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Elon Musk: Limbic System, Cerebral Cortex, and a Tertiary Layer of Digital Super-Intelligence


Transcript

Ultimately, we currently operate on two layers. We have a limbic, primitive brain layer, which is where all of our impulses are coming from. It's sort of like we've got a monkey brain with a computer stuck on it. That's the human brain. A lot of our impulses and everything are driven by the monkey brain.

The computer, the cortex, is constantly trying to make the monkey brain happy. It's not the cortex that's steering the monkey brain, it's the monkey brain steering the cortex. But the cortex is the part that tells the story of the whole thing. So we convince ourselves it's more interesting than just the monkey brain.

Cortex is what we call human intelligence. That's like the advanced computer relative to other creatures. Other creatures do not have either... 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 AI is basically a 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 your 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. So then a great deal of, like a massive amount of thinking, like truly stupendous amount of thinking has gone into sex without purpose, 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 by 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. It does. That's what the fun is. Absolutely. And then people generally don't want to lose their 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.

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