Elon Musk Thinks Humans Should Merge With Machines to Confront Challenges of AI

Last week was one of the most rewarding periods I’ve experienced since I started writing publicly nearly five years ago. For the first time ever, I become so enthralled with a topic (Spiral Dynamics and the evolution of human consciousness), that I spent the entire week writing entirely about this one topic. In case you missed the series, I’ve provided links to all five posts below.

Lost in the Political Wilderness

What is Spiral Dynamics and Why Have I Become So Interested in It?

How a Breakdown in Liberal Ideology Created Trump – Part 1

How a Breakdown in Liberal Ideology Created Trump – Part 2

Why Increased Consciousness is the Only Path Forward

The revelations I came to as a result of my exploration into consciousness will stay with me forever, and hopefully color my future work with a deeper understanding and a more thoughtful, integral perspective. Today’s post will provide an unusual example of how one can apply the framework of human consciousness to one of our more pressing contemporary challenges.

To start, let’s examine some recent comments made by Elon Musk at the World Government Summit in the UAE.

ArsTechnica reports:

Humans must become cyborgs and develop a direct high-bandwidth connection with machines or risk irrelevance and obsolescence, says Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Musk’s latest cheery thoughts were imparted at the World Government Summit in the UAE. “Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence,” Musk said, according to CNBC.

The main thrust of Musk’s argument seems to hinge on the limited bandwidth and processing power of a single human being. Computers can ingest, transfer, and process gigabytes of data per second, every second, forever. Meatbags, however, are severely limited by an input/output rate—talking, typing, listening—that’s best measured in bits per second. Thus, avoid replacement by robot or artificial intelligence, we need to become machines.

By way of example, Musk spoke about self-driving cars, which will very soon start displacing jobs—lots and lots of jobs. “The most near term impact from a technology standpoint is autonomous cars … There are many people whose jobs are to drive. In fact I think it might be the single largest employer of people … We need to figure out new roles for what do those people do, but it will be very disruptive and very quick.”

Autonomous vehicles are perhaps the most visible prominence when it comes to recent developments in AI, but rest assured (or not) that we aren’t even close to AI’s capability ceiling. Current deployments of AI are quite limited in that they can only perform one or two tasks adequately—drive a car, lift a piece of steel, flip a burger—but AI research is slowly bubbling towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), which can ostensibly perform every task that a human is capable of.

Once that happens, it’s fairly safe to assume that AGI will continue to improve until, in the words of Elon Musk, it is “smarter than the smartest human on earth.”

As for how humans might achieve silicon symbiosis, the jury’s still out. Musk, according to CNBC, proposed a brain-attached high-bandwidth computer link, perhaps via neural lace. Low-speed and low-resolution EEG-based brain-computer interfaces already exist, of course, but I doubt that’s what Musk has in mind. In all likelihood, we will need to massively improve our understanding of the human brain before any such interface can be created.

Musk has been one of the individuals at the forefront of warning about the threats of artificial intelligence (AI) for a very long time, but it appears the thrust of his most recent comments center around concerns that a rapid increase in technology applied to the economy will result in a massive wave of job losses. This seems plausible to me, and I’ve called attention to it in the past. For example, in the 2015 post, Chinese Company Moves to Replace 90% of its Workforce with Robots, I wrote:

I’m not one of those people who thinks robots taking over menial labor from human employees is a bad thing. On the contrary, I think such a displacement could ultimately prove very positive for the species. Nevertheless, the short-term pain and suffering that this could cause for displaced workers and their families likely will have tremendous negative repercussions to the societies that are most affected in the near and intermediate-term.

Since robots entering the workforce is probably one of the most significant economic trends in the decades ahead, we should all start thinking about how to deal with what will be a major adjustment for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people.

I don’t discount for a moment the challenges of technology’s rapid advancement on the world economy, which I agree is in the very early stages. It’s going to take some real deep thought and reflection to deal with the ramifications of such changes so we can harness the potential of such technology, as opposed to becoming slaves to it. In that sense, I agree with Musk, but his conclusion that we must become more like machines in order to compete with them is in my opinion represents an extremely unwise, unconscious and reactionary response. As I summarized the situation earlier today on Twitter:

Now, if you think human beings are nothing more than sophisticated machines, then Musk’s solution seems not only rational, but necessary. On the other hand, if you’re like me and see the human being as something beyond a complex biological machine, his solution sounds a lot like destroying ourselves in a race to compete with robots. Doesn’t really make much sense and, in fact, reminds me of the insanity of our societal response to the 9/11 attacks, where we’ve demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice our freedoms in order to protect our freedoms.

The forthcoming takeover of menial tasks by machines should not merely be seen as an enormous challenge, but as an enormous opportunity as well. What we learned last week about human consciousness, is that the overall stress of a human being’s environment plays a direct role in his or her opportunity to attain higher levels of consciousness. In other words, people living in a state of abject poverty and misery, will find it far for difficult to transcend. With survival being the overriding priority, it often becomes necessary to embrace lower states of consciousness to achieve this end.

As such, if we are actually close to a world where machines can complete all sorts of menial tasks for us, it could actually open up a world where more of us could be free to pursue all sorts of other avenues of the human experience. To quote John Adams:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

In other words, if we embrace the forthcoming leaps in technology and figure out solutions to them in a conscious manner, it could actually be the best thing that has ever happened to humans on this planet. Many of us could find ourselves living in an environment where we can for the first time truly explore the furthest reaches of consciousness and contemplate the mysteries of the universe. That’s not to say this will be easy. I have yet to see examples of how we can best transition from the world we inhabit, to the one that is coming, in a way that will provide the best environment for the largest number of people. It will take some serious second-tier thinking to grapple with this, so that our solution transcends the problem and pushes the species forward, as opposed to foolishly accepting a solution that ends up being worse than the problem.

If we decide to turn ourselves into machines in order to compete with machines, we will lose so much of what makes us human beings in the first. Too much, in my opinion.

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In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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8 thoughts on “Elon Musk Thinks Humans Should Merge With Machines to Confront Challenges of AI”

  1. Musk is absolutely dead wrong about the input rate of the human mind.
    The human mind collects data from all five senses… simultaneously. Consider the amount of data the human mind collects in a single second.
    It assimilates that data real-time. It does so with ZERO programming.
    Even AGI lacks the versatility and dynamism of the human mind.

    But none of that is even relevant when you consider creativity and imagination… holy shit, man.

    What could a human mind come up with IN ONE HOUR if it could seamlessly interface with a microprocessor and access the internet… take a thought and run with it at the speed of an i7 processor while instantaneously accessing the sum of human knowledge?

    After about 30 minutes, I think every human being on the planet would receive a telepathic emotion that said:

    “Hey friend, I love you. We’re all gonna be just fine. More to follow.”

    Reply
    • Humans are NOT just their mind, their actual hearts have almost as many neurons as the brain….. a robot will never have compassion for anything ever. Until a robot can feel, humans will always be better. AI cannot replace, for example, mothers……because love is what makes babies thrive. It makes children learn. Same with animals too. It is not just a stimulus – response world…..

  2. musks’ pronunciations and hyperloop nonsense are a sign of the times and will certainly be looked back with typical rolling eyes . he has also said we likely live in a hologram simulation.

    his so called giga factory is not giga. and even if it may one day be fully built, it will likely never be as profiteable as he has planned, if at all. his goals of fully automating production are not realistic. his success had been largely enabled by goldman as a stock scam using his companies stories. solarcity would have already declared bankruptcy had he not used tesla to buy it, despite the massive conflict of interest/ illegality of the deal.

    musk says a lot of stuff because he likes ot talk alot. but plenty of scifi dodos do, only he has money and goldman sachs sponsored tax credit success ( tesla is a loser) that no scifi yokels do.

    so he is best simply ignored. sure as the earth spins, musk’s pronunciations will be forgotten or scorned with the next financial retraction. as will the general welfare of any dedicated electric car only car companies worth 45 billion (better hybrids are the future of transport not electric only cars) total bubblicious nonsense can last longer than people expect but it still doesn’t change the industrial and scifi as nonsense realities of our situation.

    musk has also claimed his cars would all be self driving. they won’t everyone knows this and accepts they own’t be fully self driving in the next couple years, and yet musk has yet to apologize or walk back any of his foolish pronunciations.

    more important to issues of liberty than musks predictions..,, is the ouster of flyyn…………

    here is a more interesting take on trump being targeted by the cia succesfully with flynns ouster. http://theweek.com/articles/680068/americas-spies-anonymously-took-down-michael-flynn-that-deeply-worrying

    are the neocons counting this as a win? hillary’s pizzagate tweet seems to confirm that as a yes.

    this is trump’s first real loss. rather than the court fiasco. his inner circle has been penetrated by the shadow state cia people. the question is , does trump fight back? or does he just roll over dead. or worse, does he think he is trying to fight back, but he’s to dumb to realize he isn’t………

    trump isn’t jfk it seems……..

    Reply
  3. Yes, a lot of this AI hysteria is daft, even if it’s true, Ill willingly let them win…

    Economically, the problem certainly isn’t the machines, it is faulty economics, illogical ideas, lack of insight and imagination, where the tail is wagging the dog, so to speak..

    We have inside out ‘debt vision’, an imagination where everything is cost, where positive things inflict damage.. In reality everything is surplus, machines doing menial tasks is pure gold

    The problem is we seem to have no way to aggregate these forms of wealth to share out as surplus, they are initiated in an atomised manner consistent with self cannibalising neo liberal economics

    Reply
  4. Alan Watts, a highly entertaining, wise and insightful spirtual philosopher from the 60’s spoke of very interestingly of machines and economics.. I think it’s in this video, it’s also an excellent enlightening logical and psychological breakdown of money in general

    Money, Guilt and the Machine

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ryBUYB3F0NU

    Reply

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