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From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery

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Re: From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery

#71

Post by ygouzerh »

consumer451 wrote: post #57

Please see my bio for the full rant. The key take-away is: > While we missed the boat on Internet tracking, there is still time to avoid sailing through the final frontier of neural tracking. > Thanks to the BCI, we will soon be offered the trade of our privacy for the convenience of password-free login and faster typing. Next, there will be a quick TSA neural scan prior to boarding...

It's good point! However, one of the main benefits of a technology like this, would be not really for everyday people, but for people with handicap or a speech impediment.

I personally have a stammer. While mine is less severe, and I doesn't need directly it, I know several people that would quite be glad of the benefits that it could bring to them. (Example: pass online interviews).

I agree however of the privacy concerns. We could limit it in a first time to medical devices for example, or have some privacy laws in place.

Re: From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery

#72

Post by ksd482 »

yieldcrv wrote: post #51
supern0va wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is just no way to go past what we have already observed by their behavior since dogs can't talk or write. There are many dogs that have been trained to press buttons corresponding to words, in the extreme case tens/hundreds of buttons/words, and they can even construct rudimentary sentences. It doesn't seem insane to me that we could perhaps do a very rudimentary version of this for dogs, given a large enough…

but that's imposing our language on them, when we should be understanding them there's a movie about that default human hubris, it spoils it though

That's a great point.

The "vocabulary resolution being low" basically just means within our own limited context, it's low. But that doesn't mean it's a good measure. Heck, I'd say it isn't.

Re: From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery

#73

Post by fjlunky »

ge96 wrote: post #7

The size of that machine

I imagine you’re wanting instead something the size of a hat, but smaller fMRI are certainly in development, for example [0] with discussion about the size at [1].

[0] https://med.umn.edu/news/university-minnesota-developing-com...

[1] https://designawards.core77.com/Strategy-Research/95329/A-ne...

Re: From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery

#74

Post by Sanzig »

lwhi wrote: post #10
ge96 wrote: post #7

The size of that machine

The participants end up looking a bit like Toad from Mariokart. How realistic would it be to make a smaller device?

Not my field, but since they use SQUIDs I suspect most of the volume is taken up by cryo equipment. So, maybe if someone eventually discovers a room temperature superconductor.

Re: From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery

#75

Post by insane_dreamer »

alexpotato wrote: post #20

So attended an interesting talk a couple years ago: - fMRI and/or brain implants are the best to figure out brain waves - but they are expensive or invasive - EEG is a lot cheaper and easier but not as precise - BUT what if you used LLMs to analyze EEG data taken at the same time as brain implants etc The answer seemed to be that "yes, you can get better than traditional EEG data using EEG + LLMs". Curious to see whe…

> “yes, you can get better than traditional EEG data using EEG + LLMs"

Not yet. There are plenty of transformer based models out there for EEG but they so far do not outperform the SOTA “traditional” (ML/DL) models.

Re: From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery

#76

Post by rushil_b_patel »

Mark always been framed/stated for stealing user's data or invasing user's privacy but apart from these, this guy has always been one step ahead in making new research, technology possible by experimenting new things. First with the AR/VR which didn't work I guess so he pivoted from that to Rayban glasses, and now this.

Re: From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery

#77

Post by [deleted] »

rushil_b_patel wrote: post #76

Mark always been framed/stated for stealing user's data or invasing user's privacy but apart from these, this guy has always been one step ahead in making new research, technology possible by experimenting new things. First with the AR/VR which didn't work I guess so he pivoted from that to Rayban glasses, and now this.

[deleted]

Re: From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery

#78

Post by wwind123 »

rushil_b_patel wrote: post #76

Mark always been framed/stated for stealing user's data or invasing user's privacy but apart from these, this guy has always been one step ahead in making new research, technology possible by experimenting new things. First with the AR/VR which didn't work I guess so he pivoted from that to Rayban glasses, and now this.

The "Metaverse" bet was a bold but lost bet, in hindsight. Mark is fortunate that the Facebook empire is still printing a lot of money to burn, so he could switch his focus to AI now that it's clear AI is the real thing for this decade. This brain-wave thing is a very small wrinkle in the big picture, not really a big strategy shift.

Re: From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery

#79

Post by fooker »

dang wrote: post #62
fooker wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@dang How is this offtopic? Meta has shown remarkable disregard to users' and employees' privacy. Why should that not come up when discussing an entirely new dystopian technology that allows them to invade privacy at scale?

The topic is research into brain-wave decoding. To take some specific piece of research going on in one corner of $BigCorp, and tar it with the brush of general sentiment about $BigCorp, is a classic example of generic tangent: where the topic goes from something specific-and-more-interesting, to something generic-and-more-indignant. We've learned over the years that this is exactly the wrong direction for HN threads…

It's not a 'general sentiment' or tangent though, it's specifically THE technology that has the potential to make privacy nonexistent.

Funded by the company that in the recent past, got exposed trying to track employees computer interactions and grabbing screens. Not long before that, it was leaked that employees and contractors were watching videos recorded from meta/rayban smartglasses.

I'm a little bit baffled by the defense here. The point of having guidelines is to use your judgement when applying them.

Re: From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery

#80

Post by trueno »

smusamashah wrote: post #58
consumer451 wrote: post #57

Please see my bio for the full rant. The key take-away is: > While we missed the boat on Internet tracking, there is still time to avoid sailing through the final frontier of neural tracking. > Thanks to the BCI, we will soon be offered the trade of our privacy for the convenience of password-free login and faster typing. Next, there will be a quick TSA neural scan prior to boarding...

This is the most pessimistic take on this tech here. You can view anything with the same lens.

at this point i feel like its just painfully obvious that if this for whatever became feasible/widespread/scalable, it would absolutely be implemented by the powers that be and willed into fruition by gaslighting, fear mongering and misinformation. i dont know how much more proof this world needs that ruling classes can and do want to just subjugate the hell out of everyone & enforce their world view on the world around them
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