Part One: The Human Colossus
Part Two: The Brain
Part Three: Flying Over the Nest of Neurons
Part four: neurocomputer interfaces
Part Five: The Neuaralink Problem
Part Six: Age of Wizards 1
Part Six: Age of Wizards 2
Part Seven: The Great Fusion
Promotional video:
Eccentric in the good sense of the word, entrepreneur, playboy, philanthropist Elon Musk is known all over the world. It was he who decided to take humanity into space, colonize Mars, and abandon disposable rockets. It was he who decided to make the world cleaner by transferring us from cars with internal combustion engines to self-driving cars. As long as these enterprises unfold, he does not sit idly by. He conceived Neuralink to help us become new people. Without borders and without weaknesses, as it should be in a new world (Elona Musk).
Tim Urban with WaitButWhy volunteered to document Musk's crazy ideas, as always (he wrote about artificial intelligence, the colonization of Mars and SpaceX). We present one of the best works of modern popular science journalism. Further from the first person.
I had a phone call last month.
Okay, maybe it wasn't like that and the words weren't quite like that. But after I found out what kind of new company Elon Musk decided to create, I began to understand that what he had planned could be called that.
When I wrote about Tesla and SpaceX, I found out that you can only fully understand the activities of some companies by zooming in and out, inside and out. On the inside are the technical problems faced by engineers, on the outside are the existential problems faced by our species. From the inside - to see the world as it is now, from the outside - to see the big story of how we got to this moment and what the distant future might be like.
Elon's new venture, Neuralink, is not only the same, six weeks after first meeting the company, I am convinced that it somehow manages to outshine Tesla and SpaceX in both the boldness of its engineering endeavors and the grandeur of its mission. The other two companies are seeking to redefine what the people of the future will do. Neuralink aims to redefine who the people of the future will be.
The dizzying scope of the Neuralink mission, combined with the maze of incredible complexity in the human brain, is very difficult to comprehend. But when I thought about it, when I spent enough time zooming in and out, I realized that this is the coolest thing I've seen. I think I took a time machine, went to the future and came back to tell you guys, this is all even weirder than we thought.
But before I take you in my time machine to show what I have found, we need to get into the magnifying machine. Because, as far as I understand, the plan for the "tin foil hat", or the hat of the wizard, Elon Musk, is difficult to understand right away.
So get ready to forget everything that your brain knows about itself and its future, fall on the couch and drove into the wormhole.
Part 1. Human Colossus
600 million years ago, no one did anything at all.
The problem is, no one had any nerves. Without nerves, you cannot move or think, process all kinds of information. You just have to exist a little and wait until you die.
But then jellyfish appeared.
These jellyfish became the first animals to understand that nerves were necessary to understand what they are, and acquired the first nervous system - a network of nerves.
The neural network of jellyfish allowed them to collect important information about the world around them - for example, where are the objects, where are the predators, where is the food - and transmit this information, like through a large social network, to all parts of the body. The ability to receive and process information meant that jellyfish could actually respond to changes in their environment in order to increase the chances of a quality life, rather than wander aimlessly in the hope of the best.
A little later, a new animal appeared, which had an even cooler idea.
The flatworm figured out that much more could be done if someone in the nervous system was in charge of everything - like the boss of the nervous system. This boss lived in the head of a flatworm and controlled the entire nervous system of the body so that it would transmit all new information directly to him. So instead of organizing itself into a network, the flatworm's nervous system bunched up like a central channel of nerves that sent information back and forth between the boss and everyone else:
The boss channel system in the flatworm was the world's first central nervous system, and the boss in the head of the flatworm was the world's first brain.
The idea of a boss in the nervous system was quickly taken up by everyone else, and soon thousands of species with brains appeared on Earth.
As time went on, the animals of Earth began to invent complex and new body systems, so the bosses became more and more busy.
A little later, mammals arrived. For these millennials of the animal kingdom, life was already difficult. Yes, their hearts had to beat and their lungs had to breathe, but mammals wanted more than just survive - they acquired complex feelings such as love, anger and fear.
For the reptilian brain, which until now had to deal only with reptiles and other simpler creatures, mammals were just … something more. Therefore, mammals had a second boss who began to work in tandem with the reptile brain and took care of all these new needs. This is how the world's first limbic system was born.
Over the next 100 million years, mammalian life became more complex and eventful, and one day, two bosses found a new inhabitant in their office.
What at first seemed like an accidental infant was actually an early version of the neocortex, and although it spoke very little at first, along with the rise of primates, and then great apes and the first hominids, this new boss grew from infant to adolescent, and then teenager. with your own idea of how everything should work.
The ideas of the new boss proved to be very useful, and under his leadership, the hominids learned how to create tools, hunting strategies and cooperation with other hominids.
Over the next several million years, the new boss grew older and wiser, and his ideas constantly improved. He figured out how to get rid of nudity. He figured out how to control fire. He learned how to make spears.
But his coolest trick was thinking. He turned the head of every person into a small world-in-itself, making people the first animals that can comprehend complex thoughts, reason and come to decisions, make long-term plans.
And then, about 100,000 years ago, there was a breakthrough.
The human brain developed to the point where it began to understand that the sound "stone" was not a stone in itself, but it could be used as a symbol for a stone - this sound came to mean a stone. The first man invented language.
Very soon, words for all kinds of things appeared, and by 50,000 BC people were already communicating in a full, complex language with each other.
The neocortex turned humans into magicians. Not only did he make the human head a wonderful inner ocean of complex thoughts, his latest breakthrough found a way to translate these thoughts into a symbolic set of sounds and send them vibrate through the air to the heads of other people who could decipher these sounds and absorb the ideas clothed in them into their own ocean of thoughts. The human neocortex had been thinking about things for a long time - and now, finally, he had someone to discuss them with.
The neocortex party is gathering. The neocortexes - well, while the neocortexes are still - shared everything they could with each other: stories from the past, funny jokes, formed opinions, plans for the future.
But the most useful thing was to share everything I learned. If one person learned through trial and error that a certain kind of berry could turn life into a total diarrhea for 48 hours, he could use language to tell the rest of his tribe about his difficult life lesson. Tribe members can use language to teach this lesson to their children and their children to their children. Instead of different people repeating the same mistake over and over again, one of them may say “don't eat these berries,” and his wisdom will pierce space and time, protecting everyone from bad experiences.
The same will happen when one person comes up with some clever new trick. One extraordinarily intelligent hunter who loves observing the constellations of stars and the annual migration patterns of herds of wild animals might share a system he developed that uses the night sky to determine exactly how many days are left before the herd returns. And while some hunters could come up with such a system on their own, if passed on from mouth to mouth, all future hunters in the tribe will be able to take advantage of the ingenious find of their ancestor. And in the future, this discovery will be the first starting point in the body of a hunter's knowledge.
Suppose this spreading of knowledge will make the hunting season more efficient and give tribal members more time to work on their weapons, allowing one genius hunter to find a way to create lighter, stronger spears that can be thrown more accurately over generations. And in the same way, from now on, every hunter of the future and the present in the tribe will hunt with a more effective spear.
Language allows the best insights of the smartest people to be passed down through the generations, accumulating in a small collective pinnacle of tribal knowledge - "greatest hits" among the best moments of insight of their ancestors. Each new generation will receive this turret built in their heads as a starting point for life, and it will lead them to even cooler discoveries based on the knowledge of their ancestors. The wisdom of the tribe will grow and expand. Language is the difference between this:
And this:
The main trajectory improvement occurs for two reasons. Each generation can learn a lot more new things as everyone talks to each other, compares notes, and combines their individual knowledge (which is why the blue bars are much higher in the second graph). And each generation can successfully pass on a high percentage of their knowledge to the next generation, so knowledge is better preserved over time.
Shared knowledge becomes like a great, collective collaboration between generations. Over hundreds of generations, what began with professional advice on a particular berry and how best to avoid it will become a complex system of growing long rows of bushes of stomach-friendly berries and harvesting them annually. An initial glimpse of genius regarding wildlife migration will evolve into a domestic sheep raising system. The spear innovation will go through hundreds of changes over tens of thousands of years and become a bow and arrow.
Language gives a group of people a collective intelligence that far exceeds individual human intelligence and allows each person to benefit from the collective intelligence as if they made it all up. We consider the bow and arrow to be primitive technology, but if you raise Einstein in the forest without any knowledge and order him to make the best hunting device he can make, he won't even come close to providing you with a bow and arrow. Only a collective human movement can handle this.
The ability to talk to each other also allowed humans to create complex social structures that, along with advanced technologies such as farming and animal domestication, over time led tribes to settle in permanent places and merge into organized super tribes. When this happened, the tower of accumulated knowledge of each tribe turned into a super tower. Mass cooperation improved the quality of life for all, and by 10,000 BC the first cities were formed.
According to Wikipedia, there is the so-called Metcalfe's law, according to which "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users connected to the system." And it is illustrated with this small diagram of old phones.
And the same idea applies to humans. Two people can have one conversation. Three people can create four unique conversation groups. Five people - 26 conversations. Twenty people - 1,048,554.
As such, the members of the city not only benefit from a huge tower of knowledge as a foundation, but based on Metcalfe's Law, the number of possible conversations soars to an unprecedented amount of variety. More talk meant new ideas that collided, new discoveries, and an explosion of innovation.
Soon people mastered agriculture, it freed many people, and they thought about other occupations. After that, there was another giant breakthrough: writing.
Historians believe that people began to write down all sorts of things about 5-6 thousand years ago. Up to this point, the collective tower of knowledge was stored only in the network of people's memories and was transmitted exclusively by word of mouth. This system worked in small tribes, but when there was a much larger amount of knowledge shared by large groups of people, memories alone could not support all this, and most of it disappeared.
While language allows people to send thoughts from one brain to another, writing allows them to place thoughts on physical objects, such as a stone, where they can live forever. When people began to write on thin sheets of parchment or paper, vast fields of knowledge that would take weeks to pass by word of mouth could be squeezed into a book or scroll and held in hand. The tower of collective knowledge of people now lived in physical form, neatly organized on the shelves of city libraries and universities.
These shelves have become mankind's great instruction for everything. They led mankind to new inventions and discoveries, and these, in turn, turned into new books on the shelves, as if the great instruction was completing itself. This guide taught us the intricacies of trade and currency, shipbuilding and architecture, medicine and astronomy. Each generation began life with higher forests of knowledge and technology than the last, and progress continued to accelerate.
But painstakingly written books were considered treasures and only high elites had access to them (in the middle of the 15th century there were only 30,000 books in all of Europe). And then there was another breakthrough: the printing press.
In the 15th century, the bearded Johannes Gutenberg came up with a way to create many identical copies of the same book, faster and cheaper than ever. (Or to be more precise, when Gutenberg was born, humanity had already figured out the first 95% of how to invent the printing press, and Gutenberg, with that knowledge at the start, invented the last 5%.) (And Gutenberg never invented the printing press; the Chinese had made one centuries earlier. Good proof that anything that is usually thought to be made somewhere outside of China was most likely invented in China.) This is how it worked.
Not the most impressive digression about Gutenberg
In any case, as disappointing as Gutenberg's machine was, it made a huge breakthrough in humanity's ability to spread information. Over the next centuries, printing technology improved rapidly, and the number of pages a machine could print in an hour was about 25 in Gutenberg's time, but by the early 19th century it was already 2,400.
The mass production of books allowed information to spread like wildfire, and as books became more available they were no longer the privilege of the elite - millions gained access to books, and literacy rates skyrocketed. The thoughts of one person could reach millions of people. The era of mass communication began.
The avalanche of books allowed knowledge to transcend borders as the world's regional knowledge towers finally merged into one widespread species-scale tower that pierced even the stratosphere.
The better we are able to communicate on a mass scale, the more our species functions as a single organism, with the collective knowledge tower of humanity in the form of a brain, and each individual human brain in the form of a nerve or muscle fiber in the body. With the era of mass communication, a collective human organism began to grow - the Human Colossus.
By placing all of the collective human knowledge in the brain, the Human Colossus began inventing things that no human could invent on their own - things that would have seemed absurd science fiction to people generations before.
All of this turned our ox carts into high-speed locomotives, and our horses into shiny metal cars. It turned our candles into bulbs and letters into telephone calls and factory workers into factory machines. Sent us to heaven and space. Made us rethink the meaning of "mass communication" by giving us radio and television, opening up a world where everyone can instantly reach a billion people.
If the main motivation for humans is the transfer of genes, which forces a species to develop and reproduce, the power of macroeconomics has made the Human Colossus' motivation to create value, which means to invent new and better technologies. Whenever this happens, more and more new things are being invented.
And around the middle of the 20th century, the Human Colossus began working on its most ambitious project.
Colossus has long understood that the best way to create value is to create value machines. Machines are better at doing many things than humans, generating a stream of new resources that can be used to create value. Perhaps more importantly, machine labor has freed up huge chunks of human time and energy - that is, chunks of the Colossus itself - so that they can be devoted to innovation. He has already outsourced the work of our hands to machines in factories and the work of our feet to machines for driving. The same thing needs to be done with the power of our brains - what if somehow we outsource the work of the brain itself?
The first digital computers appeared in the 1940s.
One of the types of computers for mental work was the work of storing information - they were memory machines. But we already knew how to convey our memories through books, as well as that it is better to use cars to get around than horses and our own legs. Computers have just become an outsourced memory upgrade.
Information processing was a completely different story - a type of mental labor that we have not yet learned how to do with someone else's forces. The Human Colossus has always done the calculations on its own. Computers have changed that.
Factory machines have allowed us to outsource physical processes - we put material in, machines physically process it and spit out the result. Computers could do the same with information processing. The software was like a factory machine for processing information.
These new machines for storing, organizing, and processing information have proven extremely useful. Computers have come to play a central role in the day-to-day operations of companies and governments. By the late 1980s, it had become the norm for individuals to have their own brain helper.
And then there was another leap.
In the early 90s, we taught millions of lonely machine brains to communicate with each other. They formed a worldwide computer network, and a new giant was born - the Computer Colossus.
The Computer Colossus and the great network he formed became like Popeye's spinach to the Human Colossus.
If individual human brains are nerves and muscle fibers, the Internet gave the giant its first complete nervous system. Each of its nodes was connected to all other nodes, and information could pass through the system at the speed of light. This made the Human Colossus a faster and more flexible thinker.
The Internet allowed billions of people to instantly, freely and easily access the entire tower of knowledge of mankind (which by now has already crossed the moon). This made the Human Colossus a smarter and faster learner.
And if individual computers served as brain extensions for individuals, companies, or governments, the Computer Colossus was a brain extension for the entire Human Colossus.
With its first real nervous system, an improved brain and a powerful new tool, the Human Colossus took invention to a whole new level - and noticing how useful his new computer friend was, focused a lot of efforts on improving computer technology.
He learned to make computers faster and cheaper. The internet has become fast and wireless. Computer chips kept getting smaller and smaller until everyone had a powerful computer in their pocket.
Each innovation was like a new spinach truck for the Human Colossus.
But today, the Human Colossus has its eyes on something more than just more spinach. Computers have changed the game by allowing humanity to outsource many brain-related tasks and function better as a separate organism. But there is one thing that working brain computers don't yet know how to do. Think.
Computers can compute, organize, and run complex software - software that can even learn on its own. But they cannot think the way people can. The Human Colossus knows that everything he has built has given rise to his ability to reason creatively and independently, and he knows that the ultimate tool for expanding the brain will be one that can really, truly think. He has no idea what will happen when the Computer Colossus starts thinking on its own - when one day he opens his eyes and becomes a real colossus - but with his main goal - to create value and push technology to the limit - the Human Colossus set out to find out.
* * *
We will return to this later. First, we need to learn how to do something.
As we discussed earlier, knowledge is structured like a tree. If you try to recognize a twig or leaf with a theme before you have a solid foundation in the form of a tree trunk - understanding inside your head, you will fail. Branches and leaves will have nothing to attach to, so they will simply fall out of your head.
We determined that Elon Musk wants to build a magic hat for the brain (perhaps we will not remember the "tinfoil hat" - the scope is not the same), and to understand why he wants to do this is necessary in order to understand Neuralink - and understand how he can be our future.
But none of this will make much sense until we dive into a truly mind-boggling concept of what this magic hat is, what it will be like to wear it, and how we get there from where we are.
The basis for this discussion will be an understanding of what neurocomputer interfaces (NKI, or, as they are no longer called, the brain-machine interface), how they work, and at what stage these technologies are developed today.
Finally, the NCIs themselves are only a large branch - not a tree trunk. To understand how NCIs actually work and what it is in general, we need to understand the brain. How the brain works is our tree trunk.
Therefore, we will start with the brain, it will prepare us for the study of NCI, they will teach us how to create a magic hat, and it all smoothly turns into a great conversation about the future. Why does Mask need a magic hat? Why will it become an essential element of our future? By the time we get to the end, everything will fall into place.
ILYA KHEL
Part One: The Human Colossus
Part Two: The Brain
Part Three: Flying Over the Nest of Neurons
Part four: neurocomputer interfaces
Part Five: The Neuaralink Problem
Part Six: Age of Wizards 1
Part Six: Age of Wizards 2
Part Seven: The Great Fusion