Interview with Zack Lynch about The Neuro Revolution
The Neuro Revolution is a new book by Zack Lynch that looks at how our increasing knowledge about how the brain works will impact everything from economics and politics to religion and, of course, marketing. h+ recently interviewed Lynch about how neuroscience may someday be applied to our daily lives. From h+:
The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World (Amazon)
This is Your Brain on Neurotechnology (h+)h+: Supercomputers are now faster at leveraging trading positions than humans (this is creating a quite a controversy on Wall Street). What role do you see for human neurofinance and neuroeconomics in the financial markets as artificial intelligence continues to gain more sophistication?
ZL: The technology of each previous revolution is required for the succeeding revolution. We couldn't have had the industrial revolution without the agricultural revolution, because we wouldn't have had the specialization of labor that was required for humans to have the wealth and time to be able to develop industrial technologies. We couldn't have had information technologies prior to industrial technology. In the same way, we couldn't have had neurotechnology without the development of information technology – and without its continued development. These are enabling technologies that will continue to develop, and that will support the evolution of more sophisticated neurotechnologies. If we're talking about specific technologies that will be available to financial traders, one will be neurosoftware applications that will help retrain the brain of financial traders to reduce the human tendency to overestimate. That will require a quite sophisticated understanding of the human neurobiology of decision making. That -- in and of itself --will require computational models that are just beginning to be worked out.
The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World (Amazon)
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Add to this the benefit, for certain Wall Street firm(s) in the past, that humans can't even packet sniff the data on trades before they are made!
Now its all about the software "predicting"
what the market will do in the next 50 milliseconds.
Of course there will be no investigation of these (probably true) allegations, those bankers own way too many politicians.
"Of course there will be no investigation of these (probably true) allegations, those bankers own way too many politicians."
Really? I would have thought the opposite is true these days.
Er, neural enhancement of the brain applied to, of all things, stock market speculation?
I am, er, impressed.
I will read the book as soon as I get it.
However, I have some suspicions that it is yet another AI/neuroscience mix that ignors Penrose's and other objections.
Does it?
Has anyone on that forum read it already?
Anyway - thanks to David for pointing it out here.
However, I have some suspicions that it is yet another AI/neuroscience mix that ignors Penrose's and other objections.
Yeah, isn't it frustrating how people who study the brain keep insisting that it isn't some inscrutable thing? I mean it's so obvious. Because of a fuzzy, never-described dependence on quantum thingummies, Humans are Special. Clear, simple logic, right? But you just try telling that to Science.
Sigh... I hope most people see that this man is selling one gigantic piece of nonsense dressed up with the prefix 'neuro'. The technologies he mentions in his interview, fMRI, cognitive enhancing drugs, etc., are about as blunt and ineffective as tools can get. The fact is that so much of the brain is still a huge mystery, which means we don't know how to do almost everything he claims we can (truth detection, etc.). Instead, all we can do is correlate blood flow responses with various cognitive states at better than chance levels. We do not have the technologies to interact with the activity of billions of neurons at a spatial and temporal resolution of um/ms, which is what would actually be required to read/produce neural information. We are starting to approach some technologies for interacting with hundreds of cells like this in animals, where we are allowed to cut open their skulls, but it is still pure SF for humans. Please, ignore this book and don't push up its sales.
Those of you who are interested in a fictionalised account of neurocognition may want to have a look at my new YA F/SF serial novel Corvus.