More generally, we strongly agree that building out BCI is like a tightrope walk. Our original theory of change explicitly focuses on this: in expectation, BCI is not going to be built safely by giant tech companies of the world, largely given short-term profit-related incentives—which is why we want to build it ourselves as a bootstrapped company whose revenue has come from things other than BCI. Accordingly, we can focus on walking this BCI developmental tightrope safely and for the benefit of humanity without worrying if we profit from this work.
I can push back on this somewhat by noting that most risks from BCI may lay outside of the scope of control of any company that builds it and “plugs people in”, but rather in the wider economy and social ecosystem. The only thing that may matter is the bandwidth and the noisiness of information channel between the brain and the digital sphere, and it seems agnostic to whether a profit-maximising, risk-ambivalent, or a risk-conscious company is building the BCI.
It’s a great point that the broader social and economic implications of BCI extend beyond the control of any single company, AE no doubt included. Still, while bandwidth and noisiness of the tech are potentially orthogonal to one’s intentions, companies with unambiguous humanity-forward missions (like AE) are far more likely to actually care about the societal implications, and therefore, to build BCI that attempts to address these concerns at the ground level.
In general, we expect the by-default path to powerful BCI (i.e., one where we are completely uninvolved) to be negative/rife with s-risks/significant invasions of privacy and autonomy, etc, which is why we are actively working to nudge the developmental trajectory of BCI in a more positive direction—i.e., one where the only major incentive is build the most human-flourishing-conducive BCI tech we possibly can.
I can push back on this somewhat by noting that most risks from BCI may lay outside of the scope of control of any company that builds it and “plugs people in”, but rather in the wider economy and social ecosystem. The only thing that may matter is the bandwidth and the noisiness of information channel between the brain and the digital sphere, and it seems agnostic to whether a profit-maximising, risk-ambivalent, or a risk-conscious company is building the BCI.
It’s a great point that the broader social and economic implications of BCI extend beyond the control of any single company, AE no doubt included. Still, while bandwidth and noisiness of the tech are potentially orthogonal to one’s intentions, companies with unambiguous humanity-forward missions (like AE) are far more likely to actually care about the societal implications, and therefore, to build BCI that attempts to address these concerns at the ground level.
In general, we expect the by-default path to powerful BCI (i.e., one where we are completely uninvolved) to be negative/rife with s-risks/significant invasions of privacy and autonomy, etc, which is why we are actively working to nudge the developmental trajectory of BCI in a more positive direction—i.e., one where the only major incentive is build the most human-flourishing-conducive BCI tech we possibly can.