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Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

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Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#41

Post by echelon »

anigbrowl wrote: post #40
echelon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the world is turning to shit By most objective measures, this is false. More people are being lifted out of poverty than ever before. People are also less bored, more creative, and more productive. > because of climate change Hasn't happened yet. Barring a runaway effect, it looks like we'll have fewer species (lamentable) but more arable land. We're still in an ice age and we're nowhere close to Cretaceous climate…

> Just like we pay people money to sing for us, we'll pay people money to dream for us. The best dreamers and imagineers will sell their distilled thoughts for the rest of us to consume. [unpleasant thought] > This is just vivid imagination. The progression above is why I regard your vision of imagination as a consumer good so immediately off-putting. It's all glitz and glamor until you encounter an idea you don't li…

> It's all glitz and glamor until you encounter an idea you don't like,

It's called defeatism.

I think it's a sad way to spend our short ~60-80 years as temporarily thinking matter in a brilliant and infinite cosmos.

Downer dispositions suck the wonder and awe right out of the air.

Work. Build. Grow. If you have a complaint, throw yourself at the problem and fix it. Or maybe the problem isn't so big relative to the opportunity cost and the short scale of our lives.

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#43

Post by vasco »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #9
echelon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like we pay people money to sing for us, we'll pay people money to dream for us. The best dreamers and imagineers will sell their distilled thoughts for the rest of us to consume. We'll have an indie scene. We'll share them on internet platforms. Remix them. There's so much more good that will come from this than bad.

Yeah, like get this, when the world is turning to shit because of climate change and we're forced to live underground like rats, we can all collectively hallucinate what the world used to be like. It'll be grand. You'll be hallucinating, I'll be hallucinating, the AI'll be hallucinating too. "His older work was much better," ChatGPT will proclaim. "... what older work?"

> we're forced to live underground like rats, we can all collectively hallucinate what the world used to be like

How do you know we aren't already? Someone might've invented this already and you might be living in your pod already hallucinating a full human experience from years ago. Similar concept to "the universe is a simulation" meme.

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#44

Post by anigbrowl »

echelon wrote: post #41
anigbrowl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just like we pay people money to sing for us, we'll pay people money to dream for us. The best dreamers and imagineers will sell their distilled thoughts for the rest of us to consume. [unpleasant thought] > This is just vivid imagination. The progression above is why I regard your vision of imagination as a consumer good so immediately off-putting. It's all glitz and glamor until you encounter an idea you don't li…

> It's all glitz and glamor until you encounter an idea you don't like, It's called defeatism. I think it's a sad way to spend our short ~60-80 years as temporarily thinking matter in a brilliant and infinite cosmos. Downer dispositions suck the wonder and awe right out of the air. Work. Build. Grow. If you have a complaint, throw yourself at the problem and fix it. Or maybe the problem isn't so big relative to the o…

I call that hypocrisy. You sound like a marketing person.

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#45

Post by vixen99 »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #2

“We take very seriously the concerns that it could be used for bad purposes and have worked to avoid that,” Tang said. “We want to make sure people only use these types of technologies when they want to and that it helps them.” This will obviously be abused decades from now. Why wouldn’t authoritarians listen in on brains that have trained transformer models based on forced textual consumption over years.

And the list of those authoritarians is very long indeed. None of them would want to be left behind.

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#46

Post by walderf »

spidersenses wrote: post #32
walderf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i did. it reads as a story if you ignore everything before the first single "/" and read the title, which has a handy link to anyone wanting more info about it, because i am a nice guy, instead of asking such a question. as far as summing it up, well, you can read what i have posted here to figured it out, if you really want to know more.

This is not meant as a personal attack, but reading your comments in this thread, it leaves me with the impression that you may be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. A condition which, if remaining untreated, could eventually make you a danger to yourself and loved ones.

thanks for looking out. i wish this was the case.

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#47

Post by hungryforcodes »

“For a noninvasive method, this is a real leap forward compared to what’s been done before, which is typically single words or short sentences,” Huth said. “We’re getting the model to decode continuous language for extended periods of time with complicated ideas.”

Thats pretty scary. Who would work on this?

Refine this and in 10 years put it into wifi base stations that scan everything and you can read the thoughts of anyone in a room. Auto scan for "dangerous" keywords and voila: automated police state!

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#48

Post by hnbad »

hungryforcodes wrote: post #47

“For a noninvasive method, this is a real leap forward compared to what’s been done before, which is typically single words or short sentences,” Huth said. “We’re getting the model to decode continuous language for extended periods of time with complicated ideas.” Thats pretty scary. Who would work on this? Refine this and in 10 years put it into wifi base stations that scan everything and you can read the thoughts o…

What people tend to forget about these dystopias is that dystopias are distributed unequally. For some people the police is already going to stop you randomly and may randomly end up killing you. Some people will already spend extensive time being searched and questioned if they want to take a flight. Some people will already be automatically rejected before anyone has actually read their qualifications or interviewed them.

The US is already a police state. The police uses military grade equipment and vehicles. They can literally get away with murder in many cases. They can rob you in open daylight, legally. They can arrest you for no crime, detain you and then dump you in the middle of nowhere. They can shoot out your eyes by directly firing rubber bullets (which are supposed to be deflected off surfaces) straight on. And if you end up in prison, you can be forced into indentured servitude.

Of course this is an exaggeration because all these things don't happen to all the people, but that's the point. Concerns about thought crime are just concerns that the apparatus could be aimed at you, too, when you've been less affected so far. The concern shouldn't be for whom it is aimed at but for the scope, scale and supposed necessity of apparatus itself. The problem isn't that we might oppress the wrong people, the problem is that we think we need oppression.

Re: Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds

#49

Post by hnbad »

If this is trained to detect language in your brain, I wonder how this fares with people like me who lack a clear "inner voice" (or "inner monologue"). I don't doubt that it can be trained on a brain to detect that brain's patterns but given how different human brains can be in many ways, I'm inclined to believe this won't be turned into a "universal brain reader" so easily.
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