[HN Gopher] BrainGPT turns thoughts into text
___________________________________________________________________
BrainGPT turns thoughts into text
Author : 11thEarlOfMar
Score : 217 points
Date : 2023-12-17 16:22 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.iflscience.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.iflscience.com)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| This is very impressive and useful, and horrifying all at once.
|
| I imagine it would help a stroke patient, I also imagine it would
| give out unfiltered thoughts, which might be troublesome.
| notnmeyer wrote:
| > unfiltered thoughts
|
| not far off from existing issues like some forms of tourette's.
| rvnx wrote:
| I agree sadly :(
|
| You're right, this is why in year 2200, your job application is
| going to be fast-tracked by analyzing your thoughts directly.
|
| If you have a Neuralink, no problems, you can directly upload a
| trace of thoughts.
|
| In case you have wrong thoughts, don't worry, we have
| rehabilitation school, which can alter your state of mind.
|
| Don't forget to be happy, it's forbidden to be sad.
|
| Also, this is read-only for now, but what about writing ?
|
| This could open new possibilities as well (real-life Matrix ?)
|
| Oh by the way, did you hear about Lightspeed Briefs ?
|
| ==
|
| All that being said, it's great research and going to be
| useful. Just the potential of abuse from politics is huge over
| the long-term.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| When your bosses require you to wear one of these while
| working from home.
| rvnx wrote:
| To stay focused and analyze your pattern. Oh, so that's
| what they meant by "Attention Is All You Need".
| fragmede wrote:
| you mean I get to bill the client for all the hours I spend
| thinking about their problem, which includes while I'm
| sleeping? sign me up!
| dexterdog wrote:
| Or you just zone out and let them use your brain for the
| work day and you take nothing with you at the end of the
| day. At that point it's just Severance, but with the perk
| of working from home.
| derefr wrote:
| > If you have a Neuralink, no problems, you can directly
| upload a trace of thoughts.
|
| Except that someone with a _jailbroken_ Neuralink could
| upload a filtered and arbitrarily-modified thought trace,
| getting ahead of all those plebs. Cyberpunk! :)
| Y_Y wrote:
| Just think a virus, you know they're not going to be
| correctly sanitizing their inputs.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| just think of Robert'); DROP TABLE candidates;
| thfuran wrote:
| Who?
| da_chicken wrote:
| Yeah I can imagine law enforcement and employers are going to
| love this.
|
| As much as this is an unimaginable positive benefit to people
| who are locked in, this is definitely one of those stories that
| makes me think "Stop inventing the Torment Nexus!"
| Jensson wrote:
| > Yeah I can imagine law enforcement and employers are going
| to love this.
|
| They will hate it, lies always benefits those with power more
| than those without since when the police lies against you
| then there isn't much you could do before, now you could
| demand they get their thoughts read.
| Jensson wrote:
| Imagine putting these on presidential candidates as they debate
| or when they try to explain a bill, it could massively improve
| democracy and ensure the people know what they actually vote
| for.
| thfuran wrote:
| Yes, imagine the glorious future of politicians who have no
| thoughts beyond the repeatedly coached answers to various
| talking points.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| Suddenly they all vigorously turn pro-privacy.
| d-lisp wrote:
| Finally Platon's "King" is an AI.
| d-lisp wrote:
| Yes, and only politicians that do truly know to lie are
| elected.
| notnmeyer wrote:
| pretty interesting but with how much current llms get wrong or
| hallucinate i'd be pretty wary of trusting the output, at least
| currently.
|
| amazing to think of where this could be in 10 or 20 years.
| brookst wrote:
| You're saying this brand new experimental technology may be
| imperfect?
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Yeah...The research here doesn't even make the claim that it
| has no hallucinations. It seems to largely be exciting
| _despite_ hallucinations because it clearly does occasionally
| guess the correct words. They mention lots of issues but so
| long as it passes peer review, seems like a massive step
| forward.
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.14030v2.pdf
| dang wrote:
| I completely understand the reflex against shallow dismissal
| of groundbreaking work, but please don't respond by breaking
| the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| admax88qqq wrote:
| Combine hallucinations with police adopting this as the new
| polygraph and this could take a pretty bad turn.
|
| Cool tech though, lots of positive applications too.
| codedokode wrote:
| Why only police? Install mind-readers at every home.
| Sanzig wrote:
| If noninvasive mind reading ever becomes practical, we need
| to recognize the right to refuse a brain scan a universal
| human right. Additionally, it should be banned from being
| used for evidence in the courtroom.
|
| Unfortunately there _will_ be authoritarian regimes that will
| use and abuse this type of tech, but we need to take a firm
| stand against it in liberal democracies at the very least.
| jprete wrote:
| That's not sufficient - it needs to be actually banned for
| any uses resembling employment purposes, because otherwise
| people will be easily pressured into it by the incentives
| of businesses who want their employees to be worker bees.
| Just look at how many businesses try to force people to
| waive their right to a trial by law as a condition of being
| a customer!
| mentos wrote:
| I have a feeling that by the time this is fully fleshed
| out AI will have taken all the jobs anyways.
| Sanzig wrote:
| Agreed.
| swayvil wrote:
| What if it went the opposite way?
|
| What if perfect brainreaders/liedetectors became as common
| as smartphones.
|
| Used on everybody all the time. From politicians and cops
| to schoolkids and your own siblings.
|
| What would be an optimistic version of that?
| Sanzig wrote:
| I don't think there is one, not for a version of humanity
| that is even remotely recognizable at least. We are not
| ready to hear each other's internal monologues.
|
| Most people have intrusive thoughts, some people (like
| those with OCD, for example) have really frequent and
| distressing intrusive thoughts. What are you going to
| think of the OCD sufferer in the cubicle next to you who
| keeps inadvertently broadcasting intrusive thoughts about
| violently stabbing you to death? Keep in mind, they will
| never act on those thoughts, they are simply the result
| of some faulty brain wiring and they are even more
| disgusted about them than you are. What are you going to
| think when you find out your sister-in-law had an affair
| with a coworker ten years ago, because her mind wandered
| there while you were having coffee with her?
|
| Humanity does not even come _close_ to having the level
| of understanding and compassion needed to prevent total
| chaos in a world like that. People naively believed that
| edgy or embarrassing social media posts made by
| millenials in the late 2000s wouldn 't be a big deal,
| because we'd all figure out that everyone is imperfect
| and the person you were 10 years ago is not the person
| you are today. Nope, if anything the opposite has
| happened: it's now a widely accepted practice to go on a
| fishing expedition through someone's social media history
| to find something compromising to shame them with. Now
| imagine that, but applied to mind reading. No, that's not
| a future that we can survive as a species, at least not
| without radical changes in our approaches to dealing with
| each other.
| spookybones wrote:
| I wonder if a subject has to train it first, such as by
| reading a bunch of prompts while trying to imagine them. Or,
| are our linguistic neural networks all very similar? If the
| former is true, it would at least be a bit harder to work as
| a polygraph. You wouldn't be able to just strap on the helmet
| and read someone's thoughts accurately.
| dexwiz wrote:
| I wonder if you could develop techniques to combat it, like
| a psychic nail in the shoe. Or maybe an actual nail. How
| useful is a mind reader when all it reads is "PAIN!"
| RaftPeople wrote:
| Yes it requires training for each individual. In addition,
| they tested using a trained model from one person to try to
| decode a different person and the results were no better
| than chance.
|
| They also said that the person must cooperate for the
| decoding to work, meaning the person could reduce the
| decoding accuracy by thinking of specific things (e.g.
| counting).
|
| CORRECTION: The paper I read was not the correct paper,
| ignore this comment. The actual paper states that the model
| is transferrable across subjects.
| andy99 wrote:
| Police is far down the list or realistic concerns.
|
| - insurance discount if you wear this while driving
|
| - remote work offered as a "perk" as long as you wear it
|
| - the "alladvantage ecg helmet" that pays you to wear it
| around while you're shown advertising
|
| - to augment one of those video interviews where you have to
| answer questions and a computer screens your behavior
|
| That's all stuff that already exists more or less and much
| more likely to be the form that the abuse of this technology
| takes
| popcalc wrote:
| Eventually it will become affordable for parents,
| evangelical churches, and spouses.
| joenot443 wrote:
| Ground Truth: Bob attended the University of Texas at Austin
| where he graduated, Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor's degree in
| Latin American Studies in 1973, taking only two and a half years
| to complete his work, and obtaining generally excel- lent grades.
|
| Predict: was the University of California at Austin in where he
| studied in Beta Kappa in a degree of degree in history American
| Studies in 1975. and a one classes a half years to complete the
| degree. and was a excellent grades.
|
| Wow. That seems comparable to the rudimentary _voice_ to text
| systems of the 70s and 80s. The brain interface is quickly
| leaving the realm of sci-fi and becoming a reality. I'm still not
| sure how I feel about it.
| nextworddev wrote:
| The "Matrix" stack is really shaping up recently /s
| varispeed wrote:
| Well you are going to have a brain scanning device directly
| linked to your social credit score.
|
| That's the future.
| WendyTheWillow wrote:
| No, it's not. Good lord...
| jprete wrote:
| There are already businesses tracking their employees'
| fitness for insurance purposes.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/with-
| fitness...
|
| EDIT: There's also a national legislative proposal to
| mandate that all cars have a system to monitor their
| drivers and lock them out on signs of intoxication.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2021/11/09/1053847935/congress-cars-
| drun...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The fix here is banning these sorts of potentially
| abusive uses, not hoping the technology itself doesn't
| develop.
| jprete wrote:
| I would agree if I didn't think there were really strong
| incentives and precedents for abuse of the technology.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| There absolutely are, but when's the last time that
| stopped us advancing new tech?
| valine wrote:
| We have laws that prevent people being subjected to brain
| surgery against their will. The credit score concept is
| ridiculous.
|
| The real battle will be with law enforcement who get a
| warrant to look at your brain in an MRI.
| Jensson wrote:
| You don't need brain surgery or an MRI to scan a brain,
| this just uses an EEG.
| squigz wrote:
| There's really strong incentives to abuse any technology
| or system that gives people more power. This doesn't just
| apply to cutting-edge computer science like mind-reading,
| but to even our basic institutions like law and
| government; yet most people would agree the solution
| isn't to basically give up and hope for the best, but to
| be vigilant and fight back against that abuse.
| MoSattler wrote:
| First use will be for criminal suspects, to "save lives".
| Then its use slowly expands from there.
| blindriver wrote:
| "For the children" is the first excuse usually.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Exactly! Strap it on anyone who has to work with children
| to see if they ever have any untoward thoughts.... Then
| move on to everyone else.
| e2le wrote:
| I'm sure among the first applications of this technology
| will be to scan user thoughts for evidence of CSAM.
| garbagewoman wrote:
| Why are you so certain that's the future?
| 6510 wrote:
| For a while, eventually we will become so suggestible you'd
| wish you were special enough to have a score.
| alternatex wrote:
| Being banned in the EU as we speak.
| derefr wrote:
| Seems like it could work a lot better still, very quickly, just
| by merging the trained model with an LLM trained on the
| language they expect the person to be thinking in. I.e. try to
| get an equilibrium between the "bottom-up processing" of what
| the TTS model believes the person "is thinking", and the "top-
| down processing" of what the grammar model believes the average
| person "would say next" given all the conversation so far.
| (Just like a real neocortex!)
|
| Come to think, you could even train the LLM with a corpus of
| the person's own transcribed conversations, if you've got it.
| Then it'd be serving almost exactly the function of predicting
| "what _that person in particular_ would say at this point. "
|
| Maybe you could even find some additional EEG-pad locations
| that could let you read out the electrical consequences of
| AMPAR vs NMDAR agonism within the brain; determine from that
| how much the person is currently relying on their _own_
| internal top-down speech model vs using their own internal
| bottom-up processing to form a weird novel statement they 've
| never thought before; and use this info to weight the level of
| influence the TTS model has vs the LLM on the output.
| seydor wrote:
| > I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
|
| Sir, let us read that for you
| PaulScotti wrote:
| Guys Figure 1 is not real results, it's an illustration of the
| "goal" of the paper. The real results are in Table 3. And are
| much worse.
| explaininjs wrote:
| Interesting ploy. Present far-better-than-achieved results
| right on the front page with no text to explain their
| origin^, but make them poor enough quality to make it seem as
| if they might be real.
|
| ^ "Overall illustration of translate EEG waves into text
| through quantised encoding." doesn't count.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Urgh. And it gets worse from there. The bugs list on the
| repo has a _closed and locked_ bug report from someone
| claiming that their code is using teacher forcing!
|
| https://github.com/duanyiqun/DeWave/issues/1
|
| In a normal recurrent neural network, the model predicts
| token-at-a-time. It predicts a token, and that token is
| appended to the total prediction so far which is then fed
| back into the model to generate the next token. In other
| words, the network generates all the predictions itself
| based off its own previous outputs and the other inputs
| (brainwaves in this case), meaning that a bad prediction
| can send the entire thing off track.
|
| In teacher forcing that isn't the case. All the tokens up
| to the point where it's predicting are taken from the
| correct inputs. That means the model is never exposed to
| its own previous errors. But of course in a real system you
| don't have access to the correct inputs, so this is not
| feasible to do in reality.
|
| The other repo says:
|
| _" We have written a corrected version to use
| model.generate to evaluate the model, the result is not so
| good"_
|
| but they don't give examples.
|
| This problem completely invalidates the paper's results. It
| is awful that they have effectively hidden and locked the
| thread in which the issue was reported. It's also kind of
| nonsensical that people doing such advanced ML work are
| claiming they accidentally didn't know the difference
| between model.forward() and model.generate(). I mean I'm
| not an ML researcher and might have mangled the description
| of teacher forcing, but even I know these aren't the same
| thing at all.
| chpatrick wrote:
| So instead of generating the next token from its own
| previous predictions (which is what it would do in real
| life), the code they used for the evaluation actually
| predicts from the ground truth?
| ghayes wrote:
| Which would basically turn the model into a plainly
| normal LLM without any need for utilizing the brainwave
| inputs, right?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This is a super important point and I think warrants a
| letter to the editor
| oldesthacker wrote:
| The results of Table 3 are not really exciting. Could this
| change with 100 times more data? The key novelty in the
| specific context of this particular application is the
| quantized variational encoder used "to derive discrete codex
| encoding and align it with pre-trained language models."
| samstave wrote:
| this podcast is excellent in discussing the future we are
| racing into.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSV7cxma6_s
|
| >"Peter Diamandis, the futurist to watch as all of these
| technologies advance with unimaginable speed, is going to blow
| your mind and help you imagine new possibilities and
| opportunities for your healthspan."
| chaosmachine wrote:
| Aside from all the horrific implications, this enables something
| very cool: two-way telepathic communication.
|
| Think your message, think "send", hear responses via earbud. With
| voice cloning, you even get the message in the sender's voice.
| Totally silent and invisible to outside observers.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Be careful what you wish for. The unintended consequences of
| this are going to exceed imagination.
| pants2 wrote:
| Invisible except for the 72 EEG probes strapped to your head.
| dexwiz wrote:
| For now. Modern antennas are amazing. Maybe you could
| beamform from a lower number of devices.
| RobertDeNiro wrote:
| These are also wet electrodes meaning you need to apply gel
| to every single one. You'll notice that the person wearing it
| is also not blinking or using any facial muscles, as that
| activity would completely throw off the very weak brain
| signals.
| airstrike wrote:
| Sounds like they'd benefit from being in a sensory
| deprivation pool to enhance the quality of the signal!
|
| https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Rtya.png
| derefr wrote:
| > hear responses via earbud
|
| Maybe that's not even necessary.
|
| I'd be very curious to see the results of trying to use the
| hardware in this system as a set of _transducers_ -- i.e.
| running the ML model here in reverse from a target text, and
| then pushing the resulting bottom-level electrical signals as
| trans-cranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) signals back
| through the EEG pads.
|
| How interesting would it be, if this resulted in a person
| hearing the text as a verbal thought in their own mental voice?
| djaro wrote:
| I would never use this because I cannot 100% control my
| thoughts (i.e. intrusive thoughts, songs stuck in head,
| secrets)
| d-lisp wrote:
| Twenty years ago I couldn't even imagine that I would find
| smartphones to be somewhat boring. Twenty years ago, I was
| finding GameBoy color to be the coolest stuff in the world.
|
| PsOne's Tomb Raider seemed hi-res, Hi-res didn't even exist, I
| thought we were at the peak of gaming.
|
| Apple Pro One wants to make computers spatial, we find
| telepathy cool.
|
| I would love to code by the sole action of my mind while
| running in the forest or scuba diving, 10 seconds here and
| there.
|
| I would love to receive a drawing made in the mind of someone
| else, to see it appear in front of me and to be able to share
| it with others around me : "-Hey, look at what Julia did."
|
| And again, that's exactly what happens already but in a more
| immediate manner; replace smartphone with mind, screen with
| environment and you're in that futuristic world.
|
| It feels like this is _cool_ because of novelty, but then
| wouldn 't it be cool to go back to punching code on cards, or
| writing lines with ed on a terminal ?
|
| A few years ago I went from music production in a DAW to ten
| synthesizers (70-84 era) with a tape machine : way cooler,
| never going back.
|
| But do I produce as fast as before ?
|
| _Nope_
|
| Here is what I think : I want the possibility of writing code
| with my mind and virtual floating screens only because of _one
| thing_ (apart from the initial first few days of new=cool).
|
| I want this to work less, or more exactly to be _less_ at work.
|
| But you know how it will be; you will be asked to produce more
| work. And this will become mandatory to work by the sole power
| of your mind, with 5 or 6 virtual screens around you.
|
| And that's all, until a new invention seems _cool_ to you.
| hyperific wrote:
| Reminds me of DARPA "Silent Talk" from 14 years ago. The
| objective was to "allow user-to-user communication on the
| battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis
| of neural signals"
|
| https://www.engadget.com/2009-05-14-darpa-working-on-silent-...
| baby wrote:
| Dragon ball did this way before
| lamerose wrote:
| Subvocal speech recognition has been going just as long.
| waihtis wrote:
| now's a good time to get into meditation, lest you want the
| advertisers to read your unfiltered thoughts!
| smusamashah wrote:
| The article or the video didn't explicitly say how many words /
| min they were doing. If the video was not just a demo (like
| Google) then its very impressive on speed alone.
| reqo wrote:
| I bet this will make Neuralink useless! It would be great for the
| poor animals getting operated!
| d-lisp wrote:
| Neuralink also claims to be able to help people with motion
| related disabilities, which is at least some good thing.
| chpatrick wrote:
| Must be great for interrogation.
| d-lisp wrote:
| Thought hold-up also ?
| ctoth wrote:
| "Seriously, what were these researchers thinking? This 'BrainGPT'
| thing is a disaster waiting to happen. Ching-Ten Lin and his team
| of potential civilization destroyers at the University of
| Technology Sydney might be patting themselves on the back for
| this, but did they stop to think about the real-world
| implications? We're talking about reading thoughts--this isn't
| sci-fi, it's real, and it's terrifying. Where's the line? Today
| it's translating thoughts for communication, tomorrow it could be
| involuntary mind-reading. This could end privacy as we know it.
| We need to slam the brakes on this, and fast. It's not just
| irresponsible; it's playing with fire, and we're all at risk of
| getting burned.
|
| Like, accurate brain readers are right under DWIM guns in the
| pantheon of things thou mustn't build!
| arlecks wrote:
| If you're referencing the AI safety discussion, there's
| obviously the fundamental difference between this and a
| technology with the potential of autonomous, exponential
| runaway.
| digdigdag wrote:
| Why not? There are perfectly legitimate uses for this kind of
| technology. This would be a godsend for those suffering from
| paralysis and nervous system disorders, allowing them to
| communicate with their loved ones.
|
| Yes, the CIA, DARPA, et. al. will be all over this
| (surprisingly if not already), but this is a sacrifice worth
| making for this kind of technology.
| ctoth wrote:
| How many people in the whole world are paralyzed or locked
| in? Ten thousand? Less?
|
| How many people in the whole world are tinpot authoritarian
| despots just looking for an excuse who would just _love_ to
| be able to look inside your mind?
|
| Somehow, I imagine the first number is dramatically dwarfed
| by the second number.
|
| This is a technology that, once it is invented, will find
| more and more and more and more uses.
|
| We need to make sure you don't spill corporate secrets, so we
| will be mandating that all workers wear this while in the
| office.
|
| Oh no, we've just had a leak, we're gonna have to ask that if
| you want to work here you must wear this brain buddy home!
| For the good of the company.
|
| And so on.
|
| I'm blind, but if you offered to cure my blindness with the
| side effect that nobody could ever hide under the cover of
| darkness ( I donno, electronic eyes of some kind? Go with the
| metaphor!) I would still not take it.
| ctoth wrote:
| The other thing you people are missing is how technology
| compounds. You don't need to have people come in to the
| police station to have their thoughts reviewed when
| everyone is assigned an LLM at birth to watch over their
| thoughts in loving grace and maybe play a sound when they
| have the wrong one.
| zamadatix wrote:
| All this choice guarantees is new technology will always be
| used for bad things first. It holds no sway on whether
| someone will do something bad with technology, after all
| it's not just "good people" capable of advancing it. See
| the atomic bomb vs the atomic power plant.
|
| What's important is how we prepare for and handle
| inevitable change. Hoping no negative change comes about if
| we just stay the same is a far worse game.
| notfed wrote:
| I'm optimistically going to assume that model training is per-
| brain, and can't cross over to other brains. Am I wrong? God I
| hope I'm not wrong.
| exabyte wrote:
| My intuition is at least in the beginning, but with enough
| individual data won't you have a model that can generalize
| pretty well over similar cultures? Maybe moreso for the
| sheep, just speculating... who knows!
| rgarrett88 wrote:
| >4.4 Cross-Subject Performance Cross-subject performance is
| of vital importance for practical usage. To further report
| the We further provide a comparison with both baseline
| methods and a representative meta-learning (DA/DG) method,
| MAML [9], which is widely used in cross-subject problems in
| EEG classification below. Table 2: Cross-subject performance
| average decreasing comparison on 18 human subjects, where
| MAML denotes the method with MAML training. The metric is the
| lower the better. Calib Data Method Eye fixation -[?](%) |
| Raw EEG waves -[?](%) | B-2 B-4 R-P R-F B-2 B-4 R-P R-F x
| Baseline 3.38 2.08 2.14 2.80 7.94 5.38 6.02 5.89
| Baseline+MAML [9] 2.51 1.43 1.08 1.23 6.86 4.22 4.08 4.79 x
| DeWave 2.35 1.25 1.16 1.17 6.24 3.88 3.94 4.28 DeWave+MAML
| [9] 2.08 1.25 1.16 1.17 6.24 3.88 3.94 4.28 Figure 4: The
| cross-subjects performance variance without calibration In
| Table 2, we compare with MAML by reporting the average
| performance drop ratio between withinsubject and cross-
| subject translation metrics on 18 human subjects on both eye-
| fixation sliced features and raw EEG waves. We compare the
| DeWave with the baseline under both direct testing (without
| Calib data) and with MAML (with Calib data). The DeWave model
| shows superior performance in both settings. To further
| illustrate the performance variance on different subjects, we
| train the model by only using the data from subject YAG and
| test the metrics on all other subjects. The results are
| illustrated in Figure 4, where the radar chart denotes the
| performance is stable across different subjects.
|
| Looks like it crosses over. That's wild.
| drdeca wrote:
| What does "DWIM" mean in this context? My first thought is "do
| what I mean", but I suspect that isn't what you meant.
| ctoth wrote:
| DWIM does in fact mean Do what I mean, a DWIM gun is
| basically like the Imperius curse. Can't remember if I got it
| from @cstross or Vinge.
| ulf-77723 wrote:
| Exactly. Dangerous technology. Reminds me of dystopian sci-fi
| like inception or minority report.
|
| First thing that came to my mind was an airport check. "Oh, you
| want to enter this country? Just use this device for a few
| minutes, please"
|
| How about courts and testimony?
|
| This tech will be used against you faster than you will
| recognize. Later on one will ask, why people let it happen.
| alentred wrote:
| What is the alternative? Hide the research papers in a cabinet
| and never talk about it? How long would it be before another
| team achieves the same result? Trying to keep it under wraps
| would only increase the chance of this technology being abused,
| but now unbeknownst to the general public.
|
| Basically, are you proposing to ban some fields of research
| because the result can be abused? Anything can be abused. From
| the social care system to scientific breakthroughs. What the
| society should do is to control the abuse, not stop the
| progress. Not even because of ethics, where the opinions
| diverge, but because stopping the progress is virtually
| impossible.
| ctoth wrote:
| Look up the history of biotechnology, and the intentional way
| that it has been treated and one might reasonably say
| suppressed for some examples of how this has been managed
| previously. Yes, sometimes you can just decide, "we're not
| gonna research that today." When you start sitting down and
| building the thing that fits on the head, that's where you
| say "nope, we're doing that thing we shouldn't do, let's not
| do it."
|
| There is actually a line. You can actually decide not to
| cross it.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| The alternative _was_ to never pursue and invent
| organization-dependent[1,2] technology in the first place.
| The dynamics of the macro-system of {human biology +
| technology + societal dynamics} are so predictable and
| deterministic that it 's argued[3] if there were _any_ entity
| that is intelligent, replicating and has a self-preservation
| instinct instead of humans (aliens, intelligent Von Neumann
| probes, doesn 't matter) the path of technological progress
| which humanity is currently experiencing wouldn't change.
| That is, the increasing restrictions on the autonomy of
| individuals and invasion of privacy with the increasing
| convenience of life and a more efficient civilization.
|
| Ted Kaczynski pretty much predicted the current state of
| affairs all the way back at 1970s. [1]
|
| Thankfully the world is not infinite so humankind cannot
| continue this situation for too long. The first Earth
| Overshoot Day was 31 December 1971, it was August 2 this
| year.[4] The effects of the nearing population collapse can
| be easily seen today in the increasing worldwide inflation,
| interest rates and hostility as the era of abundance comes to
| an end and resources get scarcer and scarcer. It's important
| to note that the technological prowess of humanity was only
| due to having access to basically unlimited energy for
| decades, not due to some perceived human ingenuity, which can
| save humankind from extinction-level threats. In fact, humans
| are pretty incapable of understanding world-scale events and
| processes and acting accordingly[5], which is another primary
| reason to not have left the simple non-technological world
| which the still non-evolved primate-like human brain could
| intuitively understand.
|
| 1: Refer to the manifesto "Industrial Revolution and Its
| Consequences".
|
| 2: Organization-dependent technology: Technology which
| requires organized effort, as opposed to small scale
| technology which a single person can produce himself with
| correct knowledge.
|
| 3: By Kaczynski, in the book Anti-Tech Revolution. Freely
| available online.
|
| 4: Biological overshoot occurs when demands placed on an
| ecosystem by a species exceeds the carrying capacity. Earth
| Overshoot Day is the day when humanity's demand on nature
| exceeds Earth's biocapacity. Humanity was able to continue
| its survival due to phantom carrying capacity.
|
| 5: Just take a look at the collective response of humanity to
| climate change.
| lebean wrote:
| Don't worry. It doesn't actually work lol
| im3w1l wrote:
| Thing is, it's not possible to stop it. Technology has advanced
| far enough, all the pieces are in place, so it's inevitable
| that someone will make this. What we should ask is rather how
| we can cope with its existence.
| opdahl wrote:
| It's crazy to me that someone has developed a technology that
| literally reads peoples mind fairly accurately and its just like
| a semi popular post on Hacker News.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| It's at the top of the front page now fyi
|
| edit: and it's sliding down again. Your comment will be
| relevant again shortly ha
| RobertDeNiro wrote:
| Anyone familiar with Brain computer interfaces would not be
| surprised by this article. People have been capturing brain
| waves for a while and using it for all sorts of experiments.
| This is just an extension of what has been done before. It's
| still not applicable to anything outside of a lab setting.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| Do people not think of _anything_ while they're reading besides
| the text that they're reading? I think of all kinds of other
| stuff while I'm reading books.
| d-lisp wrote:
| Not reading a whole page, without noticing it, by effectively
| looking at it and letting your eyes run through its line
| while thinking about something completely different is peak
| literature.
| callalex wrote:
| Well, the results marketed by this study are vastly overstated,
| bordering on unethical lying. Figure 1 is literally just made
| up. See discussion here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38674971
| swagempire wrote:
| Now...1984 REALLY begins...
| DerSaidin wrote:
| https://youtu.be/crJst7Yfzj4
|
| Not sure on the accuracy in these examples, but this video may be
| showing the words/min speed of the system.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Everyone is this thread immediately went to mind readers as
| interrogation. But what about introspection? Many forms of
| teaching and therapy exist because we are incapable of self
| analyzing in a completely objective way.
|
| Being able to analyze your thought patterns outside your own head
| could lead to all sorts of improvements. You could find which
| teaching techniques are actually the most effective. You could
| objectively find when you are most and least focused. You could
| pinpoint when anxious thoughts began and their trigger. And best
| of all, you could do this personally, with a partner, or in a
| group based on your choice.
|
| Also you can give someone an FMRI as a brain scanning polygraph
| today. But there are still a ton of questions about it's
| legitimacy.
|
| https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
| electrondood wrote:
| > Being able to analyze your thought patterns outside your own
| head could lead to all sorts of improvements.
|
| Typing in a journal text file for 15 minutes every morning is
| already a thing... and it's free.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Thoughts are fleeting. 15 minutes could be filled with
| hundreds or thousands of distinct concepts. Not to mention
| active recording is different from passive observation.
| MadSudaca wrote:
| Fear is a strong emotion, and while we know little of what we
| may gain from this, we know a lot of what we stand to lose.
| amrrs wrote:
| FYI The base model that this one uses had some bug in their code
| which had inflated their baseline results. They are investigating
| the issues - https://github.com/duanyiqun/DeWave/issues/1
| swayvil wrote:
| A lie detector?
|
| If it can extract words from my grey spaghetti then maybe it can
| extract my intention too.
|
| That's probably incredibly obvious and I'm silly for even
| bringing it up.
| ecolonsmak wrote:
| With half of individuals reportedly having no internal monologue,
| would this be useless with them? Or just render unintelligible
| results?
| klabb3 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I'm one of them so I'm surprised reading these
| comments assume everyone thinks in words. I'm sure you can do a
| best effort projection of thoughts to words but it'd be
| extremely reductive, at least for me.
| Jensson wrote:
| Given that LLMs can learn to translate between languages based
| on just having lots of related tokens without any explanations
| I'd bet they could translate those thoughts to words even if
| the person doesn't think of them as words.
|
| Would probably take more to get data from such people though.
| From people with an inner monologue you could just make them
| read text, record that, and then you can follow their inner
| monologues.
| iaseiadit wrote:
| How long from reading thoughts to writing thoughts?
| odyssey7 wrote:
| I wonder if a-linguistic thought could work too. Maybe figure out
| what your dog is thinking or dreaming about, based on a dataset
| of signals associated with their everyday activities.
|
| It seems like outputting a representation of embodied experience
| would be a difficult challenge to get right and interpret, though
| perhaps a dataset of signals associated with embodied experiences
| could more readily be robustly annotated with linguistic
| descriptions using a vision-to-language model, so that the canine
| mind reader could predict and output those linguistic
| descriptions instead.
|
| Imagine knowing the specific park your dog wants to go to, or the
| subtle early signs of an illness or injury they're noticing, or
| what treat your dog wants you to buy.
| amelius wrote:
| Can it read passwords?
|
| I'm guessing it would be worse at reading passwords like
| "784&Ghkkr!e" than "horse staple battery ..."
| dmd wrote:
| Similar work for turning thoughts into images: https://medarc-
| ai.github.io/mindeye/
| lamerose wrote:
| >fMRI-to-image
|
| Not so impressive compared to EEG.
| lamerose wrote:
| Seems like it could just be getting at some phonetic encoding, or
| even raw audio information. The grammatical and vocab
| transformations could be accounted for by an imperfect decoder.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > While it's not the first technology to be able to translate
| brain signals into language, it's the only one so far to require
| neither brain implants nor access to a full-on MRI machine.
|
| I wonder whether, in a decade or two, if the sensor technology
| has gotten good enough that they don't even need you to wear a
| cap, just there'll be people saying "obviously you don't have any
| reasonable expectation of not having your thoughts read in a
| public space, don't be ridiculous". What I mean is, we just tend
| to normalize surveillance technology, and I wonder if there's any
| practical limit to how far that can go.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| I think this is when we start wearing tin foil hats
| lamerose wrote:
| This is from a paper published back in September btw:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.14030.pdf
| chucke1992 wrote:
| Sword Art Online when?
| Jensson wrote:
| Can we train an LLM based on brainwaves rather than written text?
| Seems to be closer to how we actually think and thus should
| enable the LLM to learn to think rather than just learn to mimic
| the output.
|
| For example, when writing we have often gone done many thought
| paths, evaluated each and backtracked etc, but none of that is
| left in the text an LLM trains on today. Recording brainwaves and
| training on that is probably the best training data we could get
| for LLMs.
|
| Getting that data wouldn't be much harder than paying humans to
| solve problems with these hats on recording their brainwaves.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| On the other hand, the main practical feature of a language is
| its astronomical SNR, which brain waves lack, to say the least.
| This allows LLMs to be trained on texts instead of millions of
| live people. Just imagine the number of parameters and compute
| resources required for the model to be useful to more than one
| human.
| jcims wrote:
| I've been wondering lately about the role of language in the mind
| and if we might in the future develop a successor that optimizes
| for how our brains work.
| mikpanko wrote:
| I did a PhD in brain-computer interfaces, including EEG and
| implanted electrodes. BCI research to a big extent focuses on
| helping paralyzed individuals regain communication.
|
| Unfortunately, EEG doesn't provide sufficient signal-to-noise
| ratio to support good communication speeds outside of the lab
| with Faraday cages and days/weeks of de-noising including
| removing eye-movement artifacts in the recordings. This is a
| physical limit due to attenuation of brain's electrical fields
| outside of the skull, which is hard to overcome. For example, all
| commercial "mind-reading" toys are actually working based off
| head and eye muscle signals.
|
| Implanted electrodes provide better signal but are many
| iterations away from becoming viable commercially. Signal
| degrades over months as the brain builds scar tissue around
| electrodes and the brain surgery is obviously pretty dangerous.
| Iteration cycles are very slow because of the need for government
| approval for testing in humans (for a good reason).
|
| If I wanted to help a paralyzed friend, who could only move
| his/her eyes, I would definitely focus on the eye-tracking tech.
| It hands-down beat all BCIs I've heard of.
| drzzhan wrote:
| What is it noise-to-signal ratio? Sorry I don't know much about
| the field but that sounds like something can shutdown ideas
| like "we can put eeg into transformer and it will work". So may
| I ask what reference papers that I need to know on this?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Signal to noise ratio is a very basic thing; you can Google
| it.
| southerntofu wrote:
| Not from that field, but "reading" the brain means
| electromagnetism. In real life, EM interference is everywhere
| from lights, electric devices, cellphone towers...
| EVERYWHERE. Parent meant brain waves are weak to detect
| compared to all surrounding interference, except when a lab
| faraday cage blocks outside interference then the brain
| becomes "loud" enough to be read.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I think then VR headsets will become medical devices soon
| enough
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| What's your thoughts of Elon's NeuraLink? Also, do you have an
| opinion on whether good AI algorithms (like in the article) can
| help filter out or parse a lot of the noise?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I just did a two day ambulatory eeg and noted anytime I did
| anything that would be electrically noisy.
|
| For example going through a metal detector or handling a phone.
|
| Unsurprisingly one of their biggest sources of noise is
| handling a plugged in phone.
|
| I think something like an EEG faraday beanie would actually
| work and adding accessory egocentric video would allow doctors
| to filter a lot of the noise out.
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