[HN Gopher] Human use of high-bandwidth wireless brain-computer ...
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Human use of high-bandwidth wireless brain-computer interface
Author : bemmu
Score : 227 points
Date : 2021-04-04 15:21 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.brown.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.brown.edu)
| daenz wrote:
| I guarantee that at some point in the future, if we make it far
| enough, there will be an overwhelming social argument made that
| everyone should get super integrated brain interface devices
| implanted, "for the good of everyone." The argument will probably
| go something like this:
|
| >The brain interface device X smooths out volatile emotions,
| reducing risk of angry outbursts that result in violence. By not
| getting a device installed, you are putting everyone at risk to
| your violent outbursts. Employers and businesses have the right
| to exclude someone who is at a higher risk of inflicting
| violence.
| oliv__ wrote:
| This unfortunately makes a lot of sense in the current context
| in which we live, but I am optimistic enough to believe that
| sometime, somewhere in the world, people will join forces to
| push back against such use of the technology and in favor of a
| "free-er" society of individuals.
|
| I like to think of the ideas behind the formation of the USA as
| a similar spirit.
| lenkite wrote:
| Yep, get a [Brain Passport] for [Public Safety] or be denied
| public services. Actually, this is something that will likely
| happen. It will first start with violent criminals and then
| gradually make its way into the general public - with
| appropriate cherry-picked data and statistics showing its
| advantages.
| srswtf123 wrote:
| I suspect you're right, and I already don't want this
| technology to exist, or its creation to be pursued.
|
| A brain-computer interface will, IMO, most likely be used to
| control brains, not computers.
| bserge wrote:
| I would be against it, I'd rather live in a forest and hunt
| wild rabbits and...
|
| > smooths out volatile emotions
|
| I volunteer!
|
| Seriously, that's how one would buy me. Reduce my emotions?
| Maybe remove them? Plug me in, buddy :D
| newsbinator wrote:
| If anything, the argument to get brain interfaces implanted
| would be that it's cruel to children not to implant them.
|
| It'd be like withholding a vaccine against a genetic flaw, when
| the vaccine is cheap and sitting on the shelf ready to use.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| If such a brain interface allowed X evil actor to actually
| control people, you wouldn't have arguments, you'd have a
| direct takeover (or several different evil actors dueling).
|
| But if this interface was simply like a drug or some similar
| effect, I doubt there's be enough of a combination of interests
| to get people on board.
| gallerdude wrote:
| This is huge. From what I've read, a lot of neuroscience is
| bottlenecked by having a hard time reading neurons through the
| skull. This will remove the bottleneck in whole new types of
| brain/mind/consciousness research.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| This does not read neurons "through the skull".
|
| It wirelessly transmits the data from probes already in the
| brain. The innovation is that they do not have to be physically
| tethered to get the data.
|
| > The unit sits on top of a user's head and connects to an
| electrode array within the brain's motor cortex using the same
| port used by wired systems.
| pier25 wrote:
| So what constitutes high/low bandwidth in this context? The
| article doesn't mention any specific numbers (eg: 1Mbps).
| echelon wrote:
| BCI could unlock human immortality.
|
| BCI is a hard problem, and the risk to reward ratio for current
| generation tech is too high except for a few isolated cases: non-
| invasive, which is low-resolution, and disease remediation, which
| is basically a measure of last resort. Given the poor payoff, the
| technology isn't invested into.
|
| If we can get out of the gravity well / steep energy slope that
| prevents us from reaching the pinnacle, we can maybe one day
| become capable of performing brain copies and uploads, which
| effectively achieves immortality. This would be the most
| impactful technology ever developed for humans, should we still
| be relevant at that point. There's a huge hill to climb in
| getting there, and it's unlikely we'll see it within our
| lifetimes, if ever.
|
| AGI, if developed first, would probably see little need in co-
| opting messy and overly-complicated human machines.
|
| And there's always the chance we destroy ourselves first.
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| Well, a brain copy is not exactly the same as immortality; it
| just means your memories and an amalgamation of the neural
| networks that form your unique personality can be duplicated.
| The entity that results would be a separate individual.
| scsilver wrote:
| Im not sure I would notice or care.
| bradgranath wrote:
| High-bandwidth wireless link, for existing human brain
| interfaces.
|
| They miniaturized the reciever and slapped a wifi chip on it.
|
| Cool.
|
| They aren't beaming thoughts into brains tho.
| tyingq wrote:
| Wow, that's pretty surreal. An actual person with 2 high density
| connectors on their head. Each one streaming 48mbps of neural
| data. Parts of Philip K Dick's stories are almost real. Though I
| get that the data is coming out is still pretty low-fidelity and
| crude.
| ascotan wrote:
| Next step: add a telnetd server and give it the root password of
| 123.
| l-lousy wrote:
| I can't wait until I forget to charge my brain reader overnight
| and can't access my computer.
| IncRnd wrote:
| You have not received the proper number of ad imprints this
| week. Network functionality will be restored, once your
| Facebook BCI chip detects that you have fully met the terms of
| service, which you had legally accepted in order to receive
| this free implant. Until such time, you will not be able to
| access Facebook's BrainNet. We urge your compliance, so you may
| once again virtually chat with friends and family and work
| remotely with your employer.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| "You have been disconnected because payment was declined..."
| disgruntled101 wrote:
| How long until programmers are forced to ditch antiquated methods
| of input like hands and keyboards in favor of streaming thoughts
| directly to your IDE? Can't wait to be forced by market forces to
| adopt such an interface and then promptly get ads streamed back
| or get brainhacked
| goldenchrome wrote:
| All I can say is, I'm glad I'll be dead in a handful of
| decades.
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| Suppose that while you're still around, a brain extension
| enables you to greatly extend your lifespan. Would you agree
| to the implant? Totally hypothetical, of course; I myself
| would not have a ready answer. But for paralyzed and nerve-
| damaged people, it seems to me adopting this technology would
| be a no-brainer, so to speak.
| talmr wrote:
| What about other thoughts? Does my employer get access to
| those?
| disgruntled101 wrote:
| Just meditate on your breath or play pazaak in your mind to
| distract the mind reading
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Only for advertisement and performance reviews. You will have
| to change who you are to fit into the company, im afraid..
| kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote:
| > You will have to change who you are to fit into the
| company, im afraid..
|
| As if you don't have to already? The false consensus
| paradox in corporations is overwhelming.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| That attitude will have to go, cause that space for that
| attitude is need for some upgrade. I dread this world. One
| could glimps it in the Firefall novels of Peter Watts.
| "Experts" who upgraded themselves into crippled "savants", able
| to outperform all baselines, but incapable of feeling there own
| fingertips.
|
| One can already feel that pressure, regarding substance abuse
| to stay awake longer and perform better with amphetamines and
| be more creative with hallucinogenics.
|
| Imagine having to sacrifice ever more parts of yourselves, to
| stay relevant. What a horrific freak-show we will become..
| soulofmischief wrote:
| > Imagine having to sacrifice ever more parts of yourselves,
| to stay relevant
|
| _The Little Gods_ by Jamie Wahls explores this very notion,
| in the context of a parent and her child, and how each
| respond to expectations of an augmented society.
|
| http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/thelittlegods.ht.
| ..
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| I think it'll have to wait until a non-surgical BCI gets decent
| performance. The study in the article uses implanted electrodes
| - forced surgery would be a nightmare.
| beefield wrote:
| Don't know about you, but the thoughts in my head are such an
| unordered and incomprehensible mess that it is really hard for
| me to see any benefit of direct streaming. Typing the thoughts
| slowly down and rereading and evaluating consequenses multiple
| times is the only way to get any sense out from my head. And I
| like to think myself as relatively good thinker...
| [deleted]
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Neuralink ???.
| tlibert wrote:
| Next stop: telepathy.
| rocmcd wrote:
| Call me a cynic, but I don't have a lot of optimism for brain-
| computer interfaces. I can barely control my own thoughts, let
| alone understand how they are made or where they originate. We
| would need to make an exponential leap in our understanding of
| the brain and our consciousness within it to make this in any way
| a viable input method.
| xondono wrote:
| I was pretty excited when I started learning about BCIs in
| college. Then I realized that it's not that my hands and eyes
| are some sort of limited bandwith, but rather that my brain is
| not really able to increase the throughput. How many of you
| code at the speed you type?
|
| While I appreciate that they are game changers to people with
| accessibility problems, they're essentially not worth the risk
| to anyone else.
| iamgopal wrote:
| This is what I was thinking. As a creative output device My
| brain thinks way ahead while I'm typing the current code. This
| tech will actually slowdown the process with respect to output
| . What this will thrive at is, giving input to the brain about
| data by brain generating just enough query. So ultimately
| future super human will be the guys who can generate precise
| query much faster.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| IMO, the bigger problem, which nobody talks about, is that if
| we have brain-computer interfaces, it will be trivial to use
| them to control our emotions. Once that happens, it seems to me
| we'll basically stop being human. People are going to want to
| feel whatever emotion is convenient in that moment.
|
| Don't enjoy your terrible dead-end job? Now you do. Don't enjoy
| your abusive relationship? Now you do. Don't feel comfortable
| with societal issues at large? Now you do. Empathy gets in the
| way of doing your job? No problem.
| goldsteinq wrote:
| This is the problem with computer->brain interfaces (which we
| don't have), not brain->computer interfaces (like moving
| mouse pointers via direct brain->computer connection).
| wongarsu wrote:
| If you have a good brain->computer interface you can just
| use traditional methods in a tight feedback loop to
| manipulate the brain. We have more than enough methods to
| reward or punish people. Simply reward them for good
| thoughts, punish them for bad ones, and I don't see how
| their behavior wouldn't change.
| nnmg wrote:
| I don't know, I think that is a big jump and definitely not
| trivial.
|
| "Reading" neural activity is much different than "writing",
| and modifying the circuits/neural activity precisely enough
| to modify emotions.
|
| These devices are typically cortical surface level electrode
| meshes, placed over the motor region of the cortex, while
| emotions are thought to come from various deep brain
| structures. Not saying it won't happen, but we are much,
| much, further from the latter than the former.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| I don't know about that. You're right that emotions seem to
| come from deeper structures, but these structures are also
| more primitive. We're able to modify emotions with
| something as simple as amphetamines, so controlling them
| with a few well-placed electrodes is maybe not so
| difficult. Seems to me that as brain interface technology
| starts progressing, we're going to hit an S-curve of
| technological progress that will make it advance very
| rapidly in one or two decades.
| scsilver wrote:
| Terminal Man is a fun read.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminal_Man
| nnmg wrote:
| It's definitely possible, but I guess what I am saying is
| that research in this area hasn't really been explored in
| the context of humans.
|
| In the lab, we use targeted genetic manipulations such as
| optogenetics [1] or chemogenetics (see DREADDS [2]) to
| achieve precise circuit manipulations that can
| (maybe/kinda) change emotional state (see [3] and [4] for
| manipulation of fear in mice, sorry may be pay-walled
| check sci-hub). But these are impractical in humans at
| the moment because they require specific genetic
| backgrounds (a CRISPR modified mouse expressing a
| specific artificial DNA sequence in certain types of
| neurons from birth), viral injections to add other
| genetic constructs that interact with the from-birth one,
| and implanting lights or adding drugs directly to the
| brain where the cells are. Precise electrical
| manipulation is not really done, even in animal labs
| because it is not precise or controllable for these types
| of things.
|
| Again, I have no doubt that we will get there, maybe in a
| few decades too. But the techniques are much further from
| human use than the "reading" technology demonstrated
| here.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics [2] https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receptor_activated_solely_by_a...
| [3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28288126/ [4]
| https://www.nature.com/articles/npp2015276/
| zajio1am wrote:
| > Once that happens, it seems to me we'll basically stop
| being human. People are going to want to feel whatever
| emotion is convenient in that moment.
|
| I would say it is the other way. Many animals have emotions.
| It is sophisticated abstract thinking that makes us humans.
| If one can get full control of their emotional part of brain,
| that would make them truly human.
| oliv__ wrote:
| You're ready to be hired by whoever will market these
| devices.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| If we could actually get control of our emotional part, it
| will be used for the military to create superhuman
| soldiers, devoid of any empathy and augmented with a rage
| mode switch that turns off fear and fills them with
| adrenaline.
|
| Personally, I'd use it to deal with my bipolar.
| whichquestion wrote:
| On the other side of this, some people require external
| emotional regulation because their brains fail to do so for
| them and take medication for it. So having this as a
| treatment option isn't necessarily something we should avoid
| pursuing for cases where medication isn't an option for
| whatever reason.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| Yes obviously, just like there is a legit case for brain
| implants for paraplegic or wheelchair-bound people.
| However, it's easy to see how things could easily go way
| too far and lead to a world of VR-addiction and
| dehumanization.
|
| https://cdn-
| images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*gQVf0RpFjaYfS7GJJ...
|
| As always, technology is a tool, and a double-edged sword.
| It's just hard to predict how it will change society
| sometimes. IMO brain implants are actually way more
| dangerous than genetic engineering ever could be. People
| creating designer babies with blonde hair and a higher IQ
| is nothing compared to the risk of people no longer being
| able to feel empathy and sadness in response to problematic
| situations. Maybe we'll even stop feeling love, because
| it's just too inconvenient.
|
| Oh and uh, yeah: brain implants could also make it possible
| to implement the notion of thoughtcrime. I hope, for your
| own sakes, that your political beliefs and opinions are in
| line with that the majority has deemed correct.
| whichquestion wrote:
| We already have segments of the population who have to
| deal with various forms of addiction and dehumanization
| and this has not stopped us in the development of new
| medications and technologies.
|
| Should we prevent the development of this technology due
| to its potential for abuse? Should we develop the
| technology for its potential to benefit ourselves?
|
| Obviously brain implants that can read and write thoughts
| come with an extraordinary amount of power and it is both
| wonderful and terrifying to imagine the potential
| benefits and dangers that it could provide us.
|
| I think we will do what we have done through history and
| someone somewhere will develop the technology if it is
| possible eventually regardless of our qualms with its
| potential to destroy people.
| whowe1 wrote:
| The steam engine was in use for generations before
| thermodynamics theory was discovered. So in many cases, it is
| possible to engineer a technology without fully understand the
| underlying principles that govern its behavior.
| soared wrote:
| How does 48 megabits per second compare to a tasks a computer
| does?
| escape_goat wrote:
| From the moment I read "full broadband fidelity," I began looking
| at this press release as a product of dark-pattern science
| communications rather than an announcement of scientific
| progress. The news is that the connection is wireless and high-
| bandwidth. Low-bandwidth wireless communications have already
| succeeded elsewhere. Innovation could have occurred regarding the
| interface device in the brain, the broadcast chip in that device,
| the physical link link layer, the protocol layers above that, the
| external receiver, et cetera, but there are no details we can
| clean except that the connection is 'virtually' as good as a
| physically wired connection. Wherever details are missing, we can
| assume neither that they were overlooked by the writer, nor that
| they were deliberately left out. We can assume, however, that
| they did not contain any information which furthered the author's
| purpose.
| burlesona wrote:
| So back in the 60's, people looked back at the progress over the
| previous decades, imagined the future, and thought about space.
| We'd have commercial space flight any day now. The most poignant
| scene I can think of: in 2001 A Space Odyssey, the character
| flies on a Pan-Am spaceship to the moon, and then goes into a
| _phone booth to make a phone call._
|
| Fast forward and it turns out that we had been near the top of an
| s-curve when it came to space tech, but near the bottom of the
| s-curve of computers, and few people back then were imagining
| (could imagine?) how different the world would be 50 years later
| with everyone carrying around internet-connected supercomputers
| in their pocket.
|
| I think we may be in the same situation today, where people
| imagine the future and think AI revolution and computational
| everything, but are mostly missing that we're at the bottom of a
| biotech s-curve that is going to blow "computer" progress out of
| the water over the next 50-60 years.
|
| My guess is that in 60 years our computer technology will be
| largely similar to today, just faster and nicer. But in the same
| way that the mature industrial revolution made high-precision
| manufacturing possible which made incredible computers possible,
| our mature computer technology is now enabling incredible
| progress in biotech. And the explosion of biotech will lead to
| mind-blowing changes that are difficult to even imagine.
|
| From this article: no more keyboards / mice? No typing, you can
| "think" to write. What about recording your own thoughts and then
| playing them back to yourself later? How much further can that
| tech go? And there is so much more beyond BCI, we are just
| understanding the basic building blocks in many areas, but making
| amazing progress.
|
| I'm excited about it.
| meremortals wrote:
| The Mood Organ from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
| ben_w wrote:
| While I agree that we will have mind blowing biotech
| improvements in the next 50 to 60 years, I don't believe it's
| _physically possible_ for biotech progress to be as mind-
| blowing as what happened in computer tech.
|
| In the last 60 years, computers have gone from $160
| billion/GFLOP to $0.03/GFLOP; transistors are now smaller and
| faster than synapses by the same factors that _wolves_ are
| smaller and faster than _hills_ , and the sort of computing
| tech that was literally SciFi in the 60s -- self-teaching
| universal translators, voice interfaces, facial recognition --
| is now fairly standard.
|
| 60 years of biotech? If the next time I wake is after 60 years
| in a cryonics chamber[0] and was told _every_ disease was now
| cured, that every organ could be printed on demand, that adult
| genetic modification was fine and furries could get whatever
| gene-modded body they wanted up to and including elephant-mass
| fire-breathing flying dragon, and that full brain uploading and
| /or neural laces a-la The Culture were standard, I would
| believe it. But if they told me biological immortality was
| solved (as opposed to mind upload followed by download into a
| freshly bioprinted body with a blank brain) I'd doubt the year
| was really only 2081 -- not all research can be done in
| silicon, some has to be done in-vivo, and immorality would be
| one of them.
|
| [0] this would be very surprising as I've not signed up for it,
| but for the sake of example
| maxander wrote:
| If we have full-on adult genetic modification capable of the,
| ah, dramatic example you provide, we've certainly figured out
| a way to get around in-vivo test difficulties. For better or
| worse, any biomedical advance comes up against that problem
| sooner or later.
|
| Therapies to slow aging have the particular problem that it
| could intrinsically take decades to show an effect, sure- but
| that's simply reason to be a bit more ambitious and aim for
| therapies to _reverse_ aging, which could be tested rapidly
| in already-old patients. :)
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| > But if they told me biological immortality was solved (as
| opposed to mind upload followed by download into a freshly
| bioprinted body with a blank brain) I'd doubt the year was
| really only 2081 -- not all research can be done in silicon,
| some has to be done in-vivo, and immorality would be one of
| them.
|
| But why, biological immortality is already here for many
| animals like jellyfish. Honestly seems closer to me than
| uploading.
| ben_w wrote:
| Because 60 years isn't enough time to tell if you were
| completely correct, or if there was something you missed.
| oliv__ wrote:
| _" What about recording your own thoughts and then playing them
| back to yourself later?"_
|
| Oh hell nah, it's enough craziness in real time, I sure as hell
| don't need to replay _that_.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Imagine if we could connect your brain directly to a computer.
| Imagine if you could do things like instantly and precisely
| recall any Wikipedia article, any news story, any mathematical
| formula. Imagine if arithmetic goes from a skill you learn to a
| thing your brain does with 100% accuracy.
|
| Now imagine if your need for speech goes away: why bother using
| it when you can just "text" from your brain directly to mine
| and I instantly know what you said without me having to "read"
| anything. Instant communication. Instant connection to anyone.
| Instant ads beamed directly into your brain by Google and
| Facebook.
|
| Now take it a step further: your mind is now a part of a
| collective globally connected network. The boundary of where
| "you" exist and where the rest of the world exists is erased.
| You can feel what other people feel. You can see through the
| eyes of an Oscar winner, a surgeon, a head of state, a porn
| star. Police body cams become police mind cams: what was the
| cop thinking when they took any given action? What we currently
| have as YouTube celebrities and Instagram influencers become
| Mindgram stars. You can see and perceive as them.
|
| Now take it a step further. Death isn't death. Like the paradox
| of rebuilding a ship one plank at a time, your mind stops
| existing in your body and occupies a collection of other
| bodies. Artificial intelligence mixed in with real intelligence
| mixed in with remnant intelligence. We can't imagine what this
| feels like but we are marching towards it getting ever closer
| every year.
|
| Now take it a step further. People want to get away from this
| hive mind concept. They disconnect. They play games. They make
| games where all NPCs are now simulated to the point where they
| believe they are real. They are here for the benefit of the
| players but even the players can't tell the difference when
| they are in the game.
|
| Now take it a step further. Inside the simulation someone
| introduces Hard Seltzer. The in game year is 2021 and a player
| just read that some NPC somewhere had just created a
| brain/computer interface. He rips off his headset and goes to
| unplug the computer because fuck this game, all the DLC clearly
| ruined it.
| goldsteinq wrote:
| > Imagine if we could connect your brain directly to a
| computer. Imagine if you could do things like instantly and
| precisely recall any Wikipedia article, any news story, any
| mathematical formula. Imagine if arithmetic goes from a skill
| you learn to a thing your brain does with 100% accuracy.
|
| You're talking about transferring information FROM computer
| TO brain. We have no idea how to do it.
|
| Transferring information FROM brain TO computer is achievable
| with modern tech (and that's what this link shows), but not
| vice versa.
| scsilver wrote:
| We have perfectly good analog inputs, I'd rather we start
| with improving those rather than open the digital 6th sense
| box.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| How much can you improve the human ear? More importantly
| how much can you improve the speed with which you
| perceive with the human ear and actually understand and
| retain information from it? You can probably double it's
| efficiency. But can you make it take in information with
| perfect clarify at 10x the rate? 1000x? A direct
| interface into the brain could hypothetically bypass the
| ear entirely. And there is precedent for this already: we
| went from pointing and grunting, to speech, to writing,
| to digital writing, to the web. Imagine what it might
| have been like for me to convey this message to you if we
| lived in a hunter gatherer society before human speech
| was a thing? Now flip that forward: what specialized
| tools could we use to speed up communication more? About
| the only things we have left are real time translation
| devices and an AR capable of augmenting what we are
| looking at with relevant labels and articles. Beyond that
| we have no place to improve without inventing a radically
| new way to interface, and in nature you either improve or
| you die. Nothing stands still and neither will this.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Yes that's true. But I think two way communication is a
| goal for a lot of research and whole orders of magnitude
| more difficult, likely not impossible.
| greenwich26 wrote:
| Actually, and fortunately, it is impossible. This sort of
| brain model was preemptively debunked by Kant in
| _Critique of Pure Reason_ and other works.
| eggsmediumrare wrote:
| I think it's pretty hard to argue that any philosophical
| work, regardless of how important or impactful or
| insightful it is, can "debunk" anything.
| codebolt wrote:
| But much more speculative. Just because we can imagine
| something doesn't mean science can/will achieve it.
| Brain-to-computer communication seems much more
| straightforward to achieve from a technical perspective,
| and has enough potential to revolutionize aspects of our
| lives on it's own.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| The awesome thing is that our brain is great at learning
| how to use and make sense of new inputs. The big one being
| literacy, you never think about it but you learned to
| interpret strange little patterns first as sounds that you
| hear in your head and then as entire concepts like "cat" or
| "happy". The same can be said for spoken language or
| mathematics or musical notation. I don't doubt that the
| human brain will have little trouble learning that X
| pattern of electrical inputs to a group of neurons means
| "cat" or the sound of A or even an image of a bird. It
| won't come instantly and it won't be identical to the thing
| it represents without wiring directly into the visual or
| auditory regions but it will give us a new sense and a new
| language.
| sigg3 wrote:
| Transferring information TO BRAIN is sort of the raison
| d'etre of computers.
|
| This comment FROM brain TO computer, FROM computer TO
| computer, FROM computer TO your brain.
|
| It's awesome.
| lanstin wrote:
| At least half the value or learning arithmetic is that it
| shapes ones neural network in some fashion in a way to make
| it better at certain types of thought. Skipping that
| learning process presumably skips those physical changes as
| well.
| all2 wrote:
| We could train our "soft" neural networks very
| efficiently with a computer interface. Maybe not as fast
| as dedicated software neural networks, but the human mind
| responds very quickly to feedback loops (sometimes
| destructively).
|
| Which makes me wonder, what will an overtrained brain
| look like? What kinds of illnesses are we unleashing on
| the world by attaching an interface like that directly to
| the brain?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| My pet theory is that anxiety is an over trained brain
| reaction.
| all2 wrote:
| In a lot of recovery circles there's an underlying
| concept of "getting out of your head" where the
| methodology that arises in each circle attempts to get a
| person to leave the circular thoughts in their heads and
| do/think something else.
|
| I think this is why psylocybin is so effective for
| depression: it induces a state of plasticity in the brain
| that gives someone an opportunity to fill in the ruts
| they had been mentally pacing in.
| bserge wrote:
| eXistenZ (1999 film) was a mindfuck when I saw it.
|
| But yeah, I think we're getting closer and closer to a true
| hivemind. It would have to suppress the individual
| personality, otherwise a lot of people will likely go insane.
|
| Of course, it could be that's acceptable losses or they're
| cut off from the "advanced civilization" and left to live
| somewhere far from the cities.
|
| That is, of course, if half the planet isn't flooded and
| turned into desert by then.
| Elof wrote:
| You should check out the Nexus series :)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Or watch Forbidden Planet - "Monsters from the Id"
| [deleted]
| ElFitz wrote:
| > Imagine if we could connect your brain directly to a
| computer.
|
| Please, no. I'd just get even more frustrated at how slow the
| damn thing is.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| There is so much about it that I think would be wrong,
| difficult, bad and we as a species can't even imagine what
| it would be like. How do you install an ad blocker on an
| interface like that?
| ElFitz wrote:
| Very good question.
|
| Regarding the ad blocker, one thing I definitely can't
| wait for are true AR glasses that could act as a real-
| life ad blocker.
|
| Being out in the street doesn't mean I have in any way
| agreed to being constantly drowned in and have my
| attention stolen away by all this bloody noise.
| katzgrau wrote:
| I'd argue we already connected ourselves to computers, and
| we're just using the safest but slowest adapters available
| right now.
| ElFitz wrote:
| We could argue on "safest", but definitely the compromise
| on speed, ease of use and safety that I can think of that
| I'm the most comfortable with
| qayxc wrote:
| I'm curious, what would a solution look like that's even
| safer than a touch interface (mouse, keyboard, screen) or
| voice?
| ElFitz wrote:
| Well, removing audio and images, leaving only text, would
| make it safer.
|
| I, and probably many others, wouldn't have stumbled upon
| some of the things I have. They thankfully are now only
| blurry memories to me, even though merely evoking them
| still is nauseating.
|
| It would also dramatically reduce the impact of much of
| the bullshit content out there, since words appear to
| have much less emotional impact than images (and appear
| to be much less appealing), and thus be safer to society
| as a whole.
|
| A text-only interface would also be much less useful and
| much more annoying to use.
| all2 wrote:
| > since words appear to have much less emotional impact
| than images
|
| To some. My imagination is quite good and as a child I
| consumed vast quantities of print media. A lot of it
| wasn't appropriate for a child to consume.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Same here, as evidenced when one rainy Saturday afternoon
| the family were all together after lunch, grandparents
| drinking tea, me cross legged on the floor reading when I
| innocently asked the room "hey, what does cunt mean?'
|
| Grandma turned puce and dad snatched the book from me,
| wtf are you reading?
|
| James Herbert's Rats trilogy. Aged 8.
|
| Warped ever since.
|
| Text is plenty.
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| The notion of a neurally connected Facebook or Google scares
| the heck out of me. Apart from the countless petabytes of
| data they would collect, just imagine a world where the
| powers that be can actually tap into your thoughts, perhaps
| even implant ideas that they think you should have. At a
| certain point, we lose our individuality and become subsumed
| by the global AI, game over.
|
| But before that distant dystopian point is reached, I do hope
| we develop ways for paralyzed people to regain sensory
| control and live normal lives.
| ElFitz wrote:
| > At a certain point, we lose our individuality and become
| subsumed by the global AI, game over.
|
| In a way, we already have. Each and every one of us is
| constantly influenced by and influencing untold numbers of
| people, and most beliefs and knowledge are more or less
| "standardised".
|
| Most people follow the school -> (college ->) 9 to 5 ->
| retire consensus, and even those who believe themselves to
| be outliers actually behave how outliers are expected to
| behave, all of us furthering the goals set by others, some
| of which died have even died long ago.
|
| Actual individuality is quite rare and usually expressed at
| a very small scale.
| sigg3 wrote:
| I think your identification of individuality and a
| measure of uniqueness is a mistake.
|
| We're not individuals apart from others, the others are
| presupposed. The I is an abstraction in the sense that it
| presupposes social terms to understand itself. You need a
| reference, like culture, to be correctly understood as
| "alternative" (although 'peripheral' in terms of some
| specific aspects is more correct).
|
| If you're not in a community at all, you're not going to
| reproduce.
|
| Actual individuality is merely recognizing the exercised
| autonomy by an agent. You are still an individual even
| when you behave according to existing mores you did not
| create.
|
| (The extra social esteem bestowed to relative difference
| is a cultural trend and a historical phenomenon. It does
| not determine our species, only our current conditions
| and predicaments.)
| ElFitz wrote:
| I fail to see how your arguments contradict my words.
|
| Each ant constantly exercises it's autonomy. Would you
| nonetheless argue that it has any individuality in the
| way the gp intended the word?
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| How would individuality be expressed at large scale,
| anyhow? Funny thought.
| ElFitz wrote:
| By figuring and trying out new ways of being instead of
| seeking to conform to archetypes.
|
| By trying out new ways out of repeating situations and
| creating new behaviours instead of either repeating the
| same habits or trying to adopt someone else's response to
| them.
|
| At an individual's scale, those would be large and have
| big impacts.
|
| Much more so than the colour of my living room's wall, my
| type of car or defining myself by wearing either shirts
| or T-shirts and trying to impose on everyone else what I
| consider to be professional or unprofessional.
| badjeans wrote:
| What's so dsytopian about that?
| cercatrova wrote:
| > He rips off his headset and goes to unplug the computer
| because fuck this game, all the DLC clearly ruined it.
|
| > The most poignant scene I can think of: in 2001 A Space
| Odyssey, the character flies on a Pan-Am spaceship to the
| moon, and then goes into a phone booth to make a phone call.
|
| Interesting that you commit the same fallacy as the parent
| talks about: you talk about all this complexity in biotech
| but then assume that there's going to be a headset with a
| computer in order to connect to the simulation, rather than
| it being directly implanted into one's brain.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I added that for a bit of color :)
| MetalGuru wrote:
| > Now take it a step further. Inside the simulation someone
| introduces Hard Seltzer. The in game year is 2021 and a
| player just read that some NPC somewhere had just created a
| brain/computer interface. He rips off his headset and goes to
| unplug the computer because fuck this game, all the DLC
| clearly ruined it.
|
| Lmao. Hard seltzer isn't that bad
| IgorPartola wrote:
| It's proof we are in a simulation. What else but a random
| item generator could have come up with it?
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > Now take it a step further. Death isn't death. Like the
| paradox of rebuilding a ship one plank at a time, your mind
| stops existing in your body and occupies a collection of
| other bodies.
|
| Douglas Hofstadter talks about this in "I am a Strange Loop"
| [1], but he argues that our 'soul fragments' as he calls them
| are a representation of ourselves in others. Depending on how
| large of a fragment they hold in our brain, we can perceive
| the world as they do, and think as the other person. They get
| to experience the world through us, in a sense, given that we
| 'allow them to'.
|
| It is an interesting idea, and helps reconcile the death of
| our loved ones.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-
| Hofstadter/dp...
| phreack wrote:
| This reads like an Asimov story! He really did have some very
| well informed predictions that seem accurate even nowadays.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Now take it a step further. People want to get away from
| this hive mind concept._
|
| Why would they?
|
| All the preceding paragraphs sound like Borg collective, but
| hey, if it's voluntary, it actually doesn't sound bad. As
| long as we can keep adtech away.
| bserge wrote:
| Yeah... _if_ it 's voluntary.
|
| Working is voluntary.
|
| Sure, you want to move to a farm far away from all the
| madness or you want to sit in a workshop designing robots
| all day, but you need money, so you "volunteer" to work
| some job you barely tolerate in or near a city for all of
| your best years.
|
| The ads are just constant slaps in the face.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| We were also at the bottom of the s-curve of social malware and
| adtech, which turned out to the real outcome of commoditised
| computing.
|
| The rhetoric of personal creativity and freedom was flattened
| by something far less interesting and more toxic.
|
| I wouldn't be so keen to rush headlong into a bioware-connected
| world until that problem is solved.
| frashelaw wrote:
| This indeed is also my main fear. All the nefarious,
| intrusive, methods of advertising will get a hundred times
| worse, but now be directly beamed into our brains. Our
| hypercapitalist economy will only accelerate and exacerbate
| this.
| fnord77 wrote:
| we have something today that's 3-4x faster than pecking on a
| smartphone keyboard: voice to text.
| StavrosK wrote:
| I extremely doubt that, I type faster with predictive text
| than I speak.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Entirely depends on the individual. With a virtual on-
| screen keyboard, I can rarely type even one word without
| error. It's like my fingertips are just too big to hit the
| keys accurately. Swipe-keying is somewhat better/faster but
| I'm much better with real physical keys. Speech-to-text
| used to be pretty bad but with my current phone it's better
| than typing, for me. The downside is I hate talking to
| computers.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Have you used SwiftKey? I find it corrects 99% of my
| errors, to the point where I just press keys in the
| vicinity of what I want to type and it comes out correct.
| ungamed wrote:
| But only 90% accurate, thats 10% not accurate enough.
| derefr wrote:
| > we had been near the top of an s-curve when it came to space
| tech
|
| Near the top of an s-curve in _getting-to-space_ ("heavy lift")
| tech, more like.
|
| I'd say the field of actual _in-space_ tech (i.e. technology
| that takes advantage of low-gravity / low-pressure / low-
| oxygen environments) is still pretty nascent. We still treat
| space as "Earth, minus some guarantees" (i.e. something we have
| to _harden_ for) rather than doing much with the unique
| _benefits_ of space.
|
| It'll probably take having a long-term industrial base
| operating _from_ space to see much change there, though.
|
| Imagine, for example, living on a space station, and having
| your food cooked using cooking techniques that assume cheaply-
| available vacuum and/or anoxic environments. :)
| madpata wrote:
| > cooking techniques that assume cheaply-available vacuum
|
| That also assumes that the atmosphere you're venting for that
| "cheap vacuum" is cheap as well.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| You don't have to vent. You can just compress into storage.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| So to get your cheap vaccuum you first have to make a
| vacuum in a chamber by sucking the air out before opening
| it to space? You can just skip the open it to space part
| and do it on earth!
| burlesona wrote:
| Yeah I agree, there are "generations" of technology, and I
| think that people in the 60's looked at the progress of
| transportation tech from 1910 to 1960 and thought "at this
| pace we'll all be zipping around the solar system like it's
| nothing by the 2000s." It was not easy to form an intuition
| of why the first generation of space tech was going to hit
| physics-imposed limits that would "slow that progress."
|
| To be fair we still made lots of progress with space tech
| after the 60's, and I think via SpaceX and others we are
| hopefully now starting a new S-curve unlocked by cheaper
| access to LEO.
| akhilpotla wrote:
| An interesting thing to think about was people used to
| think of getting somewhere. Now we think of things coming
| to us. In a way, we did achieve the "zipping around", it's
| just that we did it via the internet and wireless
| communication. Of course, it is not the same, but it is
| similar.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 60s space tech also hit a lot of limitations of computers
| of the time. SpaceX's Super Heavy is in some ways a
| reimagining of N1's first stage, but with control software
| that makes it viable to deal with engine failures in
| flight.
|
| But a big problem is also that the progress in space tech
| wasn't organic. There was no economic incentive, it was
| driven purely by propaganda, national pride and political
| goals. Once that fell away it took half a century for
| economic usecases catch up to a point where private
| investment was viable.
| PeterisP wrote:
| "food cooked using cooking techniques that assume cheaply-
| available vacuum " - what would those be?
|
| Vacuum isn't something that's hard to get if you need it, all
| you need is a motor driving a pump, so if any industrial food
| process or one of the fancy restaurant chefs would have a
| good use for it, they would be already using vacuum in
| cooking. A kitchen vacuum sealer is <100$ (I'm assuming that
| would count as "cheaply available"), and it's not
| particularly useful though for most other cooking purposes
| that come to mind.
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| Space tech might be considerably further along today, had we
| in the U.S. not limited our R&D after 1969. A reusable
| shuttle that cost over $1B per flight was interesting
| innovation in 1981, but it actually represented a dead end
| for the U.S. rather than the beginning of a new era of
| exploration.
| musingsole wrote:
| Once the moon mission was accomplished, we lacked a clear
| target on which to stay focused. Build cool things, but
| what for?
|
| Researchers could concoct all sorts of narratives, but it'd
| lost the spark that held the layman's attention and
| permitted the spend of political capital.
| wongarsu wrote:
| From what I gather from the era the next goals were
| pretty clear, even to the general public: "go to Mars"
| (or in the Soviet case "go to Venus"), and then go to
| Alpha Centauri.
|
| If the Soviets would have won the race to the moon this
| might even have happened. But instead the Soviets decided
| to focus on space stations, and the US declared
| themselves winner and did largely nothing (by rejecting
| NASA's Space Transportation System proposal, which was
| also about a space station and a way to get there
| cheaply).
| lumost wrote:
| The space shuttle was a bad system for a number of
| political reasons. Its per launch cost was comparable to
| developing new heavy lifts or developing new missions to
| the outer planets.
|
| Effectively nasa was spending their RnD money on opex and
| not getting any political capital back for it. Tragically
| the program had been set up with the promise of a space
| truck, if nasa admitted they didn't deliver a space truck
| Congress would have been unlikely to fund a new program.
| Had the budget been allocated entirely to either
| technological development or novel explorations America's
| willingness to fund nasa could have been substantially
| different.
| hhs wrote:
| There's a startup called MindPortal (YC W21) that seems focused
| on using tech to review thoughts and control things:
|
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mindportal
| d_silin wrote:
| That's actually a good prediction. Biotech is untapped field
| for moonshot-scale breakthroughs, even the current mRNA
| vaccines is only a small part of what will be possible in 10-15
| years.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I think this is why the grand-parent is perhaps making an
| error in thinking that e.g. space travel or computing are
| silos unto their own.
|
| Having worked in wet labs and deep learning labs, I think
| we've a lot to gain from increasing our ability to simulate
| experiments in silico and automate biological processes.
|
| A lot of the room for improvement has been carved out by
| improvements in machine learning.
| burlesona wrote:
| I agree with you :)
|
| > But in the same way that the mature industrial revolution
| made high-precision manufacturing possible which made
| incredible computers possible, our mature computer
| technology is now enabling incredible progress in biotech.
| jszymborski wrote:
| True, I missed that!
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| With the track records we have of power and technological
| abuses, I'm not sure I'm excited about having a direct
| interface to my head.
|
| In fact, I would be more excited about IRL laws tuning down
| what some are doing with the current indirect interfaces to my
| head, such as fake news, propaganda, advertising and
| manipulations of all sorts.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I agree with you, and I'd say that we are perhaps in the
| bottom, or the middle of the S curve in software. Despite all
| the technological progress in hardware, our software is very
| slow and buggy. We end up increasing complexity in the name of
| 'productivity' and going up in abstractions, but we end up
| lacking fine-grained control and performance in modern systems.
|
| I hope that we see a paradigm shift back towards writing robust
| and performant systems instead of stacking abstractions. Sure,
| Monads and Transformers are all fun to use, make code coincise
| and are very satisfying when they compose well, but, what's the
| hidden cost, and is it worth it?
|
| As a user that encounters bugs at a disproportionally high
| rate, I'd say no. The trade-off in increasing abstractions is
| not worth the trade-off.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| I think this has more to do with management timeline
| expectations and income valuation than software development.
| I do understand that they're almost inseparable, as software
| has to make money. But, timelines need to take into account
| the "craft" of software creation and not just the desk hours,
| for lack of better terms =/ Short timelines and quick turn
| arounds don't leave time for refactoring and quality code
| creation. First passes tend to be the final draft, more often
| then not.
| jolux wrote:
| Your experience of using Haskell is that it causes more bugs
| than less abstract languages?
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| No, on the contrary, my experience with Haskell is that my
| code is mostly bug free, but ends up less performant
| because you can accidentally create huge trunks in the heap
| and it consumes too much mental stamina.
|
| However, there exists an intermediate plane of abstraction
| over C and under Haskell that is absolutely horrendous and
| results in all sorts of weird bugs and unpredictable
| situations.
| jolux wrote:
| What about Rust?
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| I've heard people say that Haskell would be better with
| eager rather than lazy evaluation, because of the mental
| burden that it causes. IMO that doesn't seem like a hard
| problem to solve. We can design pure functional languages
| with eager evaluation.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Haskell would be better if it used polarity and focusing
| to make _both_ strict and lazy evaluation first-class
| citizens in the language. A stricrly-evaluated
| counterpart to Haskell is just ML, which we 've had since
| the 1970s.
| jose_zap wrote:
| You can make any module strict by using the XStrict
| language pragma in Haskell.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| I've coded in OCaml, which wasn't pure immutable, but
| rather immutable by default. Because it has mutability,
| that removes the focus on immutable data structures,
| making it a very different language.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| It makes sense though, the cost of hardware per performance
| has nosedove, whereas the cost of human labor has probably
| gone up? Why pay devs to write fast code when you can buy
| faster computers faster and cheaper?
|
| I wonder when the trend reverses. It must, at some point,
| mustn't it?
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > Why pay devs to write fast code when you can buy faster
| computers faster and cheaper?
|
| Because you can do more in the same time. Speed and
| responsiveness are features, the issue is, the general
| population has come to accept that bugs are not only
| acceptable, but just that, 'bugs' that you can shoo away by
| restarting the machine/program.
|
| > I wonder when the trend reverses. It must, at some point,
| mustn't it?
|
| I hope so. As we have seen with spectre and now AMD's
| equivalent, speculative execution is risky and very complex
| to get right. We can't rely on ever increasing complexity
| on CPUs and fabrication processes, at some point quantum
| mechanics will bite back.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Pretty much. I'm less excited. Because I was super excited 50
| years ago when we were at the bottom of the S-curve on
| computers and I had no idea they would eventually be
| commandeered to rip off my parents. I think of it as a "wider"
| view of the impacts vs a "narrow" view of the benefits.
|
| For me, the nagging question is what happens when biotech has
| figured out biological systems to the point that everyone stops
| aging/dying[1]. Does that 10 billion people, give or take,
| become "the humans" for the rest of time?
|
| [1] Lots of evidence that there is no "reason" for cell
| senescence, it's just an evolutionary afterthought (you
| succeeded in reproducing, now go die) and like other things can
| be "fixed."
| pmichaud wrote:
| I wish I could find the source, but when I've looked into
| this in the past I was reasonably convinced that the
| population would go up a bit, but not catastrophically, with
| the basic idea being that people die all the time for lots of
| reasons, only one of which is "aging" (aging is multiple
| things, blah blah). So people's lifespans would be much
| longer on average, but not infinitely long. Something more
| like 300 or 400 years, with a pretty big standard deviation.
| bopbeepboop wrote:
| I see it the other way:
|
| We've had a revolutionary S-curve with computing/artificial
| reasoning in inventing transistors -- but we know we're still
| at the bottom of two related S-curves, quantum computing (an
| exponential increase in many problems of interest) and
| IOT/smart systems where our automated reasoning is embodied in
| something. We know somewhere up those curves lies the ability
| to make new kinds of minds.
|
| I think both of those will prove to be bigger than bio-
| science... and more over, bio-science will require them to a)
| do the experiments and b) find uses for the technologies.
|
| I think human augmentation will turn out to be like
| spaceflight: humans are near the top of their S-curve already.
|
| Instead, I think biology research won't come into its own until
| AGI research does and we have an idea of how to make _new_
| biological systems.
|
| Of course, that might kill us all. Horribly.
| oceanghost wrote:
| > but near the bottom of the s-curve of computers
|
| I think the most interesting exemplar of this is Star Trek. As
| everyone knows, Star Trek is based on 19th century naval
| warfare. The battle scenes are hilarious-- a captain calling
| out orders at human speeds to his crew that executes them.
|
| It's been obvious for 40 years that computers would do the
| fighting, but in 1966 it wasn't obvious, so the paradigm was
| Horatio Hornblower.
| ddalex wrote:
| star trek is not heavy on fighting anyhow, so these battles
| are plot devices... how would a computer executing and
| finishing a battle even before humans figure ouut that
| somethin is happening help with the plot....
|
| in the same vein, why would strikes on a ship result in
| sparkles on the bridge....
| hyko wrote:
| I guess I don't see what is supposed to drive the S curve in
| biotechnology over the next 60 years. Advanced information
| technology is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for
| biotech mastery, and the other conditions are just not in
| place.
| burlesona wrote:
| Just to name one thing, I think CRISPR is likely to be seen
| as fundamental a technological building block as the
| transistor.
| vkou wrote:
| > So back in the 60's, people looked back at the progress over
| the previous decades, imagined the future, and thought about
| space. We'd have commercial space flight any day now.
|
| We _do_ have commercial space flight. Commercial space flight
| has exploded over the past few decades. The sky is full of
| communication satellites, imaging satellites, sensor
| satellites, even the occasional vanity satellites.
|
| Everything worth doing in space, we're doing.
|
| What we don't have is things that aren't worth doing in space,
| like Pan-am flights to the moon.
| noir_lord wrote:
| I think the big revolutions are going to be in biology - fast
| super computers allows us to make advances we couldn't have
| made any other way.
|
| Computers are an enabling technology for basically every other
| advancement - in fact it's hard to imagine breakthroughs at
| this point that don't involve computers in some way - even
| 'just' as a tool for collaboration.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| 'Computers' are more like, industrial consciousness, though.
| What happens when we can grow brain cells on demand? (and
| support their function). Imagine upgrading your _self_ like
| you upgrade your computer. More brain. Less sleep. More
| hands. Armored skin. Photosynthesis.
|
| Imagine you're a shapeshifter. You can copy any aspect of any
| living organism on Earth, integrate tech directly into your
| body, and the smartest people are coming up with new useful
| things to add.
| bserge wrote:
| Aaaand it's all banned. Enhancing your performance? Heresy!
|
| That's assuming such research is allowed in the first
| place. Humans are innately repulsed by biology, by
| organisms. Imagine an arm with its skin ripped open to the
| bone, gushing blood everywhere. Imagine your guts hanging
| out from your belly.
|
| And the ethical/moral rules we built over thousands of
| years will not allow the majority to sit by and watch some
| atrocious (from their POV) experiments.
| emayljames wrote:
| Also, taking economics to a new level, once we have got past
| the scarce-resource/pollution based short term thinking and
| it no longer is viable to have a volatile structured economy,
| where there is no longer a need for the profit motive. Super
| computing could easily take this task up of organising and
| fairly structuring the economy.
| frashelaw wrote:
| > From this article: no more keyboards / mice? No typing, you
| can "think" to write. What about recording your own thoughts
| and then playing them back to yourself later? How much further
| can that tech go? And there is so much more beyond BCI, we are
| just understanding the basic building blocks in many areas, but
| making amazing progress.
|
| While this itself is certainly an interesting concept, I'm
| worried at its consequences when implemented in our
| hypercapitalist economy: We'll almost certainly, along with
| this incredible interaction technology, have advertising beamed
| directly into our consciousness or something similarly
| intrusive. It's honestly terrifying how much worse intrusive
| tracking and advertising would get with this technology.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I agree.
|
| Your comment made me think of Natalie Woods' last movie:
| "Brainstorm."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)
| jmfldn wrote:
| This stuff is no doubt promising, not least for disabled people
| but this neuralink-type stuff seems terrifying. Anyone who is
| excited about having an Internet connection into their brain
| needs their head examined. Us humans don't exactly have a good
| track record of avoiding awful unintended consequences when we
| introduce new tech, no matter the benefits.
|
| It all starts out with an innocent sales pitch, "we're just
| connecting people" etc etc, but whatever we build ends up
| reflecting human nature and our social and economic context in
| all its myriad ways, good and bad.
|
| We don't control technology or even have the foggiest idea how
| anything we build will pan out. We just make it look like there
| was a masterplan after the fact when in reality it was a headless
| blunder.
|
| I'm the sort of person that yearns for computing to be done
| sitting on a chair looking at a big screen. I don't even like
| mobile internet devices that much in terms of what they've done
| to us. Beaming this straight to our brain? I'm out thanks.
| oliv__ wrote:
| I've been thinking about this quite a bit: there seems to have
| been a shift sometime during the last 50 years where instead of
| computers and computing being a tool to be mastered and
| controlled by humans, we've seen computers switch the power
| dynamic and render us humans the tools.
|
| To me, that clash of "visions" was supremely represented in
| Apple's "1984" advert.
|
| I'd love for computing to get back to that utopian vision of
| the bicycle for the mind but if you look around these days it's
| more of a train-wreck of the mind.
| etblg wrote:
| You may like the Adam Curtis documentary series "All Watched
| Over by Machines of Loving Grace", which basically posits
| that same thought.
| jmfldn wrote:
| "I'd love for computing to get back to that utopian vision of
| the bicycle for the mind but if you look around these days
| it's more of a train-wreck of the mind."
|
| Same here. I'm increasingly not interested in machines or
| software that I don't control at leaf to some extent, that
| I'm not free to modify, that aren't about empowerment,
| learning and creativity for the user. It's not just based on
| a personal desire, although it is partly that. It's the only
| way we can stay free. This isn't just some high-minded hacker
| ideology, it's literally about liberty.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| Last night someone put on a history documentary about Oliver
| Cromwell's invasions of Ireland. They showed that the invention
| of the printing press around that time led to all the news of
| the Irish rebellion having a further reach inside of England.
| Oliver Cromwell channeled that nationalism into his own
| political gains and caused a wake of destruction through
| Ireland.
|
| It's exactly the same phenomenon as we see now with social
| media.
|
| This is the natural cycle of human innovation in communication.
|
| I want these interfaces to happen despite the growing pains we
| will have.
|
| Besides, it doesn't matter what we want. They will happen
| either way.
|
| Think about it in terms of larger time scales and the growing
| pains of new technology seems like a more worthwhile cost.
|
| I know it's dismissive to label real human suffering and death
| as growing pains, but this stuff is inevitable, the results are
| predictable, and in a large enough timescale, the technology
| will yield immense fruit.
| 0x4d464d48 wrote:
| "Anyone who is excited about having an Internet connection into
| their brain needs their head examined."
|
| Perhaps you can have this done with a POST request in the
| future and kill two birds with one stone.
| unchocked wrote:
| So the innovation here is not the neural probes (200 neurons,
| same state of the art), nor the connection from the neural probes
| to outside the skull (physical port, not wireless), but only that
| there is a wireless dongle that sits on top of the physical port
| and connects to a server somewhere? Yawn?
| lallysingh wrote:
| > In the current study, two devices used together recorded
| neural signals at 48 megabits per second from 200 electrodes
| with a battery life of over 36 hours.
|
| So roughly 10 Gbps, not bad. But this isn't about the raw tech.
|
| For people doing medical research, it lets them gather data all
| day instead of just appointments. That's the big change.
| tyingq wrote:
| I didn't read it as 48mbps per signal, but rather 48mbps per
| device. Did I read it wrong?
| maddyboo wrote:
| I actually read it as 48 Mbit/s for the 2 devices combined,
| or 24 Mbit/s per device.
| tyingq wrote:
| Ah, yeah, thanks..
|
| _" In the current study, two devices used together..._"
| o_p wrote:
| I doubt thats physically possible, its like trying to access
| your RAM by reading EM fluctuations from the outside of your
| computer, sure, you can see when theres a lot of read/write
| instructions but theres no way you read memory.
| tyingq wrote:
| It seems like it's closer to measuring which areas of the
| "die" are busy. Like "the MMU is doing something hard" or
| "this adder circuit in the ALU is idle", etc.
| tyingq wrote:
| I think, yeah "Yawn" from a tech perspective. But for average
| people, the idea that these folks are hooked up and streaming
| from their homes, with minimal visible hardware is new. It
| feels more sci-fi than someone in a research center with a ton
| of wires on their head.
| loliko wrote:
| all these great brains working on such commodities when we have
| climate change, poverty, authoritarianism and other issues much
| more pressing. seems that we live in an era where it's easier to
| make human talk with machines than to work on helping humans
| talks peacefully with each other.
| whowe1 wrote:
| Neuralink's tech is definitely more advanced, but they haven't
| gotten it into humans yet and there are still issues with the
| longevity of the threads inside an actual human brain.
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