What is the Future of Cybernetics?

Now when we talk about technology and you talk about the exponential increase in the powers of technology, is it possible that we could come to a point in time somewhere in the future where there's no way to encrypt anything, where it's not possible to hide things, where we won't be able to do banking online, we won't be able to have digital currency because virtually everyone will have access to all the information. Because essentially digital currency or anything that's encrypted is just information, right? It's just ones and zeros. Is it possible that technology will reach a point in time where borders and boundaries are impossible? So one thing that a lot of people don't appreciate about cryptography is there's a really straightforward way to make completely unbreakable cryptography. And that's what's called a one time pad, where if you essentially have a long, a very long set of data and it's private as long as nobody else has it, you can encrypt anything with it. And if it was generated randomly properly, you always have to worry about flaws in your random number generation or your random number source. But a properly generated one time pad is unbreakable. Now the problem is it's finite. So you have a fixed amount of it. And all of the really serious spy craft would use something like that where you've got a one time pad, you can send a message through it. In the old days, when you were manually doing it, you might only have a book with a certain number of pages. And once it's over, it's gone and you can't get more without returning to base. But this is always a possibility. And as we've seen storage densities increase so much, the fact that you can get a little micro SIM card that's holding hundreds of gigabytes now, which is pretty remarkable. You could imagine a world like if we did have this quantum apocalypse where all of these short 512 1024 bit keys, whatever, all of those just get smashed irrevocably. You could imagine a world where, I mean, heck, maybe people start implanting the one time pad inside people. So whatever, you know, whatever you need to encrypt that's coming from you has this, you know, this clear, unbreakable key that you're working with. Do you think that we're going to have things implanted in our body soon that allow you to interface with computers or technology or wireless internet? I think that it's possible that it will. I am it would we have people that want to do that right now. In fact, that wasn't she planted a Tesla chip in her arm so that she could just get close to her car and the door would open. So in fact, one of the things that talking with the Neuralink people, the idea that, of course, right now, you start off, you say you take somebody profoundly disabled and you put them in a laboratory. And you try to train them how to use this. But we were all saying that, well, what you really need is a programmer to get this interface. You need to be able to let a programmer actually program themselves on their interface and you will make a hundred times more progress than this previously disabled person coming into the lab for a couple hours a day. And it was funny, the conversation there where one of their guys is like, yeah, we'll give them the basic rules so they don't stroke themselves out. I'm like, okay, yeah, that's kind of important. Talk about health and safety rules there. But yeah, if you start getting a programmer in there that starts running this, so like, all right, instead of just going through these basic exercises, they run everybody through. You really understand exactly what you're doing and you change it. You write the code as you're experiencing it. And there are probably people volunteering that are ready to go do that, to have something like that. I read an article sometime after that about one of the early neurosurgeons that did implant himself with some electrodes. He had to go to one of these fringe countries that didn't have any ethical guidelines around the medical practices or whatever, but he paid a neurosurgeon in one of those countries to implant an electrode into his head. And he even had some complications afterwards. It was like, now, there's a dedicated researcher. Although, interestingly, there's a whole history of a lot of medical science where you would get people that would wind up having the conviction to do the experiments on themselves. And you've got to respect that, where it's one thing to make a grant proposal to set up a study to do all of this. And it's another one to say, damn it, I am so confident in this, I'm going to have someone cut a hole in my skull and implant this in me so we can learn the lessons. What was his complications? Do you remember? He had some problems with speech afterwards. He had to learn how to do that. Like, half of his face had a little bit of a sag to it from the... Oh, God. So yes, it was life affecting changes as a result of going with that. Do you remember his name? I don't offhand. But this was a wired article, I think, from a number of years back. But this was like a single electrode. And it was just doing very one bit or one analog value computation. And he had a little transponder kind of put in under the skin of his skull. Had a big lump on his head with that. While, interestingly, again, the Neuralink stuff, all modern high tech, where you kind of power it with RF through the skull and it's got a little plug. And one of the first... When Elon first kind of approached me about talking with them about that, the idea and the thinking, which was kind of insightful, was this idea that the IO levels that they were doing on the Neuralink, or they were planning on doing with that, was fairly close to what we do on virtual reality. Where, okay, we've got theoretically maybe up to a million inputs here and a million outputs. And I can run those numbers and say, well, that's kind of like the cameras that we're taking in and the display that we're putting out. And I made the point that, well, you probably could run that off of like a Qualcomm chip that we've got in here. You'd set it all up as like turn them into what are called Miphy lanes for the input and output. Make the inputs look like a camera and make the outputs look like a display screen. And you could then run software on something like what we use here to drive your brain. Like the programmer could then kind of start running some of those experiments with it.