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Punoxysm comments on A Visualization of Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence - Less Wrong
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This strikes me as slightly surprising. From a technological standpoint, I would have thought that a hybrid of biological and machine intelligence would be likely to have the best aspects of each, by which I mean the best aspects at the time at which the BCI is created, rather than trying to posit that biological intelligence has any fundamental advantage that sufficiently advanced computers can never overcome. A fairly close analogy is how teams of a competent chessplayer and a laptop chess program can beat both the best humans and computers with far more processing power.
Admittedly I don't know much about BCI technology, but I have heard promising things about optogenetics. Having to undergo brain surgery is a problem, but the extent of this problem seems to depend upon to what extent the interface needs to penetrate into the brain rather than just overlying the surface. If bootstrapping to greater levels of intelligence required repeated surgery to install better BCIs then this might be problematic, but intelligence gains could also be realised by working on the software, or adding more hardware, or adding more people to a swarm intelligence.
Of course, in the end it would transition to a fully or mostly machine intelligence, either through offloading increasingly more cognition to the machine components until the organic brains were only a tiny fraction of the mind, or though using the increased intelligence to develop FAI/WBE. But that doesn't make BCI a dead end, so much as a transnational stage.
Finally, in the last few years, Moore's law has started to show signs of slowing, and this should cause one to update in favour of BCI coming first, as it is probably the path least dependent upon raw computing power (unless de novo AI turns out to be far more computationally efficient than the brain).
As far as social constraints go, I don't think it would be all that hard to find volunteers, and in fact there is a natural progression from treatment of blindness, mental illnesses and so forth through to transhumanism. Legal challenges are perhaps a more likely problem, but as previously mentioned, medical use will likely provide the precedent to grandfather it in.
Note I'm not saying that this is necessary a desirable path - FAI is preferable - I'm arguing it seems at least somewhat plausible to come first. Having said that, in the event that progress on FAI is slower and other existential threats loom, than BCI could perhaps be a sensible backup plan.
We have already entered the transitional phase of BCI via the keyboard and mouse, and now touchscreen.
I'm not just being a smartass. The momentum is on BCI's side; It's not hard to imagine an externally wearable device that you could query with a thought which would then return an answer to you of a higher quality than the best search or question answering today. Tightening information and feedback loops provides large cognitive boost; surgical methods would just be a bonus.
True - in fact, this has been going on since the invention of the printing press. But I think we've exhausted all the low-hanging fruit here, in that we already have access to all the public domain knowlage of humanity at our fingertips, including crude automatic translations of other languages and tools like Siri or Wolfram alpha.
But it's not easily usable, and really it's only for general-domain knowledge or certain types of broadly available statistics. Consider the difference between having to search on a given topic and having a subject matter expert on that topic on the phone, (especially pretty academic or locally-specific ones that have poorer search results). That's a gap yet to be bridged just by conventional search technology.
Ahh, you're talking about expert systems. I agree that this does hold a lot of potential - in fact in a related tangent I've been spending a lot of time coding some machine learning algorithms, and I can safely say that in their target domain not only are these algos a lot better at inference then I am, but given certain shortcomings that I have not (yet) been able to tackle, the combination of myself and the algos is significantly better than either of us in isolation.
So in a way, I'm already a cyborg, and in this specific case I don't think a simple BCI would improve matter much. A full coding cortex OTOH...
Expert Systems suggests a particular set of ideas and functions, and brings to mind software made int he 1980's that often failed to live up to expectations. I do mean something similar to that, admittedly, but bringing in the best design and information retrieval ideas developed in the 30 years since then.
And yes, when predictions are being made, combining different predictors almost always yields superior results. Another natural "cyborg" area.
Let's not forget that this is fundamentally an economic question and not just a technological one. "The vast majority of R&D has been conducted by private industry, which performed 70.5 percent ($282.4 billion) of all R&D in 2009." -http://bit.ly/1meroFB (a great study of R&D since WW2). It's true that any of the channels towards strong AI would have abundant applications to sustain them in the marketplace, but BCI is special because it can ride the wave of virtualization technologies that humans are virtually guaranteed to adopt (see what I did there :). I'm talking about fully immersive virtual reality. The applications for military, business, educational training and entertainment of a high efficacy BCI are truly awe inspiring and could create a substantial economic engine.
And then there are the research benefits. You've already put BCI on the spectrum of interfacing technologies which arguably started with the printing press, but BCI could actually be conceived as the upper limit of this spectrum. As high-bandwidth BCI is approached a concurrent task is pre-processing information to improve signal, expert systems are one way of achieving this. The dawn of "Big Data" is spurring more intensive machine learning research and companies like Aysasdi are figuring out techniques like topological data analysis to not only extract meaning from high dimensional data sets, but to render them visually intuitive - this is where the crux of BMI lies.
Imagine full virtual realities in which all of the sensory data being fed into your brain is actually real-world data which has been algorithmically pre-processed to represent some real world problem. For example, novel models could be extracted in real time from a physicists brain as she thinks of them (even before awareness). These models would be immediately simulated all around her, projected through time, and compared to previous models. It is even possible that the abstract symbology of mathematics and language could be made obsolete, though I doubt it.
Betting on such a scenario requires no real paradigm shift, only a continuation of current trends. Thus I am in favor of the "BCI as a transitional technology" hypothesis.