Host: Lex Fridman (@lexfridman)
“Neuralink might help alleviate human suffering” – Lex Fridman
  • The brain is the source of both physical and psychological pain
    • Neuralink could possibly identify the signal going to the brain and interact with them
      • “We might be able to accelerate our understanding and treatment and control of the internal environment of the mind” 
“The hope is that at the individual level you’ll be able to aid in the alleviation, in some degree, of all the sources of neurological suffering” – Lex Fridman
Neuralink will help scientists understand how the brain works at a functional level (memory, perception, cognition, etc.)
  • That information may help humans build better AI
    • “It’s possible that it will inspire or instruct us on the engineering side of how to build smarter and smarter artificial intelligence systems” – Lex Fridman
Neuralink could also help us understand what is consciousness and where intelligence emerges
Neuralink will help people regain the ability to move parts of their body 
  • It can also help people regain the ability to see by stimulating the visual cortex or even lead to superhuman level vision (ex: ability to see infrared light)
Neuralink could also augment reality and replace the need for smart glasses 
“With a brain-computer interface, beyond just gaming, you can start to think about creating virtual worlds, virtual realities” – Lex Fridman
  • We may use virtual reality headsets for now, but as technology improves, Neuralink could replace the need for such headsets
There’s also the possibility of creating virtual experiences that mimic the same experience people get some psychedelics 
There is a lot of innovation happening in robotic neurosurgery and robotic surgery in general
Neuralink currently connects with 1,024 channels in the brain, but in the future, that number could be in the millions or maybe even billions
  • “There’s so much possibility of engineering breakthroughs about the number of channels that are possible that you can’t yet imagine” – Lex Fridman
Neuralink has the possibility of enriching the communication bandwidth, by both quality and quantity, between two consenting human beings
  • Imagine communicating multi-dimensional mind maps when you’re trying to reason through a problem
  • You could also communicate creative ideas like art
Neuralink could possibly allow people to save and replay memories. You would have the ability to modify, alter, or delete memories.
  • “It’s basically converting our prior experiences into data and once it’s converted into data, that could be used for all kinds of applications” – Lex Fridman
There’s also the possibility of saving mental states, which would be a form of digital immortality
  • “You can think of being able to save the contents or the critical contents of your mind into digital form and then being able to transfer it to other systems” – Lex Fridman
    • You could then reload your content into a robotic or biological system
Sooner or later, humans will engineer systems that are far smarter than ourselves. Although this sounds great, it could backfire:
  • “There might be a set of dimensions where an intelligent system is able to generalize better than humans in a set of tasks that can lead to existential risks to human beings” – Lex Fridman
    • The AI could see humans as a threat or competitor, whether directly or indirectly, and may try to destroy humans 
One path humans to make sure the human race endures is to merge with AI:
  • “One way to ensure our survival is to expand the capacity of the human mind, to communicate with AI, and with the AI to communicate with the human mind” – Lex Fridman