141–150 of 258 posts
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I am surprised that no comment has yet mentioned Infinite Jest (which I'm still yet to complete - it's been years since I started).
Care to elaborate for those that haven't started tackling this tome yet?
This is the absolutely horrific next stage for social media platforms: - They're already well able to surface the most addictive short video for a specific user out of millions of real videos. - But these millions of real videos are just darts thrown into the space of "videos that could hook the user", in the end even the best-selected of them is not perfect. - Now, behold! AI allows to generate the perfect video to…
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We are doing to our brains and our children the same thing we are doing to pigs in cages, squezeeing every last cent until the planet burns down.
> until the planet burns down. Common misconception. We won't kill the planet even if we tried to. Wed make it too hard to sustain billions of humans, sure. But they are very different things
I can imagine truly horrifying images coming out of this. Many people who have spent a lot of time online have come across unfortunate gore images that they may have seen for only a fraction of a second that they wish they could unsee. One can imagine the brain is able to see much worse.
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My current theory is that these are similar to cigarettes. Nobody likes the first draft, it burns your lungs, your entire body wants to reject it. But the nicotine stimulates just the right receptors so that if you keep at it for just long enough, you'll be hooked and start disregarding the terrible taste, smell, tar in your lungs, and yellowing of your teeth. All of this to say, if you subjected yourself to just eno…
As a teenager, I tried to get addicted to cigarettes so I could stand by the cool kids and smoke with them. I started smoking 4-6 cigarettes a day but hated it so much, I couldn't continue after a week or two...
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> I appreciate that this is scientific research, but there are definitely companies out there that will try to row-hammer everyone's brain if this sort of thing is not heavily controlled. What's to gain in doing so?
I will state plainly that I do not think you are asking this maliciously, and that instead you are asking from curiosity. From that perspective, though, I am a bit flabbergasted. Are you truly curious as to how it might not be A Good Thing that those engaging in high-finance capitalistic money making programs would have access to forcefully engaging a human being's brain into activity, with or without their consent,…
I guess I just don't think this is the topic at hand. What you're proposing is mind control. That's not what's at issue. What's at issue is scientifically optimized superstimuli that can predictably activate certain brain regions. So when I read "rowhammer" I'm thinking about it in this context, the ability of a video to consistently activate a targeted section of your brain.
As you should know, and IIRC, cognition does not cleanly or consistently map geographically in the brain. To go from the ability to activate a subset of brain regions to influencing behavior is not a neglible step. The only real potential I imagine is in emotional activation, which is fairly well-localized.
So really what we're talking about is being able to evoke ideas and feelings with more consistency and precision than before. This doesn't seem new. And it can't be that intense either—I have the sense that your hypothetical mind control video would be extremely annoying or unpleasant before becoming influential. And for now we have the freedom to choose what we watch and turn the video off.
And it might be reasonable to say that you were referring to future possibilities, and that I'm focusing too much on what's currently available. But I am not just reacting to the first quoted clause of parent, but to their [vomits] policy recommendations. "This sort of thing", if not heavily controlled, etc. Maybe you see no value in this research, maybe there isn't any. Nonetheless the paranoid and the scifi-as-nonfiction readers will throw up the Bat signal for the idiots and moral panic orchestrators in power to wrap us all in comforting red tape for our own good.
I exaggerate. And I am talking about many more things than you were, as if the volume of text strengthens any rebuttal. All I'm saying is, this tech has little power over human behavior, in my opinion, and we should be cautious before bringing the hammer down before we know if we've got a bumblebee or a wasp.
This is very similar to last week with that mind reading startup thing. Please read the paper before commenting. This is a tool to help researchers in figuring out what different parts of the brain are actually for with less experimenter bias contamination of “well we think maybe it’s about this so let’s show it video of x to see”. The essence runs on having someone sit in a scanner for a couple hours watching all so…
A portion of young men already are more or less addicted to pornographic content. Tolls like this have the potential to make this so much worse.