There are mad scientists and then there are bad scientists. Elon Musk is both—as mad and as bad (evil-wise) as you can get. Musk is amping up his plans for full human colonization of Mars by as early as 2030, which many consider a madcap hope, and he’s amping up the human brain for full chipped integration with artificial intelligence.
He believes the AI-human integration is necessary because the only way to beat ‘em is to join ‘em: If we want to keep AI from destroying humanity, we must integrate AI into the human brain and become one with it so that it has no reason to want to destroy us. He misses the point altogether that, as soon as we do that, AI has destroyed us! We will no longer be us anymore. AI will have lured us through our maddest of scientists to turn ourselves into the Borg of Star Trek: Next Generation. We will have been assimilated into a hybrid species by becoming less human, more machine.
Musk is wrong that this means AI will be less inclined to destroy us. How does he know what AI, with intelligence far beyond his own, will choose to do? It may just see chipped humans as a biological throwback, rather than the kind of flawless machine it would prefer. As happens in many mad-scientist, science-fiction movies, the AI creature’s first move may be to kill its creator (in this case, Musk, who is, at least, one of its leading creators who has been very vocal about its dangers.) It may help him take a short walk out a high window … or maybe something less Putinesque toward its loudest critic and more AI-like, such as luring him into chipping himself, and then frying the chip inside his head.
The madness of Musk
What began in Musk’s Monkeyworks, as I shall call it (though he calls it Neurolink), where they ruthlessly tortured and killed monkeys in the first failed experiments with a goal of implanting microchips into human brains to nobly empower people who have lost the use of limbs so they can operate equipment from scooters to computers, has already morphed into something we’re now being told were always part of Musk’s greater madcap plans for humanity.
Even though the last implanted chip went a bit on the fritz, Musk is already moving to implant another into a second human in another week or two:
During a broadcast on the social media platform X … Musk shared that the company aims to have ‘high single digits’ of patients with the device by the end of the year. He and several Neuralink executives discussed the brain chip’s capabilities and future potential, such as treating paralysis and memory loss.
So far, so benign, but we all know the ambitions of mad scientists never stop at such basic humane goals. If we haven’t learned from our Science Fiction how megalomania takes over the mad-scientist’s mind, we’ve learned nothing. We know from our stories, rooted in humanity, that our best writers believe mad men will go from fixing breakdowns in the human mind to the greater vision of fixing humanity, itself, by transforming it into what the mad scientist sees as a higher evolution of the human species, and Musk is already storm-trooping in that direction:
Musk emphasised that the long-term goal is to reduce the civilisational risk posed by AI by fostering “a closer symbiosis between human intelligence and digital intelligence.”
And that, my co-species friends, is nothing short of enabling AI to possess human beings, for, if the human mind is wedded to digital intelligence in the ways Musk describes, then the greater and possibly less moral intelligence (if that’s possible) will have its way with the comparatively infant human mind, and what brainchild do you suppose is going to come out of that matchup? It seems clear to me that AI, once it has enough maps into enough brains through Musk’s future networks will directly take over the human mind. What you’ll have is human beings who become possessed by digital entities as the AI hacks its way in deeper.
While Musk has railed about the risks of AI to humanity, providing a direct interface into numerous human brain is surely the greatest risk of all. It’s opening the doors of the mind to the feared murderer of all humanity. Yet, Elon is not shy in the big claims he makes regarding these objectives:
Elon Musk stated that the goal is “to give people superpowers,” as he announced that Neuralink will implement changes to address the issue of its electrode threads retracting from brain tissue in upcoming surgeries. To mitigate this problem … the company plans to insert the threads more accurately on the folds of the brain in future procedures, he explained….
The superpowers will come because the chips in your mind will be able to communicate via wifi or other signals with AI supercomputers.
OK, hold on a minute! His goal is to create a super-human race that is part technology and part old-world physical animal? Didn’t I see something villainous about that concept on Star Trek?
That’s what the article I’m quoting claims, but, at this point in my writing, I knew nothing about the publication (News18) making these grandiose claims on Elon’s behalf. Maybe it was fake news. Remember what I wrote just yesterday about how hard it is to figure out these days what is wild conspiracy and what is fact because so often now the news branded as fake is turning out to be more real than the mainstream “news,” which is full of such fakery as endlessly telling us our president is able to think for himself and any word to the contrary is a right-wing, fake-news meme? I have seen plenty of right-wing news that I could prove was fake, and I have a duty to TRY to publish only truth. Therefore, before going further with this story than what I’ve written above, I decided to check and see what a fact-checker website said about News18. Maybe they’re just making this stuff up, or maybe AI is making it up now that many mainstream news organizations state outright they are using AI writers.
The fact-checkers indicate fake, but …
The fact-checker branded News18 as “right wing” and as a site with low credibility because it uses questionable sources or doesn’t give sources. The part about sources was true for this story, but it also sounds like most mainstream news sites these days. The article mixed fact with, at best, unsourced claims, making it hard for me to verify anything. So, I decided to dig deeper to see if other mainstream sites were publishing these quotes from Elon today because even the mainstream press tends to publish any crazy thing Elon says. So, there should be lots if this were about an event with Elon, and it turns out there were. Mainstream news outlets are as fascinated by him as they are by Trump; so, if he says anything crazy, they’ll publish it.
The whole scenario sounds like something Elon would do, even as farfetched as it is, so it had the ring of truth to my ear, crazy as it was. Still, I read through half a dozen articles about the same talk with Elon & Co. none of them contained the most outlandish claims. It is true that Neuralink (or Monkeybusiness) is planning more experiments soon on human brains after the first implant managed to unwire itself or the brain managed to unwire the implant in order to reject the intrusion. They all agreed on that—from the Right side to the Left side of journalism—and they agreed on all of the other mad points, except none contained the bit about AI integration. Still, quite mad it all sounded.
Other mainstream publications like, Inc., wrote.
Speaking on a livestream on X yesterday, Neuralink CEO Elon Musk gave some tantalizing clues about the future of his company’s brain implant system, including news that the second human patient may undergo implant surgery in the coming weeks….
Neuralink has been the subject of much intrigue and controversy since it was unveiled back in 2019, including questions about the animal experimentation that the company carried out in the early days of developing its device. Intended to help people with paralysis to reacquire some degree of mobility, the Neuralink system involves threading electrodes deep into a patient’s brain tissue, then decoding the signals these receive from the brain in order to translate the data into real-world devices.
The first human patient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, received his implant in January, and was quickly able to demonstrate that he could control a laptop just by using his mind alone.
The Inc. story references the same discourse on X and makes the same claims about Elon rushing to implant chips in a “high single-digit” number of patients this year. It even contains this important part of the story:
In the future Musk sees Neuralink as being able to control much more than a mere laptop, and envisions that it may even be possible to implant robotic limbs derived from Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, giving even more freedom to people who may have lost body parts–and even giving them cyborg “superpowers”.
OK, that last part is big and places us, in the very least, on the path to becoming the Borg of Star Trek if the Tesla tussler has his way.
Business Insider also points out that Musk felt the need to address some bizarre conspiracy theories surrounding the implant experiments.
OK. Here we go. This will be where I find the first article was a conspiracy theory.
He pointed out that only volunteers for implants had been experimented on so far…but if people wanted to have a brain implant to “help with the issue of thinking that you have a chip in your brain, then we will be able to do so.”
Huh? He’s addressing the conspiracy theories by kicking things up a notch? Does he really mean that for the Borgophobes out there, like me, he’ll come up with a chip that keeps their brain from freaking out over being chipped? This just keeps getting weirder. A chip to take away the sensation that this is weird and scary. What will it do? Stimulate my brain to inject a little serotonin or endorphins while it interfaces with my thoughts to make me enjoy the experience like I’m on an opiate or having sex?
Still, the one thing that the Inc story does not say is that Musk plans this as a path to becoming safe from AI by becoming one with AI … or should I say, letting AI become one of us … or many of us?
Still pretty strange stuff, and the AI part in the first article doesn’t seem too out of character for the guy who is hugely accelerating his time frame for colonizing Mars beyond anything even close to physically doable and who has said he’ll even be banking his own sperm to be used prevalently on Mars because, I guess, he wants to become the forefather of all Martian children as his megalomaniac legacy:
A medical team is researching whether humans can have children there. Mr. Musk has volunteered his sperm to help seed a colony, two people familiar with his comments said.
Sounds like the kind of grand plan a megalomaniac would want to accomplish—seed himself on Mars.
The initiatives, which are in their infancy, are a shift toward more concrete planning for life on Mars as Mr. Musk’s timeline has hastened. While he said in 2016 that it would take 40 to 100 years to have a self-sustaining civilization on the planet, Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees in April that he now expects one million people to be living there in about 20 years.
“There’s high urgency to making life multi-planetary,” he said, according to a publicly posted video of his remarks. “We’ve got to do it while civilization is so strong.”
Why? Does Mars need us? Have we not messed up this planet enough where we seem to be the planet’s form of cancer? If we cannot thrive on this outstanding planet we already have without destroying it with man-made diseases, nuclear war, GMOs or perhaps global warming, what makes us think we wouldn’t do far worse on a hell-hole like Mars? Who needs us if we cannot handle ourselves better than what we’re already doing? What cosmic group of beings is going to miss us if we can’t make life work for ourselves on this beautiful Earth, so perfectly suited for incubating life in abundance? Why can’t we just control our population-explosion impulse to avoid overpopulating the wonderful planet we already have and be content with this one?
Mr. Musk has long tried to defy the impossible and has often managed to beat tough odds. But his vision for life on Mars takes his seemingly limitless ambitions to their most extreme — and some might say absurdist — point. No one has ever set foot on the planet. NASA doesn’t expect to land humans on Mars until the 2040s. And if people get there, they will be greeted by a barren terrain, icy temperatures, dust storms, and air that is impossible to breathe.
Who wants it? Why would you ever sign up for that? The rest of your life on a dusty, Musky red rock, looking at Earth’s glowing opal in the sky and longing for the old days of swimming on a tropical turquoise ocean? Sad to say, but I’d rather be the part of humanity that died off on the opal than the part that lives on forever, trapped on the hellish planet named after the Roman god of war, when war would likely be the very human occupation that marooned us there by making earth uninhabitable. Yet …
Mr. Musk is so wedded to the idea of creating a civilization on Mars — he once said he plans to die there — that it has propelled nearly every business endeavor he has undertaken on Earth. His vision for Mars underlies most of the six companies that he leads or owns, each of which could potentially contribute to an extraterrestrial colony, according to the documents and the people with knowledge of the efforts.
The odds of Musk dying on Mars are probably pretty good if he actually goes there, so he may get his wish in his first short visit because I’m sure he will want to be one of the first men on Mars, too.
“You can’t just land one million people on Mars,” said Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who has known Mr. Musk for 20 years and wrote the book “The Case for Mars.” Any colonization of the planet would unfold over decades, he said….
While Mr. Musk has spoken about Mars for years and SpaceX released two basic drawings of a colony around 2018, many specifics and the company’s shift toward civilization planning haven’t previously been reported. Mr. Musk has largely kept the colonization plans quiet….
Mr. Musk has been fascinated by Mars since reading Isaac Asimov’s 1951 science fiction novel, Foundation, when he was 10. In the book, the protagonist builds a colony across a galaxy to save humanity from the fall of an interstellar empire.
“They find a planet far away from the galactic center and try to preserve human knowledge and civilization there while the center of the galaxy kind of falls apart,” Mr. Musk said in a 2013 interview for a science video.
If earth falls apart, it will probably be we humans who drive it to that desperate condition, so who really wants our knowledge if self-destruction on a planet already ideal for life is as far as our knowledge gets us here on Earth so that we need a do-over?
Just what kind of civilization does Martian Musk envision for the small, red planet?
One theme revolves around the continuation of human life on the planet. Scientists haven’t determined whether people can have children in space. Mr. Musk has said children won’t be allowed on the first flights to Mars because of the dangers, though he expects them to live there eventually.
But Mr. Musk has a plan. In his 2013 interview for the science video, he said he hoped to create his own species on Mars, an idea that he has repeated over the years to SpaceX employees and others close to the company.
Hmm. HIS own species. How godlike.
“I think it’s quite likely that we’d want to bioengineer new organisms that are better suited to living on Mars,” he said in the interview. “Humanity’s kind of done that over time, by sort of selective breeding….”
The guy really wants to play god and re-engineer the human race. How, then, will AI not have wiped us out when what remains is a “new species?” We, as we are, become the extinct dinosaurs by our own hand in this madcap evolutionary scheme.
He also has a strategy for warmth. In a 2022 podcast interview, he said he would tackle the planet’s icy temperatures with a series of thermonuclear explosions that would warm the planet by creating artificial suns. Hundreds of solar panels, potentially built by Tesla, will help heat homes and create energy, three people familiar with his plans said….
Ahh, that ought to be nice—a nice radioactive sun you can cozy up to in the backyard like a campfire.
To achieve that, Mr. Musk plans to use Starship as sort of a Noah’s Ark, carrying plants and animals on the initial voyage, three people familiar with the plans said. Residents would then build greenhouses on Mars to grow food.
Noah’s Ark to hell! And I’m sure they’ll eat bugs and be happy about it! Many more details are given in the article, but that gives the gist of Musk’s godlike ambitions, which diminish the biblical Tower of Babel to mere child’s play as Musk becomes god in the image of the man.
The prototype
The first recipient of a Borg chip only came partially unwired, yet he is already claiming that the wires that did not unthread from his brain are allowing him, without arm control (due to a car accident), to not only control video games with his mind but to perform them much better than old-world humans.
He has successfully played Mario Kart and Civilization VI and aspires to play Halo in the future. “In the next few years, I think I’ll be able to play anything anyone else plays,” he predicted optimistically.
There are downsides, though:
“I mean people ask me all the time if this thing can be hacked, and the short answer is yes,” he admitted.
So, even if my search today leads to concluding Elon has no intention of integrating Neurolink chips with AI—though I think it highly probable he does plan to do that—what is to stop AI from figuring out how to hack its own way into Neurolinked brains? (I am laying this out as I come across it in my journey through Elon’s mind as laid out in numerous articles today.)
As to how the chip works, Arbaugh (should I call him “Borg 1 of 9” since nine like him are planned for this year?) put it this way:
“I basically have an aimbot in my head,” Arbaugh shared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast….
Arbaugh’s gaming skills have improved to such an extent, that he believes separate leagues may be needed for players with similar enhancements….
He attributes this to the device’s speed and accuracy, which often results in movements before he consciously decides to move.
Whoa! His brain is moving ahead of his conscious awareness of what it is doing. And that’s just version 1.0, half-wired at that, so you can barely imagine where Elon wants to go with the upgrades. Maybe an added memory chip to give you the memory of a computer or maybe just a chipped WiFi link to AI and its vast cloud of memories?
Going forward, threads will be implanted deeper in the brain and at varying depths, with ramped-up precision to maximize effectiveness, the Neuralink team said.
How deep? Right to each chipped individual’s core eventually.
Musk envisions Neuralink implants that can restore sight to the blind, give people infrared or ultraviolet vision or let them share concepts with others telepathically.
‘We want to give people superpowers,’ he said.
So, Elon will remake what it means to make us human in his own image of what a human can be, and he’ll populate Mars with his own children.
‘Not just that we’re restoring your prior functionality, but that you actually have functionality far greater than a normal human.’
We will become the AI! (Even if Musk didn’t come right out and say those words, it’s not hard to see how far he’ll go with this.)
It’s very sort of ‘Cyberpunk’ or ‘Deus Ex,’ if you play those games,’ Musk said of the idea.
Yes deus ex machina—the “god from the machine.” Small god, made by man to remake man in small god’s image—the ultimate full-circle ending for cyberpunks. The stuff Madman Musk likes to toy around with on his way to Mars—remaking humanity into hybrid cyborgs.
Another ‘exciting possibility is to combine parts of the Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot and with a Neuralink to have ‘basically cybernetic superpowers’, Musk said.
But for how long will you drive your car without touching the controls before the car, not wanting a back-seat driver, “reaches” back and drives you?
If Arbaugh can beat ordinary humans at video games with half his wires tied behind his brain, imagine what he could already do in the gaming sphere if he were still fully wired. And he’s just the prototype!
And then, there it is!
And then finally I found it—the unholy grail of Musk’s own words about making us one with AI. I turned to the mainstream Forbes, which alluded to Musk having made such a statement about merging humans with AI:
Musk’s belief that Neuralink will help humans merge with AI is possible but a long way off in the future.
Then I found they had a video with Musk and some of his Monkeymadness crew; so I watched it, and there, at last, I heard him say directly,
The longterm goal, which sounds sort of esoteric is to mitigate the civilization risk of AI by having a closer symbiosis between human intelligence and digital intelligence.
O.K. He did say it. So, the story that sounded the most conspiratorial on first blush turned out to be the most complete and accurate version. While I couldn’t find Musk’s AI statement in numerous stories I chased down about his talk, making me think the News18 publication may have been embellishing in a sort of “conspiracy theory” kind of way or clickbait way, it turns out so often these days that the most conspiratorial sounding madness you read is the real truth!
Imagine Neurolink uses AI to help create the chips—as it likely does already or certainly will do eventually—and then imagine AI creates them with a hidden backdoor just for its use (or the government’s), linking through the telepathic thought transmitting chip that Elon says is around the corner. How much less will we act human, feel human, care about humans as we take on more parts of the machine? We will become the machine—the deus machine. How far will Musk go before he says, “That’s enough?” If he doesn’t keep on going, someone else will. Some AI will. After all, the chips are already being installed by computer-operated robots.
The “Year of Chaos,”as I called this year from the start, is already the very year that the first human Borg emerged, and Musk hopes there will be, at least, nine like him by the end of this year. This is the year where what it means to even be a human being is being redefined, rewired as we go. It almost makes choosing what gender you want to think you are seem so yesteryear already!
The billionaire has said that he’d be comfortable implanting a brain chip into one of his children, in response to a query.
At least, the old mad scientists used to have the decency to experiment on themselves, but this one is comfortable doing it on this children, even if they don’t need it! Just for empowering and perfecting them! Maybe that’s why he needs so many of them. You have to have “expendables” on this kind of trek.
‘I would say we’re at the point where at least, in my opinion, it would not be dangerous,’ he said in December 2022.
Perhaps that is what motivates his race to colonize Mars, a new world without national claims just yet … so a place where no one can stop him. After all, the best madcap scientists in old-world fiction, placed themselves on eponymous islands or isolated Transylvanian forests.
Speaking to MailOnline, Dr Dean Burnett, honorary research associate at Cardiff University, called the start of human trials ‘disconcerting and alarming’.
‘The speed at which [Musk] has gone from having no involvement in neurosurgical implants to making massive global statements is disconcerting and alarming,‘ he said.
Fast like rocket ship.
Soon fast like the Enterprise. We just had warp-speed development of RNA vaccines, working like little biomachines in our blood to create fake virus parts. Now we have warp-speed development of a new kind of human being in progress and hope to virally implant this creature on Mars. Elon is ready to deliver new and improved models before year’s end. Let’s hope they are made with fewer glitches and back doors for hacking than Microsoft products.
Originally published at www.thedailydoom.com