Neuralink and the Vuduri 2

Yesterday, I introduced you to Elon Musk's latest venture, a company called Neuralink whose stated goal is to hook your brain and my brain into the internet so that we can communicate with computers directly. Here is their mission statement:

Neuralink is developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.

Anyone who has read my Rome's Revolution novels will be familiar with this concept immediately. The 24-chromosome mind-connected Vuduri are exactly the end product that Musk envisions.

However, my novels are science fiction and Musk is dealing with scientific fact. In order for Neuralink to succeed, they need an ultra-high bandwidth mesh of receivers and transmitters to be scattered over the entire brain. I solved that problem neatly by not using electrodes but by using PPT transceivers built right into each neuron using organo-metallic elements. So I solved the bandwidth problem genetically.

The driving force behind Neuralink is to get "into" the computer before it gets into us. Musk is convinced that once computers reach sentience, they will zoom past us and become artificial super-intelligence before we know what hits us. You need to read Tim Urban's excellent treatise on his web site called WaitButWhy.com to get a firm understanding as to why this is an absolute necessity. Many scientists and deep thinkers including Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates think that ASI represents the greatest threat to the survival of mankind we will ever experience. Tim Urban uses the phrase "existential threat" meaning ASI threatens our very existence. And it is going to happen and sooner than you think. Musk wants to get there first.

In my novels, the Vuduri have already grown past this. They, too, experienced this threat when they created MASAL but before MASAL could take over the world, the Overmind sprung up. MASAL had not considered this possibility. So he tried to merge with the Overmind, kind of the reverse of Musk's plan, only to be rebuffed. But it didn't matter. MASAL's long-term plan was exactly as Musk predicted, MASAL would eventually turn humans into living robots to serve his needs.

Other elements of this program might be to give people artificial sight by plugging into their auditory cortex. I had already done this, again genetically, by rewiring Rei's brain so that his auditory cortex fed into his visual cortex (when his eyes were shut) so that he could "see" sound, a kind of sonar-vision.

Personally, I don't think that Neuralink will succeed and I don't think humans will allow this neural mesh to be inserted into their brains but what do I know? Maybe Mr. Musk will stumble across my novels and see that building the network into the brain genetically is the way to go. Perhaps in this way, Rome and Rei and OMCOM and MINIMCOM will have traveled from the 35th century to our time and save us all before the machines wipe us out.