the core of the brain

Recently, a comic adaptation work has attracted attention on the Internet, that is, "The Soul of Chess", which was generally not well-received before its broadcast but became more and more popular after its release.

The most attractive setting of the story of "Soul of Chess" is that the soul of Sawei Fujiwara, the first Go player in the Heian period in Japan a thousand years ago, was attracted by the teenager Shinto Hikari and lived together for a long time, accompanying Xiaoguang. From the original completely indifferent to Go, to assisting Xiaoguang's body to play Go, to guiding Xiaoguang to learn Go, and finally watching Xiaoguang's growth, and showing Xiaoguang himself and the famous Taya Yukiyo After the classic match of , disappeared in time.

In the Chinese drama version of "The Soul of Chess", Fujiwara Sawei changed his name to Chu Ying, Japan's Heian period was changed to China's Nanliang period, Japan's Beninfang Xiuce was changed to China's Qing Dynasty's Baiziqiu (the historical prototype is Huanglongshi Huangqiu), Jindoguang The name was changed to Time, Ta Yaliang was renamed Yu Liang, and Ta Yaxingyang was renamed Yu Xiaoyang (the prototype was Yu Bin, the head coach of Chinese Go).

The topic we are going to discuss has nothing to do with the play "Soul of Chess" itself. Personally, what I am more interested in is that if you are given a subordinate soul to follow, he is the most powerful person in all the people who have appeared in history in a certain field, and he will always follow you and do the best for you. The most correct decision in the field, then would you be willing to let such a Zuowei follow you all the time and follow his advice?

In particular, in the original comic book, Xiaoguang chose not to listen to Zuowei's opinion in the third match with Ta Yaryo, but instead relied on his own strength to play against Ta Yaryo and failed miserably, and after that. Zuowei was rarely allowed to play chess directly, but more often he played against Zuowei to learn Go. It was not until Zuowei disappeared that he regretted why he didn't let Zuowei play chess. Therefore, if you are in such a situation, do you choose to rely on your own ability to learn the knowledge in the field and work in this field according to your own judgment, or do you listen to Zuowei all the way?

In real life, of course, we can't really meet a learned ghost to follow us all the time, but with the development of technology, we may encounter another kind of ghost - which can be implanted in the brain It is an artificial intelligence chip that is connected to the entire Internet and has strong self-learning capabilities.

So, if this day in the future does come, what will you choose?

Will chips enter the human brain? This problem can be broken down into three questions:

1. can you
2. should or not
3. would it

The first question is whether it is technically possible, the second question is whether humans should implant chips into the human brain, and the third question is whether chips are possible from the perspective of social development implanted in the human brain.

After answering these three questions, we may have to go back and rethink what kind of relationship should be between humans and AI.

From a technical point of view, of course, we have not yet seen the development of a chip that can truly assist the human brain in thinking and decision-making, so the answer to this question is more or less guesswork.

But if you want to say that auxiliary chips for humans, especially those that can be implanted into the human body, do not exist at all, that is not true: as early as 1998, Brian Waugh, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading in London Rick tried implanting a chip in his forearm and tracked his position with a computer.

This is the earliest origin of the concept of " human chip ".

Today, human body chips are mainly based on RFID (radio frequency identification) chips. Pioneers can easily open such microchips by implanting such microchips in places that are not easily noticeable, such as their arms, palms, and fingertips. Access control, start a car, remote control a TV, locate a user in a major public crisis such as an earthquake, and more. These chips can also carry the user's physiological information and pathological records, so that if the user is confused, relevant personnel can also use these chips to know his basic physical condition and provide appropriate rescue. In fact, more than 4,000 people in Sweden have implanted human chips in their bodies, which can easily unlock office doors, enter and exit train stations and concert halls and other places that require identity verification.

As AR/VR technology becomes more and more developed, it is clear that there will be more and more things we can do by implanting microchips in the future.

However, these are only assistances for completing certain simple tasks through human chips, and there is still a long way to go from the " Zuowei chips " that we mentioned at the beginning to assist people in thinking and decision-making.

But that distance has the potential to shrink considerably in the coming years.

The development of science and technology in 2019 clearly reflects a trend, that is, biotechnology, especially the technology of biological computers and biological microelectronics, is about to meet a blowout explosion.

In the future, not only will the now more mature body chips for positioning and identification become more popular, we will obviously have more powerful body chips. For example, after being combined with biotechnology, a chip can monitor the state of your intestinal flora and adjust it with manual intervention, which can make your body healthier, and even help you break down excess sugar, so that your The diet is also more reasonable and the body becomes stronger.

For another example, in the face of the new crown epidemic, a chip implanted in the human body can effectively monitor the body's response, so that nucleic acid detection can be performed directly in the human body at the first time. Such a bright prospect is a very important development direction for human chips.

Combined with the current biotechnology, the data is written into the useless part of the human gene, thus forming a "gene hard disk" in the human body. Even now, such a technological prospect is within reach. Technological development in the past two years has allowed us to master this data writing and reading technology in the laboratory, and we can even use the read data as a program to execute in vivo and generate results, which can be rewritten back to the biological in the gene segment.

In the third chapter "World Biotechnology Development Report" of the "World Frontier Technology Development Report 2020", some of the latest advances in synthetic biology in promoting biological computing and biological storage in 2019 are recorded. Here are some excerpts as follows:

In March 2019, a research team from Microsoft and the University of Washington in the United States used self-developed software to realize the fully automatic interconversion of data information 0 and 1 and DNA base information ATCG, which promoted the large-scale storage of DNA and reduced DNA information. Storage cost is a key step for DNA storage technology to move from laboratory to commercial data center.

In April, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich used the newly developed organism genome computing tool Caulobacter Ethansis 2.0 to calculate an ideal custom DNA sequence based on the natural sequence of bacteria. This technology may be used in the development of personalized medicines in the future.

In the same month, Stanford University and Sandia National Laboratories developed part of a brain-like computer: it resembles an artificial synapse that mimics the way neurons communicate in the brain, while processing information storage and information processing.

In May, scientists at Harvard University in the United States developed a new method of storing data (in binary form) using oligopeptide molecules, which reduces the difficulty of synthesizing new molecules, takes less time, costs and consumes less energy. , the stable storage period is longer, and at the same time, it can avoid the difficult problem of encoding and reading data from the current macromolecules, and the data recovery accuracy rate exceeds 99%.

In July, researchers at Brown University successfully stored and retrieved digital images in an array of liquid mixtures containing sugars, amino acids and other types of small molecules.

In August, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology applied CRISPR base editing technology to create a DOMNO system that can encode logic and memory in bacteria and eukaryotic cells. Mutation to thymine without damaging double-stranded DNA, to create circuits that perform logical calculations and technological circuits, circuits that cascade events in a specific order.

In September, a research team from institutions such as the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology developed a technology to store more than 10 petabytes of information in 1 gram of DNA, which significantly improves the efficiency of data writing.

It can be said that we have now mastered the relevant technology required to use an organism as a computer in the laboratory and in theory - and combining people with chips is just a few more steps in this direction. While these steps are likely to be very difficult, they are not impossible.

In the future, combined with the above-mentioned biotechnology, microelectronic technology, 5G and even 6G network communication technology, the human body chip in our body can completely preprocess what we hear, see and hear in the human body, and then send it to the cloud server, and then send it to the cloud server. Bring server feedback to our minds.

In the future, we will probably no longer talk about the "physical network", but will talk about the "internet of people" and "internet of intelligence".

Therefore, from the perspective of the development of technology, it is not impossible to construct a "Zuowei chip" and implant it into the human body for benign interaction with people, and to form effective feedback after learning about people's perception. A future history that we may experience firsthand in our lifetimes - of course, this depends on the development of AI, and the development of expert AI systems.

In the related progress of artificial intelligence, the most significant breakthrough after AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero can be said to come from the application of mathematical "compressed sensing" technology to artificial neural networks, which greatly reduces the amount of training data required by neural networks. , the hierarchical structure of the network itself can also be leaner than in the past. Although we have not yet seen an AI system that can truly reach the height of human intelligence, we are confident that this day will surely come in the not too distant future.

It was AlphaGo Master who swept Ke Jie 3-0 in Wuzhen, and AlphaGo Zero was its upgraded version, beating the AlphaGo Master who once swept all mankind with an excellent score of 89 wins and 11 losses. Alpha Zero is an extension and enhancement of AlphaGo Zero by DeepMind. It can not only play Go, but also chess and shogi, and can completely defeat all AI programs that once swept human players, including AlphaGo Zero.

Therefore, among the three questions mentioned above, although the answer to the first question is no now, we are confident that in the near future, its answer will be a YES.

Whether or not we should do this is a much harder question to answer than whether the technology will allow us to make co-chips and implant them in our brains.

This question can be answered from many different angles.

First of all, let's make an agreement, that is, here we do not consider related problems caused by technical immaturity or flaws, because such problems are endless, and we will always get caught in the technical details debate, and ignore It solves other more critical and more essential problems that the technology itself may bring.

Under the condition that the technology itself operates according to the design intention of human beings, what impact will the chip implanted in the human brain have on the human being?

Last year, an interesting study by a German research team was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in the United States. It pointed out that in Antarctica, where there is a lack of social interaction, the brains of scientific expedition personnel shrunk by an average of 7%. Communication skills have a negative impact. Fortunately, this situation is temporary. When the scientific research personnel returned to normal human society, the brain returned to normal levels.

In 2019, the Charité Medical School in Berlin, in conjunction with researchers from many other universities, took 9 members of the German Neumeier III scientific expedition station in Antarctica as the research object. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor levels in the brain to assess their cognitive function. The researchers found that the brains of the expedition team members shrank by an average of 7 percent after living in Antarctica for 14 months, and the hippocampus, which is associated with learning and memory, shrank more than their peers of the same sex in Germany. Compared with before the expedition, the level of brain-derived neurotrophic factor decreased by 45% on average, and it was still at a low level one and a half months after the expedition.

The changes in the brains of the expedition team members may be related to their long-term isolation and monotonous environment in the Antarctic, so the brains respond to "use it or lose it".

This inevitably brings us a question: After the chip is implanted, the social behavior of human beings will obviously undergo great changes. Will this change be reflected in the physiological structure of the human brain?

A chip implanted in our brain will change us in two significant ways:

1. The way we socialize will change from developing through mobile devices such as mobile phones to directly in our minds;
2. Our thought processes will be largely interfered with by AI systems.

If the latter is likely to have a more dominant influence, the former's influence can be said to be invisible, and it will penetrate into every corner of our lives silently.

American clinical psychologist Professor Mari Swingle wrote in her book "Hijacking" that with the information age, especially the mobile information age, the excessive and unrestricted information is very important to people. In particular, the spiritual impact of minors, including negative information on the Internet, changes in social methods and the subsequent changes in social driving forces, the collapse of people's attention caused by the flood of information, these affect people's spirits. Can have extremely powerful or even extremely difficult to reverse effects.

The human brain in the era of information explosion is often in a state of continuous excitement. If this state is maintained, it may even show significant abnormalities in electroencephalogram (EEG) scans, which in the past were only found in ADHD (note that (power deficit hyperactivity disorder), anxiety, depression, nervousness, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, mood disorders, etc., and are now found in people with severe Internet addiction - what Swingle calls "digital addiction." ".

It can be seen that the information age has had a great impact on human beings. This impact is not only on the spiritual level, but has even affected the structure of the brain.

After the chip is implanted in the brain, more social behaviors will be completed through the core in the brain, and people will completely expose the brain to the flood of information, and the impact will obviously be more severe than now. However, once the chip is implanted in people's brains, it is obviously impossible for us to think that it will only bring us the knowledge of Go without changing the way we socialize, changing the way we obtain information, and immersing us further. in the coercion of information.

Therefore, we are likely to suffer from more intense distraction, mental stress caused by excessive excitement, and various mental health problems resulting from this.

This invisible problem may be constrained or linked by some mechanism, such as the development of a program to help people focus and relieve mental stress, through the chip directly acting on our brains - such good wishes are always possible It is expected, but whether it can be achieved or not, we will not delve into it for the time being.

Let's look at the explicit aspect - the interference of chips with our thinking and decision-making.

Obviously, if we do put a chip into the brain, we don't expect it to just automatically open a door for us as we approach it.

The chips we hope to implant in our brains are almost certainly some form of auxiliary systems that can provide us with expertise in a few fields, and even accurate professional analysis conclusions.

Just like Sawei in Shinto Mitsuhiro's heart, what he provides for Xiaoguang is not only a person who speaks all the time, but more importantly, the sharing and guidance of Go knowledge and experience.

But the problem is that we can conclude such a rather pessimistic "slippery slope" from the interactive feedback of product managers with users:

People always want more products that make them lazy, and once they have a lazy product, they are less likely to go back to the less lazy stuff.

For example, if we have a feature on our app that takes three steps to complete, but only two steps in the next version, the user feedback will rarely praise the improvement; but if you are in In the third edition, it takes three steps to change it back, and the turbulent "public opinion" will drown you, requiring you to change back to the previous edition.

After all, from a certain perspective, the driving force behind human technological progress is that humans want to become lazier.

Therefore, once we actually implant the Zuowei chip into the brain one day, things will never stop at the point of "I want a switch, turn it on when I want to use it, and turn it off when I don't want to use it", we almost It can be found with certainty that most people use the chip every day from the originally envisaged time of "must use the chip", such as an hour, to slowly become two hours, then three hours, then one day, and finally maybe Never closed again - after all, technology is now advanced enough to interfere with our dreams, so how could anyone with a Zowei chip resist an invitation from a Morpheus in a perfect dream Woolen cloth?

Morpheus, the god of dreams in Greek mythology, the son of Hypnos, the god of sleep, is also the head of the three thousand sleepy gods.

Even, if a chip of this level can indeed make the most correct judgment based on what the host has heard, seen, heard, and remembered, and is the most appropriate choice for the host, then even if the chip user just wants to hear it at first Listening to the opinion of the chip on a certain issue, in the end, there is still a high probability of slipping to the point of listening to the idea of the chip in everything-you think, if your body can always complete the work in the most efficient way, it can always be able to divide colleagues among colleagues. The relationship is handled harmoniously and mellowly, and you can always use the most perfect way to answer all kinds of tricky propositions raised by your boyfriend/girlfriend. Every day you are in an immersive fairy tale appreciating "the best life you can live". , then how many people will choose to operate their own bodies by themselves? After AlphaGo came out, how many players started to think about using AI to cheat?

And once people are addicted to the optimal solution, it means giving up the right to choose, because when there is only one road in front of you, it is impossible to talk about which road you choose, because you have no choice at all. Road optional.

The existence of the right to choose is more important than whether you choose the right path or the wrong path.

An important premise of human beings is that they can make choices according to their own wishes, and summarize and learn from the resulting costs. Therefore, once a person loses his freedom of choice, he also loses his foundation as a person.

In the movie "Creed", the male protagonist asked the female researcher whether free will still exists in the face of reverse time? The female researcher said: You chose to drop the bullet. So, in a world reversed in time, free will still exists, and that's because you still have choices. In the earlier movie "Front Destination", we can even think that the protagonist did not actually have a choice, so the original title of this movie is "You Zombies", the Zombie here, in fact It refers to the famous "philosophical zombie" in philosophy, that is, a body that behaves like a human but has no soul.

A philosophical zombie is a philosophical imaginary and does not actually exist. It refers to a being that is physically indistinguishable from a human being, but has no inner subjective consciousness.

Here, "physically indistinguishable from a human" not only means that its behavior, facial expressions, language, etc. are no different from a normal person, but also means that it is no different from a human under anatomy, biological analysis, and chemical analysis. That is to say, the philosophical zombie can't be verified by any feasible means of verification, and its structure can't distinguish it from human beings.

And the so-called lack of inner subjective consciousness means that the philosophical zombie does not possess the human soul, it just expresses purely according to the external manifestations of human beings, and does not understand the meaning behind all actions.

Although hardly any philosophers or scientists believe in the existence of philosophical zombies, as a philosophical thought experiment, it is often used to refute physicalists, especially in conjunction with the "Chinese room problem" To refute the view that "artificial intelligence can have the same consciousness as humans". It is also used by skeptics along with the "other-heart problem" to question the reality of the world.

In the opinion of opponents such as physicalism, it is the same as the "Turing test". Under the "duck argument", it can be proved that a philosophical zombie is actually a human being. The reason why it is distinguished from human is only because the questioner is artificially unwilling to admit it. equivalence of the two.

The so-called "duck argument" means that an object is a duck if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and everything looks like a duck.

Therefore, once human beings lose their choice, although we still look human and do what human beings would do, what is the difference between us and philosophical zombies?

Using the method of "duck argument", we appear to be philosophical zombies, and our actions are the same as those of philosophical zombies, and all the characteristics shown are no different from those of philosophical zombies, then we are philosophical zombies.

So, this may be the biggest landslide crisis we have to face after a strong artificial intelligence chip is implanted in our brains.

Even if the chip implanted in the brain cannot reach the height of strong artificial intelligence, but can only provide us with knowledge on Wikipedia, and also bring the functions of WeChat, Douyin, and Toutiao, this landslide will not change. How gentle, after all, not long after Wikipedia came out, people already knew and began to face the so-called " Wiki explosion " - starting from one entry, clicking on a group of related entries, and then a new group, So people completely lost their way in the endless "ocean of knowledge", and in the last few hours, they completely forgot what they were looking for in the first place.

The so-called "strong artificial intelligence" refers to artificial intelligence that can truly reason, think, and truly possess perception and self-awareness. Their intelligence may be more powerful than that of humans, but they may also develop a set of intelligent paths that are truly their own.

Just the chip that provides knowledge will destroy our learning process, and it does not need to be at the level of the Zuowei chip. This is because if knowledge is depicted as dots on a canvas, the purpose of learning is to connect those dots to form new patterns, not just to add new dots to the canvas. Lu You wrote in "Winter Night's Reading Shows Ziyu": "It's only a matter of time on paper, and I never know that I have to do it." If all knowledge can be easily obtained from the encyclopedia chip with only one thought, and the correctness of this knowledge is beyond doubt, then how many of us will practice the knowledge that each chip tells us? ? And how much creativity can we retain if we encounter a set of dots that even a Wikipedia chip can't connect to a line?

The learning process is not simply to answer the correct answer, trial and error itself is an inevitable stage of learning, and the abuse of the encyclopedia chip will lead to the destruction of this learning process, so that the user's learning ability will be hit by the bottom line. However, those who are cut off from the ability to learn in the known world will also lose the possibility of exploring the unknown world.

Do you expect the user's "self-control" to make appropriate judgments and constraints between the heart and the core? This obviously can only be regarded as cutting meat and serving tigers.

Therefore, it is not difficult to find from the above analysis that if the use of the chip in the human brain is not properly restricted, the vast majority of users have a high probability of slipping into the chip unknowingly. It cannot be found in the beautiful trap of , whether this chip only brings people an encyclopedia, or a soul of support.

The above is only for individuals, and for human beings as a whole, chips will bring about changes that cannot be ignored.

In addition to shaking the most fundamental characteristics of what makes us human, that is, the powerful learning ability, the chip will also bring great challenges to the so-called "human nature".

Of course, we must first make it clear that human nature is not a static thing. In different regions, different groups of people and different times, what people think of human nature will take on different forms. Therefore, the human nature that an Easterner thinks is very likely to be different from the human nature that a Westerner thinks, and the human nature that a Qin Dynasty person identifies with a modern person is more likely to be completely different.

Therefore, it is obvious that the human nature between a "native person" without a chip and a "new person" with a chip is very likely to be very different.

There is also a problem involved here, that is, the "human nature" brought by the chip is likely to be "inhuman". Thus human nature will undergo a slow and quiet change under the intrusion of this inhumanity - there will not be a sudden event announcing that human nature has migrated, but after a few years, you look back. At first glance, the general human nature in society has not been what it used to be.

American philosopher Daniel Dennett proposed a "multiple draft" model to replace the old "Cartesian theater" model in his 1992 "Explanation of Consciousness" to explain how human consciousness arises. In the multi-draft model, a philosophical model of mind that does not involve the details of specific neurobiological processes, the information perceived by people through the sensory organs is sent into the "draft box", and the multiple drafts are finally put in what Daniel calls "deliberate". At the level of "stance", it is aggregated into an output, which is the human self, which Daniel calls the "narrative center of gravity".

Descartes's mind-body dualism believes that the human spirit is immaterial, but this view will encounter the "infinite retrogression" dilemma of the "little man argument". Although modern Cartesian materialism has largely abandoned this mind-body dualism, it still holds that there is a critical finish line or boundary somewhere in the brain, the core area where consciousness arises. Daniel believes that this model, which he calls the "Cartesian Theater", does not actually solve the problem of how the self and consciousness are generated, but replaces "a person produces consciousness" with "a certain area in the human brain produces consciousness". In essence, it does not explain how consciousness is generated, and it still belongs to the villain's argument, and there is an infinite regression problem.

Daniel's multiple-draft model is based on the idea that consciousness cannot really be distinguished from our judgments about consciousness. In the multiple-draft model, Daniel argues that the senses submit information to the final narrative conclusion, and this process is the process of generating consciousness, and this process is consciousness itself.

The interesting part of this model is that it disassembles the original single "self" into a group of "selfs", which we can call a "conscious society", each "self" processes a part of the information it perceives, and finally in the brain All these processed information are aggregated and formed into a final "self", which is very similar to the process of artificial neural network, that is, self and consciousness are not a single functional module, but are the same in the whole process of neural network operation. The resulting "runtime phenomenon". And more importantly, if the chip is implanted in people's brains, it is clear that the chip will also provide part of the multi-draft - it may come from its processing of the visual signals that our eyes receive, or it may come from It is based on historical memory that can be traced accurately, or some kind of emotional signal transmitted from the network. These "drafts" may be bland in themselves, but they overwrite the draft content that would otherwise form the focus of our narrative, ultimately affecting our ego.

In the words of modern AI systems, the Cartesian theater model believes that there is a black-box module called "consciousness generation" that can generate consciousness, but does not explain how exactly this process is achieved; while in "multi-draft" In the model, information is continuously input into the neural network through multiple sensory devices and analysis modules, and finally a conclusion is drawn to form a complete consciousness. This process is the process of consciousness generation without entrusting it to a "black" box module".

However, because the "body" of AI is completely different from ours, the way of perceiving the world is different, the amount of information and computing speed it is exposed to are vastly different, and the process of "growth" and learning is also very different from ours, so AI can "learn" The "Humanity" (or rather "Organicity") of "God" will be very different from what we humans currently have.

So the "draft of humanity" provided to us by the chip embedded in our minds will spread in our hearts like a drop of ink dripping into milk - no one can say that it will be more human than we are now Worse, but definitely going in a completely different direction from now. Although this kind of replacement is a very common and universal phenomenon in human society, it is not surprising, but this may be the first time that the replacement of human nature has been dominated and completed by human technical works.

In addition to the more metaphysical field of "human nature", the changes of the core of the brain to human society will bring more impact in the metaphysical field.

For example, there will be subversive changes in the way people communicate with each other.

We can briefly review the current interpersonal communication methods on the Internet. From the early years of communication through email and bulletin boards or even more "primitive" virtual space public opinion places, with the increasing bandwidth, pictures, Audio and video gradually began to replace text, and even pure text began to appear in the middle of a large number of "emoticons" and expressions. Information on the Internet is evolving in a direction of more and more forms and carrying capacity.

At the same time, we also found that people's online communication has also changed from the need to enter complete text at the beginning, to the use of abbreviations, Martian and emoji, to emojis that can express a large number of meanings, and including "Take a picture" Various "one-click interactions" including "Shoot". In addition to the evolution of information in the direction of diverse forms and huge amount of information, it is also evolving in the direction of more and more boundaries of interaction.

Therefore, if the chip encased in the Internet is implanted in our brain, we can not only transmit ideas directly to each other in the form of language and pictures in our minds, but also directly encode emotions and send them to the other party, and the other party receives the emotions. Afterwards, instead of seeing words and pictures, you can directly feel your emotions in your heart.

This way of communication is something that human beings have never had before, and it is a subversive change. It can deliver as rich and precise information as possible with almost no operational cost.

Accompanied by the change in the way of communication is the change in the way of human beings, as well as the changes in the various dark sides of social life-this change has been quietly happening now that the human chip has gradually begun to emerge-February 2020 At that time, Garson, a scientist from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, encountered a very "sci-fi" incident. The human chip implanted in his body turned out to be the carrier of the virus, infecting the computer in the office and becoming the first in the world. A human being "possessed" by a computer virus.

When emotions can be transmitted directly in the human brain network through chips, hacking that uses emotions, subconscious minds, fictional memories, etc. as means of attack will become more and more common.

A person can make everyone around him fall into a state of depression in an instant, and even initiate suicidal impulses. This situation was previously the plot of "Fringe", but it is a reality that may happen in the era of the core of the brain.

This is not the worst, and even worse, we will leave the "post-truth era" we are now in and enter the "no-truth era".

Harold Lasswell, the famous founder of modern social communication, put forward the "5W Theory" in his foundational classic book "The Structure and Function of Communication in Society" in 1948, namely:

The so-called social communication is: who, in what way, to whom, what to spread, and what effect you want to achieve. (Originally "in what way", but in modern times it can be expanded to a broader "how".)

At the same time, it also proposes four functions of social communication: monitoring the environment, coordinating the society, inheriting culture and entertaining the public. (Three functions in the 1948 book, followed by a final function added by Roswell in 1959.)

That is to say, even if the same information is transmitted from the same source to the same target audience, if the transmission method is different, it will get different effects. Friends who have done operations must know that in this "post-truth era", only a strong emotional shock can achieve wide-area information push.

So what could be more emotionally charged than a direct delivery of emotion?

So, when we can get emotions directly from the Internet through chips, rather than words or pictures that encode emotions in them, does the transmission of information still have anything to do with the authenticity of the content that comes with it? After all, if the cold truth is not encapsulated by emotions, it may even disappear into the minds of the target audience.

Therefore, in the age of the core of the brain, the truth will completely become an appendage of the emotions, and the truth will be completely eliminated by the emotions .

The current KOI, in that era, had to evolve into an "emotional leader" to have a way out, and the "opinion leader" would become a pile of scraps in the wastebasket.

Moreover, this means of propagating information with emotional floods will not only bring about the disappearance of truth, but more importantly, people who master emotions will be able to pass arbitrary information to the audience. In this way, things like canvassing during the election process will become more crazy, after all, emotions such as hatred of the rich and national pride are the easiest to spread.

How can we find out the truth in those times?

Not only are we unable to find the so-called truth from the emotions and information like the stars and the sea, but we may not even have the motivation to search. At that time, we may completely rely on the chip to screen out the so-called truth for us, and master the Behind this kind of power-screening chip, it is not the programmers who write the algorithms, nor the data scientists who conceive the algorithms, but the bigwigs who really hold the power, just like the media bigwigs who can really manipulate the truth now.

Therefore, the public opinion field lattice field dominated by the recommendation algorithm that we are deeply trapped in will become more serious, more fragmented, and more centralized in that era - there may be fewer centers than now.

In such an era, does it matter whether everyone has the right to choose freely and the ability to learn?

For example, you now think that you have the ability to think, but how do you know that your thinking is not subconsciously controlled by the public opinion venues compiled by the public account, Douyin, Weibo, etc. you are in? How do you know that the people around you are not soulless philosophical zombies who just live according to programs?

You don't know anything, you can't be sure of anything.

If the final conclusion of the question of whether it should be mentioned above is pessimistic, then the answer is likely to be even more pessimistic on the question of whether human society will eventually enter the era of the core of the brain.

Although we mentioned earlier that chips are likely to bring disruptive changes to our computers, which may even be classified as lesions from our current point of view, it is undeniable that chip blessings The human brain will obviously bring great improvements in efficiency and accuracy.

Therefore, whether the chip will eventually be implanted in the human brain is not just a question of discussing what good and bad it will bring, and it is not just a question of what it will bring to our society as a whole. It is a question of how society will make a choice between its commercial value and social and personal costs.

This technology is likely to bring a great boost to our social productivity and accelerate the accumulation of social wealth.

From a family point of view, if a child can get 100 points in every test after implanting a chip, will parents be willing to let their child lose at the starting line?

From the company's point of view, the work efficiency of an employee implanted with a chip is much higher than others, and the quality of the work is impeccable. The annual revenue he brings to the company is very significant. There is absolutely no competitiveness in front of him. He makes your company compete with a company with 500 ordinary employees even though it has only 20 employees. How many bosses can resist such temptation?

From a social point of view, people with implanted chips may always achieve the ideal balance between life and work, be impeccable in moral behavior, and make everyone feel like a spring breeze in dealing with others, thereby greatly reducing social anxiety. Friction, so is it better to have more or fewer such people?

Who doesn't want to live in a beautiful era when the road does not pick up things and the night does not close the door? Who doesn't want to have a life full of order?

Under the temptation of such a beautiful paradise, although the various shortcomings and disadvantages mentioned above still exist, it is obviously not worth mentioning compared with the image of heaven.

Therefore, although there are still great concerns and vigilance about the implantation of chips into the human brain, if AI can really achieve the level advocated by strong artificial intelligence, then the implantation of chips into the human brain can be said to be an inevitable The general trend.

And even if we can’t achieve strong artificial intelligence, everyone has a WeChat and a Wikipedia built in their minds, and also comes with a lot of nails, beep, beep, vibrato, etc. This kind of temptation is enough. Big enough, big enough to entice users to abandon the ownership and use of their own brains to welcome new souls.

Therefore, in my personal opinion, as long as the technology is in place, the introduction of chips into the human brain will be a historical trend that will not be hindered by the question of whether it should enter the human brain.

Maybe we should think more about how to keep as much as possible what we think is good and should not be replaced in such an era - of course, as written above, the individual has to rely on himself or the society. Whether power can survive this new wave without slipping all the way to the abyss is obviously pessimistic.