Welcome back to Geek time Advance. This is Brad. How are you doing Lulu?

Hi, Brad, I’m doing fine, and I’m ready for our talk about Brain Chipping.

All right. So I thought we'd start off by talking about Neuralink, which is Elon Musk’s company. He is creating brain chips that people can use. The whole idea for him is to use like these chips to control devices really like IoT devices or to help people with their motor skills, their cognitive issues.

Yeah, just to remind our audience. IoT is internet of things we actually talked about this “物联网”. So it's like all of these things that are connected within a network, right? So using brain chipping, I guess you can control all of those devices.

Yeah, so rather than having to say serious name or to any of your home systems, you can just rather than say something, you can think it, and you can control it that way.

Yeah, so I think I want my room to be warmer and immediately my brain, this chip in my brain will help control the temperature of the room because it's linked with my smart aircon.

Exactly.

That sort of idea.

These chips aren't just meant for controlling IoT devices. They're also used for helping people with medical issues. They can help people who have problems with motor skills, help people with vision problems or other issues with senses, whether it's hearing or anything like that.

And he's already started to do trials not on humans, but on monkeys.

So human trials haven't started yet.

He is in the process of getting those human trials going. He's accepting applications, but there's a little bit of issue, because some of the monkeys in the trials didn't exactly behave to the way they would. Some of them got sick, because of the brain chips and so may not be ready for human trials.

Yeah. To be honest, I know everyone talking about Elon Musk, especially people who really, really love him, really look up to him. There was obviously they always say he's such a visionary, he's a man with vision. But the other way of looking at it is so progressive in a way that sometimes I think that there's a lot of ethical issues, ethical concerns to be hammered out before going further whatever his vision is.

Mhm. Yeah, you have to wonder how this is gonna affect people. Are people actually going to be able to maintain their sanity? Are they gonna be healthy? There's a lot of issues that can come because of this. And so we do have to make sure that people aren't going to get sick after we put a chip in their brain.

Yeah, but even if we put that aside, let's just say you can, medical-wise, you can safely implant the brain chip into human brains.

But then there's a whole lot of other issues to be talked about. For example, doesn't that make us part machine, especially... I mean what's the next step? Right? First, the chip and then replacing part of us with machines, robots and maybe next time, oh yeah, people are talking about merging with AI.

That's exactly what Musk is, his intention is, I think in the long run, he wants people to merge with AI as a way to avoid AI taking over the world rather than us fighting AI, we could become one with AI.

So, if we can't beat AI, join them.

Yes, exactly.

就是打不过就加入, 中文也这么说, wow, okay. But how to join them? It’s by merging with them, I guess.

Yeah, I mean like some people think that this might be the actual suicide of humanity by merging us with AI, we're definitely killing ourselves.

But the Musk’s idea basically is that if AI become sentient, it might realize that it has to fight us in order to live, because just looking at our media and what people do to robots within our own media, AI would probably be scared. But if we can merge with that AI we can show that AI that there is a benefit for both of us in doing this.

AI will be always be limited in some cognitive issues, right? Memory is one issue with AI, where humans they can pull from their experiences, and they can look at an experience they had 20 years ago, and apply it to something completely unrelated, but somehow they can see how that experience can help them with what they're doing now.

You mean that's the uniqueness of humanity. And by merging with AI we're essentially pleading to the AI like “look, look, we’re useful, we're still useful, don't kill us, don't just wipe us out.”

Exactly.

Wow.

If you're familiar with Star Trek, there's actually a whole group of, I wouldn't call them a group of people. They're actually a collective of many different species, aliens and just all over the galaxy. The borg is one giant AI merged with alien species.

I think I’ve heard of it, I’m not very familiar with Star Trek, but I’ve heard of the borg星际迷航里面的博格人, the borg.

So isn’t that somehow related to the whole warning signs about against merging with AI.

Right. Because in this case, people have merged with AI. And AI has found a use for all the different biological beings out there, as being part and one, but everyone at that point loses their autonomy. They're no longer an individual. They're one with the collective, they're part of the collective. They think as a collective, they are no longer individuals.

Now there are a few episodes that talk about how... what happens when the borg wants individuality but that is usually destroyed by the borg queen.

It's a little bit like totem tale also politically but then again we're not gonna go further with that. So with the borg is, every borg loses its autonomy, right? And then they just has a use within the collective.

Right. Now the benefit of that is everyone shares the knowledge, everyone has the knowledge, there are no secrets, but in doing so, everyone loses their individualism that no one can hide anything. Everyone knows everything about anyone else.

Yeah. You said the good thing about it is all knowledge is shared, but to be honest that doesn't sound like a very promising future. If you think about it, if I merge with AI and that is the borg is basically our future or the prototype of our future, all knowledge is shared. That means all of the or most of the existing occupations would be rendered obsolete, 就所有现在的那些职业以后都不用用了.

Teachers are not necessary because everybody shares all knowledge anyways. Lawyers, doctors, you really don't need them because everyone knows exactly the same. Right?

Right.

And there's no privacy.

Yeah. The whole idea is that the borg just sit in their spaceship they go around trying to better themselves by incorporating other biological beings that would somehow bring benefit to the borg. But they don't sleep, they don't have fun, they regenerate, the body needs regeneration. And so basically the borg go to their pod, they regenerate. They add knowledge to the collective.

To recharge.

Basically, yes. If someone loses an arm in battle, it's just replaced by another part.

Yeah. Which brings us to this big debate. What makes us human or what makes human human? and brings us this, not very new idea, but nowadays we talk about it a lot more with all this AI talk, this idea of trans humanism这种超人类主义.

It's not exactly a new idea. So Brad, give us a definition of transhumanism.

So, basically the idea of transhumanism is that humans should be able to use technology to modify or enhance ourselves, whether it's our mental capacity or our body function as a way to give us abilities or capacities that we can't do with our bodies at current state.

For example, when we're aging because as humans we age and then when we are aging or when we getting sick, with all of these advanced technology, we can technically replace parts of ourselves with machines and then where we'll live longer or even live permanently.

But then the whole talk is to what extent can we change our body or modify our body or replacing our body parts with machines, to what extent can we do that to still remain human.

Right.

There's the whole idea where if you take one part away and you'll replace that, and eventually you'll replace everything. And when you replace everything, are you still the same as you were before? Why not just build a whole new body and use that? Right?

So the whole idea is some people think we should be pure, we shouldn't change our body in any way. Some people think we should do anything we can to make ourselves better.

And so there are people out there who are already doing any type of body modification. There are people who are putting chips into their arms that they can use to control tools. Usually, it's not something...it's not something that you would necessarily equate to something from science fiction. It's very general basic things, but it's a start.

Yeah. But then you have to differentiate, because I, you know, I’ve heard of these two words, right?

So one is cyborg, which is humans with mechanical parts of. cyborg 这个词就是说是人类, 但是它有mechanical parts, 有这种机械的身体部分, but then you have androids就被翻译成仿生机器人, which is a robot that look like humans. Think some of West World, right? That's more like android. Then what is the difference? What makes us human... cyborg is more human than androids?

It's all just kind of like this whole idea. The cyborgs were originally human. But they just started if you replace your arm with a mechanical arm, you're technically a cyborg, because you're using a mechanical part to replace something that you lost. There are people who are actually going out and replacing body parts that aren't injured, because they wanna make themselves stronger in some way. But a cyborg will never become an android, because a cyborg will always have been a human just replacing themselves with body parts, whereas an android starts off as a robot.

But the whole idea that you have this divide between cyborgs and androids, when you think about humans...

Yeah, but what if android developed sentence.

Okay. That would put them on part with cyborgs. But like the point I’m trying to make, it is not that specific. It's more related to, if we look at the difference between like android and cyborg, that's gonna be kind of like the difference between cyborgs and humans in the future.

There is going to be the shift where there's a new species, where the cyborgs are the new species, where people when they're from their birth, they're going to have probably, not coming out of the womb with mechanical parts. But once they're born, they're probably their parents might start giving them some sort of brain chip or mechanical parts that will make them stronger or different. And…

The next level of human.

Yeah. So that's gonna bring us kind of like there was the neanderthals and then we replaced the neanderthals, we fought with them, and eventually all the neanderthals were gone. They still live within us with DNA, but neanderthals are all gone. And we survive. Eventually, maybe everyone will be cyborgs.

So, you're equating this whole technological advancement with evolution?

It's a technological evolution.

But, yeah, it's essentially that when you think about it, we started off as biological beings that just went around and gathered food and ate. And then we started using tools, and then we started using more and more advanced tools. And now we're finding that we can make more advanced tools to and not just give us more strength when we like stringing a sword and being able to cut something.

Now we can turn our arm into the weapon. And so people are gonna be like can I do that? Yes, I wanna do that.

Okay, okay. before I’m getting myself more confused and terrified, let's wrap up here. This is a huge topic what makes us human, and will we change the definition of human with this technological evolution in the future or at present actually. So, leave us a comment in the comment section if you have anything to say about this topic or you can put in a request for some new topics in this segment. Thank you, Brad, for coming to the studio and confusing me as usual.

No problem anytime.

We'll see you next time. Bye.

See you in the next episode.