Replicating The Human Brain
If Artificial Intelligence (AI) were to simulate the human brain, our world would change forever. What if a machine could manipulate your thoughts? Change your beliefs? Replace all jobs?
The Idea
With devices like Neuralink in production, having an intrusive Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) in everyone’s body is foreseeable in the near future! With this, we can analyze every thought, every movement and every emotion to train the strongest neural network ever. This will essentially create AI consciousness, with the data of billions from birth, it will be impossible to tell the difference between a human and an AI brain. We can run drug simulations, nail the art of negotiation and of course, replace nearly all jobs.
The Problems
Security 🔐
Having a BCI in your skull is a rather scary thought for most, including myself. If the device is ever connected to the Internet it would bring a whole new wave of questions: Can it be hacked? Would data be read by 3rd parties? Will radiowaves cause damage?
Bias ⚖
Even if we create an AI brain identical to the human, can it still replace jobs like judges in the court of law? Humans often (click here for more) have prejudice and bias, this means our replicated brain can make unfair rulings. If humans can’t train a model that is 100% fair, how can we trust AI to sentence criminals?
Regulation 🛑
While this becomes a political issue, who can regulate, who has access to this powerful software and data? We need to aggregate all of human data without actually reading sensitive information otherwise, no one would want these BCIs in their heads. If the government does, however, start regulating these emerging technologies it could severely stifle innovation.
Do We Need It?
If most jobs were replaced by AI, what would we do with our lives? An example is the education industry, some people genuinely love their jobs and will lose meaning in life without them.
So even if it means cheaper and better labour, it might not be great for humanity. However, once this becomes a reality, we can turn the years of FDA drug testing to a matter of days.
We will be able to understand our brain allowing us to become better at surgeries and make predictions on human behaviour. Lastly, there is labour, humans are very intuitive and simple tasks like walking down a hill can be challenging for robots and AI, we can now educate ourselves without money being an issue and better humanity.
Why You Should Care
To first train the AI brain we need to use our own data, but then we can reverse it, how you ask? With a re-enforcement learning model, the simulated brain can get stronger and smarter from itself, then we can take data from the simulation and transfer it back to us with a BCI. That’s right, you would be able to download karate as a skill, to your brain, just like the matrix!
This will save lives. Quantum engineers have been trying to simulate an environment to test drugs, but I find this to be a much simpler solution. We can test the effects of medication, mental abuse and sleep patterns on “people” without any consequences. The only question is, when.
Conclusion
Now, this is a very real application, but it is also highly controversial and dangerous. The benefits are almost incomprehensible with reality being straight out of a movie, but the cons can wipe out humanity and put millions out of jobs.
What are your thoughts?
