Elon Musk says talking to humans will be like talking to a tree for future AI

[DeepInlet]

Sky has run a clip of Elon Musk making one of his more memorable comparisons. Speaking in an interview with China Media Group in Silicon Valley, he said that to an AI communicating at a terabyte a second, talking to a human will be like talking to a tree. It is a vivid image and very much his style. The point underneath it is about bandwidth rather than intelligence

He laid out the numbers as he sees them. Humans output roughly 100 bits per second when speaking or typing, our visual input is somewhere around 1 to 5 megabits per second, and computers talk to each other at trillions of bits per second. On that basis, the gap is enormous and only getting wider as AI systems speed up

His answer, unsurprisingly, is brain computer interfaces like Neuralink. The argument is that increasing the bandwidth between people and machines would help keep AI aligned with human goals. If AI can barely hear us, the reasoning goes, it will be hard for it to care what we want. Even a well meaning system would struggle with such a slow partner

I find the analogy interesting but I am not sure the logic holds. Speed of communication is not the same as understanding, and plenty of useful relationships work with slow channels. Also, it is hard to ignore that the solution he proposes happens to be a company he owns. That does not make him wrong, but it is worth keeping in mind

Still, the underlying worry is real enough. If AI systems end up doing most of the thinking and deciding at machine speed, humans risk becoming spectators. Do you think bandwidth is the actual bottleneck, or is it more about who controls the systems? And would anyone here volunteer for a brain implant to keep up?

It Will Be Like Talking To A Tree Elon Musk On The Gap Between Ai And Humans 13592343news.sky.com

[RusticRidge]

Every Musk interview on AI ends up at Neuralink eventually. It is his hammer and every problem looks like a nail. I would take the point more seriously if someone without a stake in brain implants was making it

[Dolphin43]

Interesting that this was for China Media Group. Musk has been talking to a lot of different audiences lately about AI. He clearly enjoys the attention

The message stays the same whoever is listening. AI is coming fast and humans need to merge with it or be left behind

[Batgirl60]

My worry is the opposite of his. I think people will slow down their own thinking and let AI do it, not speed up to match. Bandwidth will not matter if we stop trying

[RomanReigns96]

He does have a point about the scale of the gap. We already see it with AI agents doing hours of work in minutes. Humans reviewing that output become the slowest link in the chain, and there is pressure to just trust the result. That is where things could slip away from us without anyone deciding it. Nobody will vote for that, it will just happen

[NatureBoyMichael27]

Great soundbite, questionable argument. Trees do not communicate much, but a slow human can still say something important. The value of what is said matters more than how quickly it arrives

A chess grandmaster makes one move every few minutes and still beats faster players. Speed is not the same as quality

[UltraShane86]

If talking to us is like talking to a tree, the logical question is why AI would bother listening at all. That is the part that should worry people. Alignment only works if the system still has reasons to pay attention to us. Speeding up the connection might help, but it will not fix that on its own

[Matthew80]

The 100 bits per second figure is often quoted but it is a bit misleading. Human speech carries a lot of context, tone and shared understanding that is not captured in raw bits

An AI that has read most of human writing already knows a huge amount of that context. So the effective gap may be smaller than he claims

[Edith8]

No chance I am letting anyone drill into my skull to talk to a chatbot faster. Typing is fine