Something is very very hard if we see no indication of it happening naturally. Thus FTL is very very hard, at least without doing something drastic to the universe as a whole… which is also very very hard. On the other hand,
“hacking” the human brain, using only normal-range inputs (e.g. regular video, audio), possible, for various definitions of hacking and bounds on time and prior knowledge
is absolutely trivial. It happens to all of us all the time to various degrees, without us realizing it. Examples: falling in love, getting brainwashed, getting angry due to something we read… If anything, getting brainhacked is what keeps us from being bored to death. Someone who is smarter than you and understands how the human mind works can make you do almost anything, and probably has made you do stuff you didn’t intend to do a few moments prior many times in your life. Odds are, you even regretted having done it, after the fact, but felt compelled to do it in the moment.
Not sure what you mean by “happening naturally”. There are lots of inventions that are the result of human activity which we don’t observe anywhere else in the universe—an internal combustion engine or a silicon CPU do not occur naturally, for example. But inventing these doesn’t seem very hard in an absolute sense.
It happens to all of us all the time to various degrees, without us realizing it.
Yes, and I think that puts certain kinds of brain hacking squarely in the “possible” column. The question is then how tractable, and to what degree is it possible to control this process, and under what conditions. Is it possible (even in principle, for a superintelligence) to brainwash a randomly chosen human just by making them watch a short video? How short?
Something is very very hard if we see no indication of it happening naturally. Thus FTL is very very hard, at least without doing something drastic to the universe as a whole… which is also very very hard. On the other hand,
is absolutely trivial. It happens to all of us all the time to various degrees, without us realizing it. Examples: falling in love, getting brainwashed, getting angry due to something we read… If anything, getting brainhacked is what keeps us from being bored to death. Someone who is smarter than you and understands how the human mind works can make you do almost anything, and probably has made you do stuff you didn’t intend to do a few moments prior many times in your life. Odds are, you even regretted having done it, after the fact, but felt compelled to do it in the moment.
Not sure what you mean by “happening naturally”. There are lots of inventions that are the result of human activity which we don’t observe anywhere else in the universe—an internal combustion engine or a silicon CPU do not occur naturally, for example. But inventing these doesn’t seem very hard in an absolute sense.
Yes, and I think that puts certain kinds of brain hacking squarely in the “possible” column. The question is then how tractable, and to what degree is it possible to control this process, and under what conditions. Is it possible (even in principle, for a superintelligence) to brainwash a randomly chosen human just by making them watch a short video? How short?