Pigs in cyberspace: Neuralink and the noosphere
Hans Moravec’s essay “Pigs in Cyberspace,” published in “Extropy” (1993) and republished in “The Transhumanist Reader” (2013), is an extropian classic.
In his Neuralink update, live streamed and published on YouTube on August 28, Elon Musk has shown pigs in cyberspace. The star of Musk’s presentation was a pig named Grutrude, outfitted with Neuralink’s brain implant. CNN reports:
“Musk unveiled three not-so-little pigs: one that did not have an implant from his brain-computer interface company, Neuralink; one that had been implanted in the past; and Gertrude, who currently has a prototype of the device.
Gertrude shuffled around her pen, sniffing the ground and eating, while loud beeps and blips filled the air and a display showed real-time spikes in her brain activity. Musk explained that Gertrude had the implant inserted in her head two months before, and that it connected to neurons in her snout. When she touched something with her snout, it sent out neural spikes that were detected by the more than 1,000 electrodes in the implant.”
Watch Musk’s presentation:
By the end of the 2020s, I wrote in 2013, “we may have our iPhones implanted in our brains and become a telepathic species. Ramez Naam’s great sci-fi novel NEXUS is a fascinating preview… After the ‘magic decades’ of the 60s (space) and 90s (Internet), all seems to indicate that the next decade, the 20s, will be the magic decade of the brain, with amazing science but also amazing applications… Soon after, we may learn how to upload our minds to high performance engineered substrates and become a post-biological species of potentially immortal software minds.”
While mind uploading “real soon” was far too optimistic (since 2013 I have learned not to make predictions with dates), things are evolving in this direction indeed, slowly but steadily. Neuralink is an important step toward the noosphere envisioned by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
According to Teilhard, “humanity was simply one step on a never-ending staircase of increasing complexity,” notes Micah Redding. “Humanity wasn’t at the end of the process. Not at all.”
“In fact, Teilhard believed another new level of complexity and intelligence was already emerging. Teilhard called this new level the ‘noosphere’ — the increasingly networked world of the mind… network of links… a nervous system… a closely interdependent network… over the whole earth… Teilhard has been credited with anticipating the internet before it was even a glimmer in DARPA’s eye.”
Today’s internet is an early instance of the noosphere, but tomorrow’s neuralinked internet, where our brains will be network nodes streaming thoughts to the cloud and to each other, will be a much more mature instance of the noosphere.
In the noosphere, human and artificial intelligence (AI) will blend. “On a species level, it’s important to figure out how we coexist with advanced AI, achieving some AI symbiosis,” said Musk.
I also think that very high speed brain interfacing, plus breakthroughs in the fundamental physics (and engineering) of conscious matter substrates, will enable real advances toward mind uploading.
Thank you Elon!
I’m one of many who are praising Elon for this and other accomplishments, but there are also those who hate Elon and all that he represents. See for example this MIT Technology Review commentary, a perfect example of the ongoing war against optimism and imagination waged by certain “cultural” camps.
Really now, for f#’s sake.
Elon Musk is by far the person who has done more to create the clean and green electric vehicles that will do much more than big words to protect the environment of the Earth. So it seem obvious that those who love Greta Thunberg for talking the talk should also love Elon Musk for, you know, walking the f# walk. But no, Greta and Elon “belong” to different camps that must hate each other. BS.
Besides electric vehicles, Elon is striving toward the black sky and our human future as an interplanetary species, and then interstellar. This is the only solid long-term safeguard against the possibility of human extinction. In the meantime, offshoring heavy industry to space is the only sustainable way to protect the environment of the Earth, and the reusable launchers pioneered by Elon are making it more affordable.
And now Neuralink and the noosphere.
I’m sure Elon Musk must be a flawed person like everyone, but what he has done and continues to do deserves praise and admiration. If Turing Church has saints, Elon is certainly one of them.
Cover image from Pixabay.
