What Is Neuralink??! - TDBS 22 April 2017

What is going on, everyone? Welcome back to Day 81 of The Daniel Bourke Show. This is a new experience for me. I'm standing up and doing this, this live show on YouTube. Well, not live, but I'm recording it live and doing this podcast here. Usually, I do it in my car and I'm not doing it in my car today because it's in the sun. Let me show you. Check this out. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see all this. That's in the sun. Now, that's way too hot. So, I'm going to test myself and see what it's like standing up. Haven't done one of these shows standing up before. I've still got my trusty resource here. Podcast is recording on the bench, so don't worry if you're listening to the podcast, you'll get the majority of this show. Oh, here's my makeshift camera stand, just a whole bunch of books. Check all of these out, by the way. Screenshot all that. Alright, so why am I in gym gear? Well, I'm going to go for a run after this. It's a beautiful day outside, as you saw the sun before. It's April 22nd, 2017, and we're at day 81 of the Daniel Bourke Show. Thank you so much for tuning in. Whatever you're doing, I hope you're having an awesome day. So, what have I been up to? So, this morning I spent about 3 hours reading an article by— I can't remember his name, but it's the blog called Wait But Why, and he wrote an article, a very in-depth— it was about 38,000 words. and it took me about 3+ hours to read it. I woke up this morning at about 5:30 AM with all intentions of going to the coast with my little brother and friend and going to the beach, but didn't, because it was raining. And so, I spent this morning reading it, as well as some last night, as well as probably the majority of the morning this morning actually reading it all. I fell back asleep and woke up at like 9:30. But phenomenal article, I'll link it in both descriptions on the podcast and on the YouTube video. But what was it about? So, essentially Elon Musk has started a company called Neuralink, N-E-U-R-A-L-I-N-K, and you can find out a bit more by going to neuralink.com. I'll link that in the description. And what the company is putting together, an elaborate team of some of the smartest people in the world. I don't know their names off by heart, but In the article, it goes through some of these, these people and what they're, what they've done in the past and what they're doing. Most of them are professors, like tenured professors from universities, and Elon's managed to drag them out of their tenured positions, which is a big thing if you're at a university and you're a tenured professor. It essentially means you're guaranteed employment there for the rest of your life if you want to. But he's dragged them out and obviously not dragged them out against their will because they're working for Neuralink now. And what's the goal of Neuralink? Well, the article does a much better job at summing it up than what I ever will be able to do, but essentially what they want to do is find out a way to link the human brain with a super, super powerful or super intelligent artificial intelligence. Because what Elon's afraid of and what a lot of people are afraid of, and you've probably heard me talk about this in the past a lot, is artificial intelligence taking over humans and just going, "Humans, we don't need you anymore. We're smart enough, we're machines, we're computers, we can live on our own and we don't need you anymore." So, well, effectively, there's a possibility of humans becoming like pets. The human race could become like house cats to some sort of super intelligence. And house cat is actually a good scenario if that happens. Rather than them wiping us all out. But that's what Elon Musk wants to do with Neuralink. Instead of AI taking over, he wants to find a way for us to merge the super artificial intelligence, so like a computer, with the brain. And his timeline for doing this, he said, he quoted himself in the article, the guy from WaitByWhy has done an amazing job, by the way. He's spent countless hours interviewing, and you can tell how much depth he's gone into by writing this article. 38,000 words. It took me a long time to read it. There's beautiful pictures, hand-drawn pictures, diagrams, interviews with the top people in the world with this new, I don't know, new market essentially. Well, not a market, but this innovative space, a phenomenally innovative space. So, it might be the last frontier. Like, where we are right now in in this period of time is a phenomenal period of time. We're in the century where we may be well able to communicate with any other human being, well, we already can communicate with any other human being on the planet, but without using any medium. Without using, right now we need an external device to be able to communicate with someone across the planet, but if that device was implanted in our brain, and this sounds a whole lot of Matrix stuff, and I'm, I'm, Read the full article if you want a better description of what I'm doing right now. But, imagine that, someone's, say your best friend's climbing a mountain right now, 400 kilometres from you, and they say, "Hey, check out this mountain," and you tap, you can tap into their senses, and you can see the mountain from their point of view, you can feel the wind, you can hear the birds chirping. That's the big picture, that's way down the track, but, Elon's timeline for doing something like this, for bringing it to the market, is 8 to 10 years. Some of the top people working with him are saying, oh, maybe not, maybe 15 to 20, maybe 50 years if that, maybe longer, who knows. It really depends on whether the engineers can get the tech ready. Elon wants to make it consumerly, like available to the public, right? Because if you imagine this piece of technology, if you can, link your brain with a super artificial intelligence, that's essentially a superpower. If that gets into the wrong hands, well then, who knows what they could use it for, right? So, if it's available, universally available, that's why he's got his company as well, OpenAI, if you've ever heard of that. If not, check that out as well. Which is a research company behind artificial, well, that researches artificial intelligence, and they publish all their findings. Because the idea is that if everyone has access to it, it won't get— even if it does get into the hands of someone who wants to do no good, doing no good with superintelligence against a whole bunch of people who want to do good with superintelligence, it's an even playing field. It's not as if someone, one person, has the superpower. Everyone has the superpower. Like today, right? The internet did— does wonders for ISIS, but everyone has the internet, so if they had the internet and no one else did, well then maybe they'll be more of a superpower. So, that's an article inspired me. I'm learning deep learning and machine learning right now, which is subset of AI, and I'm absolutely loving it. The stuff that's going on in the world today, especially what Wei-Pot Wai talks about in that article, is absolutely amazing. You should definitely check it out. I'll make sure I link it in the podcast and in the YouTube video. But what else? Oh yeah, today I started reading some books on machine learning just to gain more of a basic understanding of it. I've reached a point in this course that I'm doing that I'm having a little bit of trouble with, and I decided, well, maybe I need to, to start getting more of a fundamental knowledge because I've only really started programming this year. But nonetheless, I'm loving it a lot. Reading that article really inspired me to keep going. And actually, here's a big point. I was writing today and the 750 words that I do every day, and I came across a point in the writing where my body moved. I watched as if when I was typing, I typed something and I was like, "Wow, that is an incredible idea." Then my body moved and I ran around the room. I was like jumping around the room, getting excited at this idea I just typed down. And that's what I believe you have to pay attention to. You ever notice when someone— when you're having a conversation with someone and they say something and all of a sudden your body moves? Or if you say something and then your body moves? Or if their body moves after you've said something? Like, when you move around, right? You could have a conversation and no one is moving, but when someone moves, like, if they're sitting down and then all of a sudden they burst out in laughter, well, then you've said something really funny. Or the same goes if you've said something like brought up an idea in a conversation and someone goes, "Wow, that's a good idea," or their mind blows, then that's when you know you're onto something. So, I read it, I read it in the past, it's that when your body moves, you know you're onto something. So, I guess that's why when I'm in the gym and talking to friends and we have all these crazy ideas because our body's constantly moving, who knows? But, Yeah, when I was writing, I made sure, because I write in this document that sort of gets archived every time you finish, I copied out the stuff that made me move, and I'm going to review that in a couple of days and see if it still, still, I don't know, excites me how it did when I first typed it out. But that's, that's a piece of advice. So, when you're speaking or when you're writing down something that I found, if it's a profound idea or if it's some sort of magical insight. If it makes your body move, then, I don't know, think about it more. Just dig deeper on that point. Alright, what else? Oh, lastly, it's my brother's formal tonight. My littlest brother is already in the, I don't know, final year of high school. It goes so fast. I remember when my formal was, and now I'm his oldest brother. We're 8 years different, and He's got his formal tonight, so I'm excited for that. I'm going to go do a workout after this and then get dressed, take some photos of him and his friends, and yeah, driving one of my friends, one of my good friends, Neji. He's been on the podcast before and been on the YouTube channel. You've probably seen him in the background, but he's got a pretty cool car, so we're going to pick him up in that and drive him. You'll probably see some photos on it if you follow me on Instagram. @MrDBourke, M-R-D-B-O-U-R-K-E. But nonetheless, oh wait, what's today's challenge? Today's challenge is, hmm, read some of the article I link in the description. So even if it's 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or whatever, or 1 minute, just scroll through it, find somewhere that you think might interest you, because I think this is a profound, a profound technology that is definitely gonna, if it comes off within the next couple of decades, it's going to influence everyone's lives and highly recommend reading into it because some of the best, the smartest minds in the world are working behind this right now. And if it's going to be universally available, hey, you might as well get a jump start and learn about it now. But nonetheless, whatever you're up to, have an awesome day, tell someone you love them, and tomorrow is day 82. I'll see you there. Catch you later.