Steve Kaufmann here today, I want to talk about, uh, Elon Musk's,
Neuralink and the future of language or the future of language learning.
Uh, so, uh, I have done a few videos here on ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence,
and someone brought to my attention this issue of Elon Musk's Neurolink.
So I did a bit of research on the internet.
So my, my views on it are a little preliminary because I don't know enough,
but I'd be interested in people's reactions, reaction from people who
know a lot more about it than I do.
Um, for those of you not familiar with it, I, I hope I do justice in
explaining the concept, but basically what Neuralink is, is a chip that will
be implanted in a person's brain or in a animal's brain, and it is able to sort
of connect with that person's brain.
It can, uh, sort of anticipate what the person is going to do,
or at least what they have....
The experiments that they have done with animals like monkeys and pigs
show that if a pig or a monkey is used to doing something, then that
desire to do something in the brain is already, sort of, call it signals
amongst the neurons, which can be read and in some way the, with this chip,
it's possible to communicate with those sort of intentions in the brain.
Either to record them and possibly to influence them.
And the idea or the sort of, at this point we only have experiments of, say,
a monkey with this chip implant that is playing pong and is used to controlling
the activity of pong where, you know, this little ping pong ball goes up and down
on a screen, doing it with a joystick.
And when they disconnect the joystick, the mere fact that the monkey wants
to move the, you know, items on the screen a certain way that that is
enough that he can transmit that intention to the computer and the
computer will be basically moving based on the intentions of the monkey.
The monkey thinks he's controlling it with his joystick, but the
joystick has been disconnected.
So that's an example of how the monkey is communicating to a computer through
this chip, uh, they showed the pig where they were able to anticipate
how the muscles of the pig were going to move based on the muscle, the
pig wanted to move a certain way.
And they were able to collect that information from the chip and see it on
a computer and basically predict which muscles were going to move on the pig.
So those were examples of, call them, intentions, uh, in the brain, wanting to
do something that were transmitted out to a computer and read by the computer.
Uh, I haven't seen any example of the computer telling their brain
what to do, but maybe those exist.
I just haven't seen them.
Uh, the purpose of this initially was to say, you know, there are so many
people, for example, who have limited, limited control of their limbs.
Or maybe we have Alzheimer's, or we have Parkinson's, or we have any number
of neural like brain afflictions that the hope is that, uh, this chip can
somehow alleviate those problems, uh, once we have this communication
going with this chip going with the brain, uh, years and years away.
But that's kind of the optimistic scenario.
Uh, it should also be pointed out, at least in these videos that I saw it said
that the idea that you can connect, you know, plant a chip in, in an animal's
brain and follow what it's doing in this way, is not new to Elon Musk.
This has been around for 10, 20 years.
What's significant with Elon Musk is A, he's saying this can help people
who have problems with the brain, but B, he sort of says that this will
make it unnecessary to have language.
That language is an inefficient way to communicate.
uh, that once we have these chips, then people like I could, I would be able to
communicate from this chip to a device.
The device would then communicate to another chip in another person, and
we could be communicating images and thoughts and concepts without having
to go through, uh, words or language.
So, and therefore it's not only language learning that would be
obsolete, but language would be obsolete according to this image.
So whatever, 10, 20, 30 years into the future, my initial reaction is I
find that language is very useful for sort of forming your thoughts and.
Uh, I'm not used to the idea of having concepts that aren't
expressable in language.
Maybe that's true.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned.
But, uh, the process of expressing my ideas and thought actually is, is, is fun.
It's quite rewarding.
It's part of what makes us human beings.
Uh, I enjoy listening to other people explain things I enjoy, either challenging
what they're saying or trying to learn and, and add on to what they're saying.
And all of this happens in language, leaving aside whether
we record it, you know, into audio or whether we write it down and
record it by, you know, in a script.
It, it, it's still language.
And I, I think language is something that we enjoy sharing with other people.
Uh, there was, I think in some of it they said, well, you know, if you
have this image, you can share this image with others and then, then
you wouldn't have to describe it.
Not everything we want to share is an image.
If we wanted to share an image, uh, I share an image.
I can do that very easily.
I just, here on my computer, here's some images.
Last time we were in whatever country, here's what it was like.
We can share those images.
So this nothing, we don't need a chip planted in our brain to share
image, uh, if we're sharing ideas.
That's basically a social activity.
Uh, I enjoy making these videos.
I enjoy telling you what I'm thinking.
I enjoy getting the feedback back.
I enjoy the idea that people are actually listening to me and thinking about
what I have to say using the language.
It's, again, it's like learning languages.
As I say, the process is the reward.
It's all about the enjoyment of, of sharing things through language.
I'm not convinced that, uh, we will do away with the desire
to speak uh, and to use language.
It's possible that, uh, again, maybe with this chip we can all of a sudden
input, you know, 50,000 words of Chinese or the ability to write 4,000 Chinese
characters can just be quickly dropped in there or inputted to this chip.
It's possible.
I have trouble imagining that, but it's possible.
And yet to me, the process of learning the language is part of the enjoyment.
The process of, you know, listening to a history book, audio book, or
reading a history book on the country about, you know, the language that I'm
starting to explore is interesting to me.
It's possible that if I were able to buy, you know, a language, call it Swahili
or, you know, Urdu, and bingo, I'm able to communicate in that language.
I might go for that, I don't know, but I feel a bit uneasy about implanting
something in my brain because I don't know what other uses can be made of this chip.
All of a sudden I'm doing this because somebody else is controlling me.
Uh, I kind of don't like that.
And I'm a little, I have to be very honest, I'm very suspicious of Elon Musk.
I think he is, uh, very conceited, um, very much caught up with his
money and power and thinks he knows things that he doesn't know.
I mean, he didn't invent the electronic, uh, electric vehicle.
There are a number of things where he has been very successful
in making things happen, but it's not necessarily his ideas.
And many of the ideas that he expresses now on Twitter and so forth are completely
erroneous, uh, and, uh, basically betray this tremendous arrogance.
And so the idea that I'm gonna allow some technology developed or under
the, say, leadership of Elon Musk to be planted in my brain, uh, my
initial reaction is, no thank you.
So anyway, uh, just while we're, you know, continuing to exchange ideas on this
whole idea of artificial intelligence and language and language learning, language
teaching, I just thought I would digress a bit, uh, on the subject of, uh, neuralink.
and I don't do it justice, but, and I, there's a lot of things that I saw in
the various videos and things that I looked up that I've already forgotten
before I even uh, mentioned them here.
Maybe I should have had a, you know, input to my Neuralink and I could have just
sort of zapped it out to everyone and you would know exactly everything that I'd
learned about Neuralink, but we're not there and I hope we never do get there.
So thank you for listening and uh, bye for now.