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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.

#81

Post by lars »

zacharycohn wrote: post #59
lars wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not being clear, I don't think that thinking the words "left left up up" would be detectable through EEG. When I say detecting movement, I mean things like imagining moving a hand, a foot or a tongue. These movements use distinct areas of the brain so you can distinguish between them by looking at where on the scalp the change occurred. This is done in ways that are known to be close to perfect. However, you prob…

Would it (now, or in the reasonably realistic future) be able to detect me imagining my fingers typing "call mom" on a keyboard?

It definitely isn't possible now, and I wouldn't expect it in five years either. If you look at [1], you can see the areas of the motor cortex. With todays methods we can do an acceptable job at separating for example hand from foot movement. These methods look at the spatial domain, and do so in a way that is near perfect. And as you can see, there is a certain distance between the areas on the scalp, while the fingers are all in the same area.

So you couldn't distinguish individual fingers with todays technology. If it was ever to be done, I'd expect that it would be done with the same algorithms as we use today, but with much denser electrodes. If I were to bet, I'd bet that this would be physically impossible, but I'm not as confident as I am with saying we wont be able to detect who I want to call.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Human_motor_cortex_topogra...

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#82

Post by JoeAltmaier »

cullenking wrote: post #12
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #2

A little fanciful I think. The stuff about generating your own energy through captured kinetic energy is silly. My house has a 20KW feed - thats about 27 horsepower. On my bike I produce a tiny fraction of a horsepower. Its many orders of magnitude off.

You definitely produce more than a tiny fraction of a horsepower :) I have a watt meter on my bicycle, and I can easily average 250 watts for an hour ride. Well, easily meaning sweating profusely and worked at the end of it, but still, that's 1/3rd of a horsepower for an hour. I can put out 1 horsepower for a few seconds, and I am not a great cyclist...

Ok, YOU produce more than a tiny fraction. I'm 52 and out of shape. I can ride 50 miles if you give me all day, but no way am I putting out more than 1/10 of a horsepower. And NO WAY am I putting a generator on my bike while I'm riding it!

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#84

Post by imgabe »

tokenadult wrote: post #47
lars wrote: post #27

I've recently completed a masters thesis on EEG based mind reading, and I think I have a fairly good grasp on the state of the art in this field. I also have a copy of Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near by my bed, and I'm usually strongly optimistic about technology. But if IBM are talking about EEG based technology here, I would have to bet that they are flat out wrong on this one. I'll explain why. Something like m…

Thanks for the interesting detailed information about EEG resolution, which I can attest is in accordance with what I have read about neuroelectrical interaction in other contexts. But what is to me implausible about thinking "phone Mom" and having my computer do it for me is that this scenario envisions an unusually high degree of usability that no consumer-facing software writers have ever achieved. Right now, on a…

Given the above comment I would be even less optimistic about a computer being able to determine the difference between thinking "I should call mom at some point" or "What a nice phone call I had with mom yesterday" and "call mom right now".

This would take the "butt-dialing" phenomenon to disturbing new levels.

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#85

Post by blhack »

bgalbraith wrote: post #35
blhack wrote: post #7

Linkbaity headline, there. "Mind reading" already exists kindof sortof maybe good enough to cnet to write an article about. This is at the top of my Christmas list: http://emotiv.com/ In fact, here is a comparison of consumer Brain Computer Interfaces: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_consumer_brain%E2...

As a current PhD student working in this area, I caution you about getting too excited about the Emotiv EPOC. We've got one in the lab we've started to work with as a potential low-cost EEG system. The out-of-the-box software is kinda hokey, so you may end up with an expensive novelty you use once or twice. On the technical side, it does seem to be the best current option for consumer EEG, though most of these device…

Have you worked with the open source python library for it?

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#86

Post by zifot »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #82
cullenking wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You definitely produce more than a tiny fraction of a horsepower :) I have a watt meter on my bicycle, and I can easily average 250 watts for an hour ride. Well, easily meaning sweating profusely and worked at the end of it, but still, that's 1/3rd of a horsepower for an hour. I can put out 1 horsepower for a few seconds, and I am not a great cyclist...

Ok, YOU produce more than a tiny fraction. I'm 52 and out of shape. I can ride 50 miles if you give me all day, but no way am I putting out more than 1/10 of a horsepower. And NO WAY am I putting a generator on my bike while I'm riding it!

Yeah, but isn't it that the premise of the article is that you would combine energy from various multiple sources like, I don't know, 10-30 per house? Water flowing in pipes, generated heat, gathered kinetic energy?

It would be interesting to see some calculations how much could be gained that way.

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#87

Post by cbr »

colton36 wrote: post #58
brianwillis wrote: post #45

Previous "five in five" predictions from IBM can be found here: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibm_predictions_for_f...

So their 5 year prediction from 2006 fell completely on its face.

Including: "Our mobile phones will start to read our minds"

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#88

Post by cbr »

unwind wrote: post #67
mkramlich wrote: post #61

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.

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.

    $ sudo cp /bin/cat /dev/null
    $ echo test | /dev/null
    test
(this doesn't actually work)

Re: IBM: Mind reading is less than five years away. For real.

#89

Post by cullenking »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #82
cullenking wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You definitely produce more than a tiny fraction of a horsepower :) I have a watt meter on my bicycle, and I can easily average 250 watts for an hour ride. Well, easily meaning sweating profusely and worked at the end of it, but still, that's 1/3rd of a horsepower for an hour. I can put out 1 horsepower for a few seconds, and I am not a great cyclist...

Ok, YOU produce more than a tiny fraction. I'm 52 and out of shape. I can ride 50 miles if you give me all day, but no way am I putting out more than 1/10 of a horsepower. And NO WAY am I putting a generator on my bike while I'm riding it!

I think you'd surprise yourself :) you could easily peak 250 without much issue, and could sustain 125 without too much of a problem.
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