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the jurogan experience i do think there's a limit to the amount of technological progress that we will make yeah like i don't think it'll keep going forever or that i guess what i'm saying is i i feel like i encounter a lot of people that are sort of techno-utopians like we'll be able to figure out anything we can think of now we will eventually make it's possible though but i think there will be a limit there'll be stuff we can think of that we'll never be able to do like what i don't know what i just think that if you like if you assume that humans are not the most intelligent possible beings that could physically exist compatible with the laws of physics of the universe which i think is true like we're not sure of course the the most intelligent and like it would stand to reason that there are things it's possible to do there are things the laws of physics don't rule out that we simply aren't intelligent enough to do that like we aren't intelligent enough to ever figure out i think that's assuming that we're not going to merge with technology in a symbiotic way that advances our cognitive ability and i think that's inevitable but what if what if merging with technology is already something we're unable to figure out because we can't conceptually understand consciousness readily enough um well consciousness whether we understand it or not we could still manipulate it the thing about technology and the symbiotic sort of uh future of humans and technology when you talk to e have you ever talked to elon no talk to elon about it he's developing neural ink and neuralink is essentially going to be some sort of an implant that they um they they cut a hole in your [ __ ] head and they put wires inside your brain and change the way you interface with information and and he was explaining to me he goes you're going to be able to talk without words
and when he says you're going to be able to talk without words it's not like one of my stoner buddies bro you're going to be able to [ __ ] talk without words i'm like man maybe something like that but when he says it he's got a [ __ ] plan and he's going to start with people that have problems with their uh with neurological issues people that have nerve damage people that have spinal cord injuries they're going to replace the ability to move and use some sort of computer controlled technology that replaces what the the function of the spinal column then from there they're going to move to human beings advancing their cognitive function they're going to move to changing the way they interface with i'm skeptical they'll get there why so last year i i got a cough it wasn't covered and were you sad was i sad that i wasn't going yeah a little bit yeah i was like damn everybody is everybody hopes they just have a [ __ ] cough yeah and i went to the doctor it just wasn't going away you know and i'm i'm a podcaster i'm a rapper i'm a musician i need my voice it wasn't going away you still have a little cough now i do a little bit is that the same cause no it's not the same coconut this cough is from omicron which i had like six weeks ago really yeah but it went it had it for four weeks lingered went away for two weeks so it's a it's a me thing it's it's not covered it's me all right my costs tend to linger a little bit for a long time anyway i went to the doctor and the doctor was very kind he like did an x-ray of my chest for free and just just just kind of being nice i was like listen i'm a pi i really need to [ __ ] get rid of this cough it's been a month i have no idea what to do and um he said you know it's probably just mild bronchitis after you saw the x-ray do you want me to prescribe you anything and i was like what do you why are you asking you're the doctor don't that's why i'm coming here is because you're supposed to say that things tell
me the things and he's like i don't know man um he can give you some stuff he's probably not gonna do anything but and i was like yeah just just give me everything he's like all right any bacterial steroids this other thing so that took everything did nothing robitussin over-the-counter cough medicine you know turns out the [ __ ] does not work for everyone it did nothing for me and then i looked up the meta-analysis studies of robitussin in meta-analysis versus a placebo has almost no effect did you know that really yes there are meta-analysis compiling studies of robitussin versus placebo that find tiny effect sizes well nyquil used to get you high as [ __ ] did they change it i think they did for sure right yeah that's what robo trip and they had to stop that there was like uh coding in it i think dude once i had nyquil once in the 90s i'll never forget it yeah i was i was sick and i took nyquil and i was laying in my bed and i was as happy as i've ever been in my life i was like i feel so loved i just feel so like one with everything it was just i was like oh my god i'm so happy yeah i was like this like ah yeah and i remember thinking so this is why people like niko i don't think before that time and i was like in my 20s at the time i was like i don't think i've ever really had nyquil right like really had it and especially not as an adult where i could like recognize what's going on i was like i'm so high yeah i mean nyquil even now kind of feels good what is it it used to be right yeah that's what i was just looking up dextromethorphan yeah right what was nyquil in the 90s was it codeine it was [ __ ] strong though i mean bring it back how come i can't have it now [ __ ] anyway my point about bringing up the cough story was there are certain problems uh
like okay let me put it this way we have intuitions about which are the hard problems and which are the easy problems right and sometimes those intuitions are just way off so it turns out putting a man on the moon was easier than curing the common cough reliably i wouldn't guess that if i were like a human in like 1890 i would have been like they'll probably cure the cough before they put a guy safely in space it turns out we haven't done that and my guess is that the neuralink stuff is going to be more like a common cough type of problem where it's like we think we're making progress but it turns out to be so much more difficult than we can even realize that you know it's like 500 years from now and we still haven't gotten it that's possible it's also possible that they do it and then they keep expanding on it and they keep innovating and then the competition starts kicking in and other people start developing new sorts of human brain interfaces and it gets extremely valuable to the point where you cannot compete without it and it becomes a thing where everybody has just like everybody has a cell phone now you know if they can figure out a way to get people to interface with technology where you can literally share data and information back and forth without talking that's an invaluable skill and or ability whether or not that actually is implemented i don't know but elon has a [ __ ] plan and that's the smartest guy i've ever talked to and he talks about definitely not he's explaining how it's going to work he's not like it's not pie in the sky [ __ ] no but i think so this is this goes back to my point about intelligence is often not why people get things wrong it's not that they're not intelligent it's that sometimes when you're in an industry and you have that hammer everything
looks like a nail so it's like the people in tech are going to be the ones to overestimate what tech can do precisely because they're in tech yeah just like the surgeon the surgeon is gonna think you can solve everything with surgery because he's a [ __ ] surgeon right right and so it's not that they're unintelligent it's that um sometimes you know people tend to overestimate the importance of their industry or the ability of their industry to solve everything it's a systematic bias i think people have across the board so often people with it on the inside are some sometimes the worst judges of the limits of their own enterprise that does make sense however technological innovation seems to be one of the main consistent factors in human civilization and the explosion of technological innovation that's taken place over the last 30 years and particularly over the last you know whatever it has been since the internet was really fully implemented into everyone's household it's been mind-boggling and i don't see it slowing down and i think that the next logical step is to go from something you carry around to something that's a part of your body and i think they'll do it first for people with injuries and then once they and they've already have that they already have things where they allow people to move a mouse around with their brain they already have things where people with previously paralyzed hands can now use them they have those things the logical sort of technological innovation if you extrapolate from where we are now to where we're going whether it takes 10 years or 50 years or 100 years i think the symbiotic connection between humans and technology is probably the only way we beat out artificial intelligence i think the big fear is that someone creates artificial intelligence and that
thing becomes sentient and then that thing creates better artificial intelligence far superior to ours and does it very quickly they they find all the flaws that we have and they come up with a new version of us and that we're not going to be able to compete and that is this sort of silicon-based life form will be far more advanced than us but without emotions without all the biological problems that we have without the desire for breed and ego and all it won't be programmed with any of those problems so we'll just seek advancement and technological innovation for whatever [ __ ] reason i don't know why i mean maybe it would have no motivation to do anything it would just stop dead in its tracks because it would realize that the existence is futile but i think the way to stop that is we become symbiotic and we we integrate with technology and that technology advances our capability and as elon says it advances our bandwidth for accessing information yeah i mean i can't i mean i can't justify this with much more than a gut feeling but gut feelings are great yeah i mean gut feelings come from somewhere they come from hopefully from years of learning about the world and guessing and being wrong and being right it's where intuitions come from but my intuition tells me that this is going to be one of those problems that we underestimate the difficulty of by orders of magnitude it's like how close are we to understanding the brain anywhere close enough how many neurons are there in the brain again it's a good question it's like how many so many more than you think billions probably trillions i believe yeah really i think it's trillions is it trillions i think it is how close are we to truly yes truly to like okay oh god i'm gonna say three trillion no i'm gonna say 2 trillion 999 86 billion oh okay a close to average average between 80 cents oh it's not that many
that's earth when we have optimal uh population density how close are we to understanding the brain it's 86 billion neurons not totally close that's the question that's an understatement of the century we're not even like yeah we're not we're like dipping our toe in to like the pacific ocean it's like the pacific ocean and we like kind of are starting to understand like maybe what water is yeah i don't know it's like we're at the beginning and and i guess my point is uh an understanding complete enough to integrate with technology it's not at all obvious to me that we will ever get there you know like we could make progress forever but it can be like asymptotic progress like there's there's an there's an asymptote here and it's what's that word it's like uh well you know like in math like how a graph can like approach the limit of a thing without ever touching it and get infinitely closer to a line without ever touching it and go on forever like this so it's like if you imagine we make asymptotic progress there's this line that because of our intelligence you know in our our the fundamental fact that we're not wired by evolution to understand the world perfectly we're wired to evolve and reproduce basically on the african savannah right and just like every other animal in the world there's a limit to the things we are able to understand right um that limit for humans is way further than for any other animal but fundamentally it's not infinite and um again it would stand to reason there are problems in the world that we may not we may not even be able to understand the problems much less the solutions i would say probably consciousness so far is looking like one but the point is it's possible we could keep making progress technologically forever but it's asymptotic progress in the sense
that there's a line here that we keep approaching and it keeps looking like we're making progress because we are but you know there's a line we're never gonna hit so it can be true at the same time that we keep making progress forever and that there is a limit to that progress that's asymptotic and certain things are um be just beyond that line and my my intuition tells me that merging with understanding the brain and understanding you know silicon well enough to merge them is probably beyond that line