Departed Neuralink co-founder Max Hodak has a haunting take on the fate of humans. He believes robots will take over and will leave humans in the dust. The key to his argument is that AI might likely not adhere to humanity’s preconceptions about political and economic models for society.
“Humans are objectively bad with socialism (and on the contrary, capitalism is amazingly effective at advancing humanity),” he wrote in a tweet, “but machines might end up reasoning about their identities and communities super differently.”
Are robots taking over?
Such incompatibility could lead to some huge differences. “We are going to get so wrecked,” he added. The kind of value systems that humans have used to build p societies in the past – regardless of their success in bringing about meaningful change – might soon no longer be required.
“Idk, I think the broader point is just that machines might end up having a lot more flexibility on how they organize themselves than we do,” Hodak wrote in a follow-up tweet. “It takes generations to upgrade cognitive technology in human societies.”
The news comes after Hodak left Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink in May, a company he co-founded. “I am no longer at Neuralink (as of a few weeks ago),” he tweeted at the time. “I learned a ton there and remain a huge cheerleader for the company! Onward to new things.”
Hodak has his own tech in works
Neuralink is working to develop brain-computer interfaces and judging by Hodak’s work at the company, aimed at making machines and humans work in tandem, making his recent comments all the more interesting.
To Musk, this has been imperative. The billionaire CEO has repeatedly said that machines are coming to get us, a warning that should encourage us to get ahead of the issue using cutting-edge technologies. Even Neuralink’s entire mission statement says that “if you can’t beat em, join em.”
If the reports are to be believed, Hodak has raised more than $47 million for a project that will go against Neuralink. He also appears to be working with Neuralink’s talent for the “stealth startup” Science Corp.
