Elon Musk: Is immortality possible? | Lex Fridman Podcast — Transcript

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1. 0:02- I guess that is the question for non-disabled people.
2. 0:03Do you think that there's a lot in our perception,
3. 0:06in our experience of the world that could be explored,
4. 0:10that could be played with using Neuralink?
5. 0:12- Yeah, I mean, Neuralink is,
6. 0:15it's really a generalized input-output device.
7. 0:20It's reading electrical signals
8. 0:23and generating electrical signals.
9. 0:25And I mean, everything that you've ever experienced
10. 0:29in your whole life, the smell, emotions,
11. 0:33all of those are electrical signals.
12. 0:35So it's kinda weird to think that your entire
13. 0:39life experience is distilled down
14. 0:41to electrical signals for neurons.
15. 0:42But that is in fact the case.
16. 0:45Or I mean, that's at least
17. 0:46what all the evidence points to.
18. 0:48So I mean, if you trigger the right neuron,
19. 0:54you could trigger a particular scent.
20. 0:56You could certainly make things glow.
21. 1:00I mean, do pretty much anything.
22. 1:02I mean, really, you can think of the brain
23. 1:04as a biological computer.
24. 1:06So if there are certain, say, chips or elements
25. 1:09of that biological computer that are broken,
26. 1:11let's say your ability to, if you've got a stroke,
27. 1:14that if you've had a stroke,
28. 1:15that means you got, some part of your brain is damaged.
29. 1:19If that, let's say, it's a speech generation
30. 1:21or the ability to move your left hand.
31. 1:23That's the kind of thing that a Neuralink could solve.
32. 1:29If you've got like a massive amount
33. 1:31of memory loss that's just gone,
34. 1:33well, we can't get the memories back.
35. 1:36We could restore your ability to make memories,
36. 1:38but we can't restore memories that are fully gone.
37. 1:44Now, I should say, maybe if part of the me memory is there
38. 1:51and the means of accessing memory
39. 1:54is the part that's broken, then we could re-enable
40. 1:56the ability to access the memory.
41. 2:00But you can think of it like RAM in a computer.
42. 2:03If the RAM is destroyed or your SD card is destroyed,
43. 2:07we can't get that back.
44. 2:08But if the connection to the SD card is destroyed,
45. 2:11we can fix that.
46. 2:13If it is fixable physically,
47. 2:15then yeah, then it can be fixed.
48. 2:16- Of course, with AI, you can just like,
49. 2:18you can repair photographs
50. 2:20and fill in the missing parts of photographs.
51. 2:22Maybe you can do the same, just like-
52. 2:24- Yeah, you could say like,
53. 2:26"Create the most probable set of memories
54. 2:28based on all information you have about that person."
55. 2:34You could then,
56. 2:36it would be probabilistic restoration of memory.
57. 2:39Now, we're getting pretty esoteric here.
58. 2:40- But that is one of the most beautiful aspects
59. 2:43of the human experience is remembering the good memories.
60. 2:46Like we live most of our life,
61. 2:49as Danny Kahneman has talked about,
62. 2:50in our memories, not in the actual moment.
63. 2:53We're collecting memories
64. 2:54and we kind of relive them in our head.
65. 2:56And that's the good times.
66. 2:58If you just integrate over our entire life,
67. 3:00it's remembering the good times
68. 3:02that produces the largest amount of happiness.
69. 3:05And so- - Yeah, well, I mean,
70. 3:06what are we but our memories?
71. 3:08And what is death but the loss of memory,
72. 3:12loss of information?
73. 3:15If you could say like, well, if you could be,
74. 3:18you run a thought experiment,
75. 3:19if you were disintegrated painlessly
76. 3:23and then reintegrated a moment later,
77. 3:26like teleportation, I guess,
78. 3:28provided there's no information loss,
79. 3:31the fact that your one body was disintegrated is irrelevant.
80. 3:33- And memories is just such a huge part of that.
81. 3:37- Death is fundamentally the loss of information,
82. 3:40the loss of memory.
83. 3:43- So if we can store them as accurately as possible,
84. 3:46we basically achieve a kind of immortality.
85. 3:49- Yeah.