As a self-proclaimed tech enthusiast and futurist (and a software engineer), I'm excited about breakthrough technologies that push the boundaries of our imagination. GPT-4, the next-gen language model by OpenAI, and Neuralink, the brain-machine interface company founded by Elon Musk, are two such technologies that have caught my attention. Let's explore their potential to revolutionize human capabilities and the ethical concerns that come with them.
🤖 GPT-4: The Language Model of the Future
GPT-4's multimodal capabilities are pushing the boundaries of natural language processing. It has scored over 90 percentile on the LSAT and wrote great code in no time. What blew my mind was that it could improve the code by pasting the documentation. It's nothing less than magical.
🧬 Neuralink: Enhancing Human Capabilities
Neuralink is working on developing brain-machine interfaces that could enhance human capabilities. The latest version of the company’s N1 chip is intended to be implanted in brains and spines to augment our capabilities. Neuralink’s electrodes can listen in on brain activity to interpret motor control signals. They've been testing their prototype in pigs and monkeys, and in another experiment, visual data captured with a camera was fed into a monkey’s visual cortex, showing it virtual flashes the monkey interpreted as being in different locations.
🧠 Augmenting Human Intelligence
By integrating AI directly into the brain, we can augment human intelligence beyond what we ever thought possible. We can offload certain tasks consciously into the brain accelerator, such as calculations and line of thought reasoning. It's possible to take the signal from a camera and feed the signal into our visual cortex, making us see things our eyes didn't pick up. We can inject a video into our brain or read what our eyes see and process and augment that with the help of AI. At that point, we will have offloaded 90% of our tasks to AI, and our human will will be amplified by orders of magnitude.
🤔 Ethical Concerns and Risks
As exciting as these technologies are, they come with ethical concerns and risks that need to be addressed. We must acknowledge the potential risks, such as loss of privacy and autonomy, and the need for safeguards to prevent misuse. As we offload more tasks to technology, we may lose agency and our thoughts and desires may be hacked and used to manipulate and control us. My biggest worry is that we might be able to control pain and grief. Pain is one of the greatest innovations evolution has brought on us and fundamentally defines us as an animal rather than just a reasoning engine.
✨ Conclusion
The combination of GPT-4 and Neuralink has the potential to revolutionize human capabilities and augment our intelligence beyond what we ever thought possible. However, we must also address the ethical concerns and risks that come with these technologies. As we move forward, it's important to have safeguards in place to prevent misuse and ensure that the benefits of these technologies are accessible to all. Let's all work towards harnessing the power of AI and BMI for the betterment of humanity.