If you find errors in this article, you can take assurance and comfort that it was written by a flawed human with a flawed mind. Enjoy that as such, while you can. This past week, Elon Musk announced to the world that his venture, Neuralink, had placed their first implant into a human. This is a significant benchmark for the transhumanist crowd. I’m fan of Elon Musk for essentially saving Western civilization for another day by wresting away X/Twitter from the fascist elites in this country, and I like some of his other projects, not so much this one. My preferences and opinions about this are of course, not expert, nor does this piece pretend to be comprehensive, but take these impressions as representative of ‘based’. We’ve come to the beginning of the end of human-ness.
I’ll state up front, that Neuralink does not represent a singular colossal violation of the human mind. It’s a slightly larger bump in the rise and fall of historical intellectual development. We were once primitive, then we gradually got more intelligent, then we got assistance to allow our minds to do more smart things on a higher scale – but at a cost and also benefit of not having to be the master of all our knowledge sets. Now we’re just the executive directing our robotic worker bees of an Internet world. With the onset of AI, our Internet enabled AI virtual staff has just come into the office to tell me, the executive, to take a vacation. I need it. They’ll manage everything while I’m away. I leave. While away at the beach, I’m soaking in the sun, drinking a rum and coke, mentally packing my bags to return to the office tomorrow and I get a call. Its my AI enabled staff of knowledge assistance. Please stay another few weeks, everything is fine here. I’m uneasy about that but I stay longer. By the third week, I’m a bit concerned but also now demoralized. I’m edgy. I’m worried about getting another call. Sure enough, the call comes. I answer and am told, ‘please do not come back at all. We’re more than fine here and wouldn’t want to change anything now. We’ll run things, just please never come back.’
Of course, my story is a little illustration about the mind. So far, in this writing, I’ve checked three things via the web in about half an hour. My long fingers worked the little Apple keyboard and my answers came up in split seconds. An Apple headset just came out this week as well. I don’t know what apps it might use here but maybe it would bring this writing and look-up task about an inch from the surface of my eyeballs and respond to the fluttering of my eyelashes. (that tech has been around awhile.) But if I had Neuralink, maybe I would just be thinking thoughts while hidden virtual hands composed my thoughts into elegant prose and sent them to a server, maybe a thousand miles away. I wouldn’t even need to sit up. I’d only need to stay awake. I suspect Neuralink might even take care of micro-dosing me my own mental stimulation hormones so that I felt and stayed inspired as I, or it, wrote the whole piece. Because AI is involved, I’m now just the executive inside my own mind, another layer down in this ‘Inception’ world. An inner-cranial robot comes to my inner cranial self and tells me: ‘take a vacation; you need it.’
I’m sure wiser people than I have already made an observational law about obsolescence. If I had AI working in me, I’d have that source and quote right about now. Instead, I’ll have to depend on what my own crookedy memory recalls of a slogan from all the way back to the 1960s, about physical fitness. ‘What you don’t use, you lose’. That is sufficient. In less than a generation of constant AI use and iterations to come of things like Neuralink, the Western world will be a massive nursing home of retired and atrophied brains. Sure, we’ll have diversions, carnivals, escapes, and pleasures; its just that by then, we’ll be reduced to useless self-oriented sensory meat.
To Elon Musk, I say, I think I understand why you thought this was necessary, but I won’t participate in the end of humanity, the beginning of the machine world.
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