Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Neuralink
http://www.physicscentral.com/explore/ac...ralink.cfm

EXCERPT: Elon Musk has described some of his ideas publicly. The premise for his latest company, Neuralink, is Musk’s concern that if artificial intelligence (AI) continues to grow at any rate, it will surpass human intelligence by a large amount. [...] Musk believes that one solution to this could involve humans interfacing with machines by adding a digital layer to our brains above the cerebral cortex. [...] The digital layer would not be surgically implanted, but might be injected into the blood stream, and layer itself atop the cortex...

MORE: http://www.physicscentral.com/explore/ac...ralink.cfm

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This chatbot will soon help you sue anyone (or take down corporations)
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/60941...ue-anyone/

EXCERPT: As a young programmer, Joshua Browder built a chatbot to act as a kind of AI lawyer that would help people dispute parking tickets. Not only did it work, but it was hugely popular, which led Browder to expand the program to help anyone harmed by the Equifax scandal sue the company in small claims court. Now his company, DoNotPay, is aiming even higher:  by the end of this year, Browder  plans to launch an addition to the platform that will you let you sue anyone.

“To be honest, Equifax was just a bit of testing for the product that would let anyone sue anyone,” Browder, one of 2017’s 35 Innovators under 35, said Wednesday at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech MIT conference. “The main use would be for taking down corporations.”

MORE: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/60941...ue-anyone/

(Nov 10, 2017 03:56 AM)C C Wrote: [ -> ]EXCERPT: Musk believes that one solution to this could involve humans interfacing with machines by adding a digital layer to our brains above the cerebral cortex.

That sounds like a computer-geek conceit to me.

The problem is that nobody is really sure how percepts, ideas, and memories are encoded and processed in the brain. It seems that the brain is an inconceivably complex neural network, that's trained (as opposed to programmed) to recognize things. It won't be easy to integrate our kind of electronics with something like that.

But that being said, this company may find a market with the US government. I believe that DARPA and people like that are funding research into these kind of areas.

I admire the way that Musk likes to set up shop at the outer limits of what is possible, but I don't expect this to come to fruition any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime. Our understanding of neuroscience will have to advance tremendously first.