrity status really impaired his ability to just sit down and casually shit post without worrying so much about what everybody else would think.

It's quite ironic given this. [2] He simply needs to go mammoth hunting.

[1] - https://waitbutwhy.com/

[2] - https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html

Does anybody remember when Elon Musk said he created Neuralink because he was scared of AI and thought brain interfaces was the only way to mitigate that? (Amazing article on brain interfaces here: https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html)

He’s always been a bit crazy but there was a time when he seemed genuinely thoughtful and concerned about the future. Now he’s constantly trying to bait people and intentionally create division for the sake of PR. Maybe he’s bought into accelerationism, but whatever it is is a far cry from his “we should tread carefully” approach

Wait But Why says it best: AI is in the "ha ha look at the funny robot that can do monkey tricks" phase.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html (it's towards the end of the article)

Take a longer view. Google's AI slip ups are temporary and necessary when getting the product out, to be improved in the open. Tech companies did awkward stuff in the 90s and we loved it! It's cool that fail-in-the-open culture is back in!

Besides, the real search results are still shown. They are right there, below the AI slop.