The only one who can tell me something is N years away is someone who just stepped out of a time machine. I see no time machine, I pipe to dev null.
IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.
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Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.
#62IBM constantly seems to release press releases about technology it hasn't yet developed to production quality. Said technology always vanishes without trace (as far as I can recall.) I'm not holding my breath on this one.
Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who's to say a MRI machine has to weigh 5 tons 5 years from now? I imagine people once said "Sure it's great to store your recipes in a computer, but who wants to do that on a room sized computer?"
Gauss and Maxwell say.
They do and they don't. Yes, it is true that MRI machines weigh 5 tons because of the magnetic fields generated and the amount of hardware required to constrain those fields.
But you could imagine an MRI machine that works with lower strength fields and better sensor technology. Imagining one is a far cry from being able to build one though and I don't see this happening in the near future (if at all).
I think this prediction (like most of IBM's predictions about the future) is strong on marketing and very weak on science.
Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.
#64The great thing about bold predictions is nobody ever remembers them if you're wrong, but you look like a genius if you're right.
Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
"who I would like to call can not be inferred from the electrical activity on my scalp" If I read the blog post correctly the claim is not passive mind reading. The claim is that the user has some training to issue the sorts of thought commands that can be reliably picked up. If I think "call mom" it doesn't do anything. But if I think "Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right" maybe it can interpret that correctly as m…
I bet it's harder not to compulsively think "Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right" than it is to dial a phone.
Maybe if it recognized just thinking about that sequence, but I think having to deliberately focus on each direction (kind of like pressing a series of buttons in your mind, one after the other) would be too hard to accidentally do like that.
Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.
#66Does anyone ever feel that neuroscience is getting more and more lovecraftian and challenging basic assumptions of what it means to be human? It sometimes feels like we're at a point in history where all the basic tenets of existence are being torn down by science and replaced with... nothing. Am I the only one who gets existential crisises from this kind of stuff? :p
It doesn't help, of course, that I'm currently reading this book: http://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-Against-Human-Race-Contriva...
The luddite in me wishes that science will never be able to fully pick apart the human psyche. Here's to having an inscrutable ghost in the machine to keep us from being mere deterministic flesh-bots...
Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.
#67The only one who can tell me something is N years away is someone who just stepped out of a time machine. I see no time machine, I pipe to dev null.
You cannot pipe to dev null, since it's a device, not a process.
So, to summarize in shell-like syntax, you can redirect your output to /dev/null, as in
$ me > /dev/null
but you can't sensibly use a pipe like so:
$ me | /dev/null
This has been a message from your friendly neighborhood Unix fundamentalism/literalism chapter.
Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.
#68The only one who can tell me something is N years away is someone who just stepped out of a time machine. I see no time machine, I pipe to dev null.
You cannot pipe to dev null, since it's a device, not a process. So, to summarize in shell-like syntax, you can redirect your output to /dev/null, as in $ me > /dev/null but you can't sensibly use a pipe like so: $ me | /dev/null This has been a message from your friendly neighborhood Unix fundamentalism/literalism chapter.
but you had no problem with the time machine. only on HN.
Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.
#69Does anyone ever feel that neuroscience is getting more and more lovecraftian and challenging basic assumptions of what it means to be human? It sometimes feels like we're at a point in history where all the basic tenets of existence are being torn down by science and replaced with... nothing. Am I the only one who gets existential crisises from this kind of stuff? :p It doesn't help, of course, that I'm currently re…
I wonder too...
There have been other times in history that scientists had the idea that science was almost complete, that there were just a few things left to sort out and we'd understand it all (such as around 1900 with mathematics).
We may think we are very near and then discover something new and then find out a lot of new questions around the mind and consciousness. I don't think we're quite there yet.
However I'm sure "shallow AI" (and maybe "shallow mindreading") will become more and more important in the near future. Which is what IBM is focusing on.
BTW: Thanks for the pointer. That book looks very interesting.
Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm easily willing to bet IBM money that who I would like to call can not be inferred from the electrical activity on my scalp. (Seriously IBM, let's go on longbets.org and do this.) Be more precise. If you can distinguish two classes, you can convey anything through EEG, however slowly (think 'bits'). With error, use error-correcting codes and you can get relatively high accuracy. Pedantics aside, I agree in senti…
HA. Error correcting codes? You realize that means the person thinking in bits would have to do that themselves . A 7-bit parity would be harder to do than just dialing the damn thing. Even then all it'd be able to do is tell you that you messed up. Something that actually makes corrections on the fly (Hamming). No way. I couldn't do it and I know how Hamming works. I really doubt a consumer could do it or would want…
A credit card number already has a check digit. If you could make people memorize a few more digits than the telephone number that they'd like to call, you have your error correction.
(Of course, this is highly domain-specific and not very convenient. But it does seem possible.)