New Week #67
Elon Musk's Neuralink brings its brain-machine interface to humans. Belarusian hacktivists wage cyber warfare against Russia. Plus more news and analysis from this week.
Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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This week, the brain-machine interface startup Neuralink announce an intriguing job vacancy.
Meanwhile, El Salvador’s crypto-obsessed president considers a second job at McDonald’s. And hacktivists take the fight to Vladimir Putin and his plan to invade Ukraine.
Let’s go!
🧠 Of one mind
Elon Musk’s brain-machine interface company, Neuralink, is about to start testing its technology in humans. This week, the company began hiring for a director of clinical trials:
You will lead and help build the team responsible for enabling Neuralink’s clinical research activities and developing the regulatory interactions that come with a fast-paced and ever-evolving environment.
Musk says Neuralink brain implants could transform life for those with severe spinal injuries, by allowing them to control computers via thought alone. The company demonstrated the principle in monkeys last year.
But the end game, here? It’s about all of us. Musk wants Neuralink technology to create a seamless connection between the 1.3kg of wet organic tissue in each of our heads and the 5 million terabytes of information on the internet. Back in 2018 he outlined this vision to (of all people) Joe Rogan in his infamous pot-smoking appearance on Rogan’s podcast (skip to 25:28).
You’re already a cyborg. It’s just that the data rate is very slow. It’s like a tiny straw of information flow between your biological self and your digital self. We need to make that tiny straw like a giant river. A huge, high-bandwidth interface.
⚡ NWSH Take: If Neuralink implants can allow tetraplegics and others a greater degree of control in their lives, that’s cause for celebration. For Musk, though, that achievement is intended as only a staging-post on a far longer journey; one that is fraught with ethical difficulty for the rest of us. // Billions of brains, merged with the internet: think what we could achieve! But in such a world, do we remain individual human persons in any recognisable sense? What happens to selfhood when we can access all information – and perhaps other human brains too – in the same way as we access our own memories and spontaneous thoughts? // A great schism is emerging. It’s between those who believe we should use technology to transcend all known human limits even if that comes at the expense of our humanity itself, and those keen to hang on to recognisably human forms of life and modes of consciousness. It may be a while yet until that conflict becomes a practical and widespread reality. But as Neuralink prepares for its first human trials, we can hear that moment edging closer.
🍟 I’ll have a bitcoin and fries
In September, El Salvador become the first country on Earth to start accepting bitcoin as legal tender. This week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) told it to stop.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is a huge bitcoin advocate, with a great sideline in crypto bro tweets. But as bitcoin fell sharply this week, even he was forced to acknowledge his losses:
When El Salvador started accepting bitcoin in September, it stood at $53K; at the time of writing it’s at $36K.
We first met Bukele back in November’s New Week #62, when he announced plans to build a volcano-powered Bitcoin City in his country’s southeastern La Unión region. There’s no word, yet, on whether that plan remains in motion, but subsequent tweets suggest the President’s crypto-thusiasm remains undimmed.
The IMF can do nothing to force Bukele to jump off the Bitcoin Express. But I doubt many other heads of state will be joining him on it just yet.
💥 Cyber war and peace
Belarusian hacktivists claimed responsibility for an attack carried out this week on their country’s railway system.
The self-styled pro-democracy Cyber Partisans say they want to hinder the build up of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border. Belarusian rail is believed to have played a key role in the deployment of around 100,000 Russian soldiers.
The attack rendered the Belarusian Railways website near useless. In Wired magazine, ransomware expert Brett Callow calls it a first: ‘This is the first time I can recall non-state actors having deployed ransomware purely for political objectives.’
⚡ NWSH Take: If this is the first hacktivist incursion into a dispute between sovereign states, it surely won’t be the last. And it comes amid reports that Kremlin-backed hackers this week launched multiple attacks on Ukrainian government websites: one displayed a message that warned Ukrainians to ‘be afraid and expect the worst’. In short: decentralised, non-state political activism and geopolitics are colliding, and the implications will be manifold. // Some fear that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could prove the flashpoint that ignites a larger war; a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan is thought of in similar terms. But in the Cyber Partisans attack, and in Russian state-backed cyber warfare against Ukraine, we see the outlines of another possibility emerge. Could it be an act of cyber aggression, rather than territorial incursion, that starts the next Great War?
🧙♂️ Feels so real
I promised to start sharing more on what I’m reading. Let me start by sharing news of the book I plan to read next.
The Australian philosopher David Chalmers has just published Reality+. In it, he argues that it’s meaningless to make a distinction between physical and virtual reality.
A common way of thinking about virtual realities is that they’re somehow fake realities, that what you perceive in VR isn’t real. I think that’s wrong…Virtual reality is genuine reality.
We can’t have knowledge of anything beyond our sensory experience, says Chalmers. So in what sense is a totally convincing virtual reality any less real than the day-to-day reality we ordinarily inhabit?
Chalmers is best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness — his 1995 paper on that subject was era-defining. I’ll read anything he writes; David Chalmers on The Metaverse is pretty much the combination of my dreams. And it comes just in time for the first NWSH monthly essay, The Worlds to Come, which will be about our long journey into virtual worlds and where we’re heading next.
In that essay, though, I’ll be making a case for the idea that our intuition around this subject is right; that there is a meaningful difference between this world and a virtual reality that looks, sounds, and feels just like it.
Unless, of course, Reality+ proves so revelatory that it changes my mind. I have the book on order; you can learn more about it here.
🗓️ Also this week
🖼 Fake art collectors created a fictional artist and hyped him on Instagram before selling paintings they claimed were his work to hoodwinked buyers. Two European collectors paid five figure sums for work by Moritz Kraus, who does not exist. But was the Moritz project simply a scam, or itself a work of art?
🌔 A part of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is on a collision course with the Moon. Falcon 9 was launched in 2015, and the rocket’s spent second stage has been in orbit since then. The path of that orbit will cause it to collide with the dark side of the Moon in March; it will be the first unintentional impact of its kind.
🛒 Supermarket chain Aldi has launched AI age-estimation technology to allow self-checkout of alcohol. The facial recognition system has been deployed at a new staffless store in southeast London.
😇 The CCP has launched a month of internet ‘purification’ ahead of the Beijing Winer Games. The Cyberspace Administration of China said it will crack down on illegal content and ‘immoral celebrities’ to create ‘a healthy, happy, and peaceful online environment’.
🤖 IBM says it will sell its health data and AI division Watson Health. The division was launched in 2015, but saw its lead in the AI health space overturned by Google’s DeepMind and others. Now, it will sell to private equity firm Francisco Partners.
🛰 Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites keep photobombing astronomy images. The company wants to put 42,000 satellites in orbit; in Do We Need a World Government I wrote about the damage this will do to our view of the night sky.
🤦♀️ Amazon has ended its controversial ambassadors programme, which saw it ask warehouse workers to tweet positive views of the company. The initiative launched in 2018 and was intended to counter reports of poor working conditions inside Amazon warehouses, including workers so pressed for time they were forced to pee in plastic bottles.
🧮 Meta are building the world’s fastest supercomputer to power their version of the metaverse. The AI Research SuperCluster will allow Meta to train new AI models for computer vision, speech recognition, and more.
🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋 Global population: 7,922,987,682
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.8017756372
💉 Global population vaccinated: 52.2%
🗓️ 2021 progress bar: 7% complete
📖 On this day: 24 January 1926 saw Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrate the world’s first television at the Royal Institution in London.
Experience Machines
Thanks for reading this week.
This newsletter is endlessly fascinated by the collision between new technologies and human nature. But Neuralink’s project to merge the human brain and the virtual realm forces us to ask: what makes us human in the first place?
New World Same Humans will keep tracking this story, and asking what it all means for our shared future. And there’s one thing you can do to help: share!
Now you’ve reached the end of this week’s instalment, why not forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it? Or share it across one of your social networks, with a note on why you found it valuable. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.
I’ll be back next Wednesday as usual. Until then, be well,
David.