Elon Musk argues the limbic system, or monkey brain, often overrides the cerebral cortex in humans. He proposes AI as a digital neural net that could form a tertiary layer of superintelligence, coexisting with biological brains without conflict.
Ultimately, we currently operate on two layers. We have sort of a limbic prime primitive brain layer which is where all of our kind of impulses are coming from. It's sort of like we've got like a monkey brain with a computer stuck on it. That's the human brain. And a lot of our impulses and everything are driven by the monkey brain and the computer. The cortex is constantly trying to make the monkey brain happy. It's not the cortex that's steering the monkey brains, the monkey brain steering the cortex, you know, but the cortex is.
The part that tells the story of the whole thing. So we convince ourselves it's, it's more interesting than just the monkey brain.
Cortex is like what we call like human intelligence, you know, so it's like, that's like the advanced computer relative to other creatures. Other creatures do not have either really, that don't. They don't have the computer or they have a very weak computer relative to humans. But it sort of seems like surely the really smart thing should control the dumb thing, but actually the dumb thing controls the smart thing.
So do you think some of the same kind of machine learning methods, whether that's natural language processing applications, are going to be applied for the communication between the machine and the brain to learn how to do certain things like movement of the body, how to process visual stimuli and so on? Do you see the value of using machine learning to understand the language of the two way communication with the brain?
Sure, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're a neural net. And that, you know, AI is basically neural net. So it's like digital neural net will interface with biological neural net and hopefully bring us along for the ride. But the vast majority of our intelligence will be digital. Think of the difference in intelligence between the cortex and your limbic system is gigantic. Your limbic system really has no comprehension of what the hell the cortex is doing. It's just literally hungry or tired or angry or sexy or something. And then that communicates that impulse to the cortex and tells the cortex to go satisfy that. Then a great deal of massive amount of thinking, truly stupendous amount of thinking has gone into sex without purpose, without procreation, without procreation, which is actually quite a silly action. In the absence of procreation, it's a bit silly. So why are you doing it? Because it makes the limbic system happy. That's why.
That's why.
But it's pretty absurd, really.
Well, the whole of existence is pretty absurd in some kind of sense.
Yeah, but I mean, this is a lot of computation has gone into. How can I do more of that with procreation not even being a factor? This is, I think, a very important area of research for nsfw.
An agency that should receive a lot of funding.
Especially after this conversation, I propose the formation of a new agency.
Oh, boy.
But people generally like the fact that they have a limbic system and a cortex. I haven't met anyone who wants to delete either one of them. They're like, okay, I'll keep them both. That's cool.
The limbic system is kind of fun.
That's where the fun is. Absolutely. And then people generally don't want to lose the cortex either. So they like having the cortex and the limbic system. And then there's a tertiary layer which will be digital superintelligence. And I think there's room for optimism, given that the cortex is very intelligent and the limbic system is not, and yet they work together well, perhaps there can be a tertiary layer where digital superintelligence lies, and that will be vastly more intelligent than the cortex, but still coexist peacefully and in a benign manner with the cortex and limbic system. SA.
