Luddite - is the Singularity near?

Neuralink - Control a Mouse via Thought

Neuralink's First Human Patient Able To Control Mouse Through Thinking, Musk Says

The first human patient implanted with a brain-chip from Neuralink appears to have fully recovered and is able to control a computer mouse using their thoughts, the startup's founder Elon Musk said late on Monday. From a report: "Progress is good, and the patient seems to have made a full recovery, with no ill effects that we are aware of. Patient is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking," Musk said in a Spaces event on social media platform X. Musk said Neuralink was now trying to get as many mouse button clicks as possible from the patient. The firm successfully implanted a chip on its first human patient last month, after receiving approval for human trial recruitment in September.

Exit Strategy?

Oh boy. ELE ongoing, humans go extinct, biosphere goes extinct, Mars and Moon have no self-sustaining biosphere, the only thing which still has gas is the AI. Which exit strategy to choose? The good ole Marvin Minsky upload scenario? Seriously? A post-human Matrix? Let go of the old, embrace the new? Project Lambda. Oh boy.

Nip It In The Bud

Brain scans can translate a person’s thoughts into words

In a new study, published in Nature Neuroscience by researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, a model trained on functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of three volunteers was able to predict whole sentences they were hearing with surprising accuracy—just by looking at their brain activity. The findings demonstrate the need for future policies to protect our brain data, the team says.
“We think that mental privacy is really important, and that nobody’s brain should be decoded without their cooperation,” says Jerry Tang, a PhD student at the university who worked on the project. “We believe it’s important to keep researching the privacy implications of brain decoding, and enact policies that protect each person’s mental privacy.”

Nip It In The Bud

Scientists Target 'Biocomputing' Breakthrough With Use of Human Brain Cells

Scientists propose to develop a biological computer powered by millions of human brain cells that they say could outperform silicon-based machines while consuming far less energy.
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The project's ambition mirrors work on the more advanced quantum computing but raises ethical questions around the "consciousness" of brain organoid assemblies
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Nip It In The Bud

MIT's Newest fMRI Study: 'This is Your Brain on Code'

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What the group wanted to find out was whether the brain signals seen in their study when participants were examining pieces of code resembled the patterns of activation observed when neural networks analyzed the same piece of code. And the answer they arrived at was a qualified yes. "If you put a piece of code into the neural network, it produces a list of numbers that tells you, in some way, what the program is all about," Srikant says. Brain scans of people studying computer programs similarly produce a list of numbers. When a program is dominated by branching, for example, "you see a distinct pattern of brain activity," he adds, "and you see a similar pattern when the machine learning model tries to understand that same snippet." 
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The Rise Of The Matrix

Looking at the tag cloud of this blog, there are two major topics, pro and con Singularity, AI (Artificial Intelligence) vs. ELE (Extinction Level Event).

So, we slide, step by step, to an event called Singularity, but concurrently we face more and more the extinction of mankind.

What about combining those two events?

Let us assume we damage our ecosphere sustainable, but at the same moment our technology advances to an level where it is possible to connect via an Brain-Computer-Interface directly with the cyberspace.

People already spend more and more time in virtual realities, with the advent of Smart Phones, they are connected all the time with the cyberspace, they meet people in digital social networks, they play games in computer generated worlds, create and buy virtual goods with virtual money, and, essentially, they like it.

To prevent an upcoming ELE, we would need to cut our consumption of goods significantly, but the mass of people wants more and more.

So, let us give them more and more, in the virtual, computer generated worlds.

Let us create the Matrix, where people can connect directly with their brain, and buy whatever experience they wish.

A virtual car would need only some electricity and silicon to run on, but the harm to Mother Earth would be significantly less than a real car.

We could create millions or billions of new jobs, all busy with designing virtual worlds, virtual goods, and virtual experiences.

And Mother Earth will get an break, to recover from the damage billions of consuming people caused.

ELE + Singularity => Matrix

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

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