Unfortunately, EEG doesn’t provide sufficient signal-to-noise ratio to support good communication speeds outside of the lab with Faraday cages and days/weeks of de-noising including removing eye-movement artifacts in the recordings. This is a physical limit due to attenuation of brain’s electrical fields outside of the skull, which is hard to overcome. For example, all commercial “mind-reading” toys are actually working based off head and eye muscle signals.

Implanted electrodes provide better signal but are many iterations away from becoming viable commercially. Signal degrades over months as the brain builds scar tissue around electrodes and the brain surgery is obviously pretty dangerous. Iteration cycles are very slow because of the need for government approval for testing in humans (for a good reason).

If I wanted to help a paralyzed friend, who could only move his/her eyes, I would definitely focus on the eye-tracking tech. It hands-down beat all BCIs I’ve heard of.

That is a neural lace, it informed her. ~ A more exquisite and economical method of torturing creatures such as yourself has yet to be invented.

The ability of deep learning to tease back out signal from noise, such as reversing what's being typed from room audio with a keyboard in it, shouldn't be underestimated.

The biggest challenge may be that EEG data correlated with signals is relatively expensive to generate, so there's not going to be anything like millions of hours of people looking at or processing known things to throw into a model.

Whereas we're about to have massive increases in eye tracking data as it becomes a central component to new consumer hardware.

For example going through a metal detector or handling a phone.

Unsurprisingly one of their biggest sources of noise is handling a plugged in phone.

I think something like an EEG faraday beanie would actually work and adding accessory egocentric video would allow doctors to filter a lot of the noise out.

https://actu.epfl.ch/news/thought-controlled-walking-again-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage

Even if they were, count them among the lucky 10000 [1] and explaining is nicer. Soon with ai generated spam it feels like searching for anything is going to be worse than useless.

1: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Predict: was the University of California at Austin in where he studied in Beta Kappa in a degree of degree in history American Studies in 1975. and a one classes a half years to complete the degree. and was a excellent grades.

Wow. That seems comparable to the rudimentary _voice_ to text systems of the 70s and 80s. The brain interface is quickly leaving the realm of sci-fi and becoming a reality. I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

^ "Overall illustration of translate EEG waves into text through quantised encoding." doesn't count.

https://github.com/duanyiqun/DeWave/issues/1

In a normal recurrent neural network, the model predicts token-at-a-time. It predicts a token, and that token is appended to the total prediction so far which is then fed back into the model to generate the next token. In other words, the network generates all the predictions itself based off its own previous outputs and the other inputs (brainwaves in this case), meaning that a bad prediction can send the entire thing off track.

In teacher forcing that isn't the case. All the tokens up to the point where it's predicting are taken from the correct inputs. That means the model is never exposed to its own previous errors. But of course in a real system you don't have access to the correct inputs, so this is not feasible to do in reality.

The other repo says:

"We have written a corrected version to use model.generate to evaluate the model, the result is not so good"

but they don't give examples.

This problem completely invalidates the paper's results. It is awful that they have effectively hidden and locked the thread in which the issue was reported. It's also kind of nonsensical that people doing such advanced ML work are claiming they accidentally didn't know the difference between model.forward() and model.generate(). I mean I'm not an ML researcher and might have mangled the description of teacher forcing, but even I know these aren't the same thing at all.

Also, @dang, can we ban links to iflscience? They're a trash publication that entirely relies on clickbaity misrepresentations of research works. There is __always__ a better source that can be used.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38565424

This year it is the "Brainoware" which is claimed to do speech recognition , and now this.

Come to think, you could even train the LLM with a corpus of the person's own transcribed conversations, if you've got it. Then it'd be serving almost exactly the function of predicting "what that person in particular would say at this point."

Maybe you could even find some additional EEG-pad locations that could let you read out the electrical consequences of AMPAR vs NMDAR agonism within the brain; determine from that how much the person is currently relying on their own internal top-down speech model vs using their own internal bottom-up processing to form a weird novel statement they've never thought before; and use this info to weight the level of influence the TTS model has vs the LLM on the output.

Sir, let us read that for you

That's the future.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/with-fitness...

EDIT: There's also a national legislative proposal to mandate that all cars have a system to monitor their drivers and lock them out on signs of intoxication.

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/09/1053847935/congress-cars-drun...

The real battle will be with law enforcement who get a warrant to look at your brain in an MRI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSV7cxma6_s

>"Peter Diamandis, the futurist to watch as all of these technologies advance with unimaginable speed, is going to blow your mind and help you imagine new possibilities and opportunities for your healthspan."

I wonder whether, in a decade or two, if the sensor technology has gotten good enough that they don't even need you to wear a cap, just there'll be people saying "obviously you don't have any reasonable expectation of not having your thoughts read in a public space, don't be ridiculous". What I mean is, we just tend to normalize surveillance technology, and I wonder if there's any practical limit to how far that can go.

Over a decade ago were the stories about how Target's loyalty program algorithm had discovered a teen was pregnant before she'd told her family, based on correlative purchase changes (like switching from scented to unscented candles).

If I could take your social media, face and eye tracking on CCTV, phone gyroscope data, purchase history, search history, and the same from all your associated contacts, with a broad enough comparative data set I could probably identify all kinds of skeletons from all kinds of closets.

It's a bit like the "my phone is listening to my conversations" freak out. It's not, but the thing you should be much more concerned about is that it has such an accurate picture of what you end up talking about without needing to be listening in the first place.

Voice works as a very inferior substitute when hands-free operation is of overriding importance.

Being able to analyze your thought patterns outside your own head could lead to all sorts of improvements. You could find which teaching techniques are actually the most effective. You could objectively find when you are most and least focused. You could pinpoint when anxious thoughts began and their trigger. And best of all, you could do this personally, with a partner, or in a group based on your choice.

Also you can give someone an FMRI as a brain scanning polygraph today. But there are still a ton of questions about it’s legitimacy.

https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...

Typing in a journal text file for 15 minutes every morning is already a thing... and it's free.

This might not be everybody. I don't feel that way.

> keeping a diary makes you understand yourself better or just become more coherent with your delusions

That might be true, but once they're coherent are they still delusions? I call those plans.

Yes.

It's kind of hard to think about the upside of no longer having private thoughts.

I'm amazed you can go right to its benefits without realizing the universe-sized hole in the ethics of this.

But then again, that's techbro nature.

This is like saying "thermonuclear weapon tech has its ups and downs". It is technically correct, but we are talking about the (lack of) balance here. Not being able to think privately could be the end of civilisation as we know it.

Nuclear technology is a superset of nuclear weapon technology. I am not saying all neuroscience is bad, just this specific topic.

https://www.engadget.com/2009-05-14-darpa-working-on-silent-...

I'm sure we're close to brain interfaces, but something seems off about this one.

Let's say a couple years from now, someone invents an airport scanner that "detects" evil thoughts, except there is no way to verify it, and no accountability for false negatives. The result is whatever the operator says it is. If enough people accept it enough to not resist it, and even turn on the ones who are detected by it, it doesn't matter what's real because it's just a participatory ritual of sympathetic magic. I feel like there are examples of similar dynamics in recent memory.

I imagine it would help a stroke patient, I also imagine it would give out unfiltered thoughts, which might be troublesome.

You're right, this is why in year 2200, your job application is going to be fast-tracked by analyzing your thoughts directly.

If you have a Neuralink, no problems, you can directly upload a trace of thoughts.

In case you have wrong thoughts, don't worry, we have rehabilitation school, which can alter your state of mind.

Don't forget to be happy, it's forbidden to be sad.

Also, this is read-only for now, but what about writing ?

This could open new possibilities as well (real-life Matrix ?)

Oh by the way, did you hear about Lightspeed Briefs ?

==

All that being said, it's great research and going to be useful. Just the potential of abuse from politics is huge over the long-term.

Except that someone with a jailbroken Neuralink could upload a filtered and arbitrarily-modified thought trace, getting ahead of all those plebs. Cyberpunk! :)

As much as this is an unimaginable positive benefit to people who are locked in, this is definitely one of those stories that makes me think "Stop inventing the Torment Nexus!"

They will hate it, lies always benefits those with power more than those without since when the police lies against you then there isn't much you could do before, now you could demand they get their thoughts read.

not far off from existing issues like some forms of tourette’s.

It seems like outputting a representation of embodied experience would be a difficult challenge to get right and interpret, though perhaps a dataset of signals associated with embodied experiences could more readily be robustly annotated with linguistic descriptions using a vision-to-language model, so that the canine mind reader could predict and output those linguistic descriptions instead.

Imagine knowing the specific park your dog wants to go to, or the subtle early signs of an illness or injury they're noticing, or what treat your dog wants you to buy.

Think your message, think "send", hear responses via earbud. With voice cloning, you even get the message in the sender's voice. Totally silent and invisible to outside observers.

Maybe that's not even necessary.

I'd be very curious to see the results of trying to use the hardware in this system as a set of transducers — i.e. running the ML model here in reverse from a target text, and then pushing the resulting bottom-level electrical signals as trans-cranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) signals back through the EEG pads.

How interesting would it be, if this resulted in a person hearing the text as a verbal thought in their own mental voice?

https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Rtya.png

PsOne's Tomb Raider seemed hi-res, Hi-res didn't even exist, I thought we were at the peak of gaming.

Apple Pro One wants to make computers spatial, we find telepathy cool.

I would love to code by the sole action of my mind while running in the forest or scuba diving, 10 seconds here and there.

I would love to receive a drawing made in the mind of someone else, to see it appear in front of me and to be able to share it with others around me : "-Hey, look at what Julia did."

And again, that's exactly what happens already but in a more immediate manner; replace smartphone with mind, screen with environment and you're in that futuristic world.

It feels like this is cool because of novelty, but then wouldn't it be cool to go back to punching code on cards, or writing lines with ed on a terminal ?

A few years ago I went from music production in a DAW to ten synthesizers (70-84 era) with a tape machine : way cooler, never going back.

But do I produce as fast as before ?

Nope

Here is what I think : I want the possibility of writing code with my mind and virtual floating screens only because of _one thing_ (apart from the initial first few days of new=cool).

I want this to work less, or more exactly to be less at work.

But you know how it will be; you will be asked to produce more work. And this will become mandatory to work by the sole power of your mind, with 5 or 6 virtual screens around you.

And that's all, until a new invention seems cool to you.

    And if my thought-dreams could be seen
    They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
    But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

edit: and it’s sliding down again. Your comment will be relevant again shortly ha

Would probably take more to get data from such people though. From people with an inner monologue you could just make them read text, record that, and then you can follow their inner monologues.

For example, when writing we have often gone done many thought paths, evaluated each and backtracked etc, but none of that is left in the text an LLM trains on today. Recording brainwaves and training on that is probably the best training data we could get for LLMs.

Getting that data wouldn't be much harder than paying humans to solve problems with these hats on recording their brainwaves.

Not sure on the accuracy in these examples, but this video may be showing the words/min speed of the system.

Not so impressive compared to EEG.

I'm guessing it would be worse at reading passwords like "784&Ghkkr!e" than "horse staple battery ..."

amazing to think of where this could be in 10 or 20 years.

Cool tech though, lots of positive applications too.

Unfortunately there will be authoritarian regimes that will use and abuse this type of tech, but we need to take a firm stand against it in liberal democracies at the very least.

What if perfect brainreaders/liedetectors became as common as smartphones.

Used on everybody all the time. From politicians and cops to schoolkids and your own siblings.

What would be an optimistic version of that?

Most people have intrusive thoughts, some people (like those with OCD, for example) have really frequent and distressing intrusive thoughts. What are you going to think of the OCD sufferer in the cubicle next to you who keeps inadvertently broadcasting intrusive thoughts about violently stabbing you to death? Keep in mind, they will never act on those thoughts, they are simply the result of some faulty brain wiring and they are even more disgusted about them than you are. What are you going to think when you find out your sister-in-law had an affair with a coworker ten years ago, because her mind wandered there while you were having coffee with her?

Humanity does not even come close to having the level of understanding and compassion needed to prevent total chaos in a world like that. People naïvely believed that edgy or embarrassing social media posts made by millenials in the late 2000s wouldn't be a big deal, because we'd all figure out that everyone is imperfect and the person you were 10 years ago is not the person you are today. Nope, if anything the opposite has happened: it's now a widely accepted practice to go on a fishing expedition through someone's social media history to find something compromising to shame them with. Now imagine that, but applied to mind reading. No, that's not a future that we can survive as a species, at least not without radical changes in our approaches to dealing with each other.

- insurance discount if you wear this while driving

- remote work offered as a "perk" as long as you wear it

- the "alladvantage ecg helmet" that pays you to wear it around while you're shown advertising

- to augment one of those video interviews where you have to answer questions and a computer screens your behavior

That's all stuff that already exists more or less and much more likely to be the form that the abuse of this technology takes

Sadly accuracy has not been a big concern historically of polygraphs and much of forensic "science".

They also said that the person must cooperate for the decoding to work, meaning the person could reduce the decoding accuracy by thinking of specific things (e.g. counting).

CORRECTION: The paper I read was not the correct paper, ignore this comment. The actual paper states that the model is transferrable across subjects.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.14030v2.pdf

If it can extract words from my grey spaghetti then maybe it can extract my intention too.

That's probably incredibly obvious and I'm silly for even bringing it up.

Granted there may be chains of assumptions of advancement involved between them into actual thought-reading, but we've seen before how the devil has hid in those details in advancement chains. See all of the problems with autonomous vehicles in practice. People kind of suck at predicting what problems will be easy to solve.

Like, accurate brain readers are right under DWIM guns in the pantheon of things thou mustn't build!

First thing that came to my mind was an airport check. “Oh, you want to enter this country? Just use this device for a few minutes, please”

How about courts and testimony?

This tech will be used against you faster than you will recognize. Later on one will ask, why people let it happen.

Looks like it crosses over. That's wild.

Basically, are you proposing to ban some fields of research because the result can be abused? Anything can be abused. From the social care system to scientific breakthroughs. What the society should do is to control the abuse, not stop the progress. Not even because of ethics, where the opinions diverge, but because stopping the progress is virtually impossible.

There is actually a line. You can actually decide not to cross it.

Ted Kaczynski pretty much predicted the current state of affairs all the way back at 1970s. [1]

Thankfully the world is not infinite so humankind cannot continue this situation for too long. The first Earth Overshoot Day was 31 December 1971, it was August 2 this year.[4] The effects of the nearing population collapse can be easily seen today in the increasing worldwide inflation, interest rates and hostility as the era of abundance comes to an end and resources get scarcer and scarcer. It's important to note that the technological prowess of humanity was only due to having access to basically unlimited energy for decades, not due to some perceived human ingenuity, which can save humankind from extinction-level threats. In fact, humans are pretty incapable of understanding world-scale events and processes and acting accordingly[5], which is another primary reason to not have left the simple non-technological world which the still non-evolved primate-like human brain could intuitively understand.

1: Refer to the manifesto "Industrial Revolution and Its Consequences".

2: Organization-dependent technology: Technology which requires organized effort, as opposed to small scale technology which a single person can produce himself with correct knowledge.

3: By Kaczynski, in the book Anti-Tech Revolution. Freely available online.

4: Biological overshoot occurs when demands placed on an ecosystem by a species exceeds the carrying capacity. Earth Overshoot Day is the day when humanity's demand on nature exceeds Earth's biocapacity. Humanity was able to continue its survival due to phantom carrying capacity.

5: Just take a look at the collective response of humanity to climate change.

Yes, the CIA, DARPA, et. al. will be all over this (surprisingly if not already), but this is a sacrifice worth making for this kind of technology.

How many people in the whole world are tinpot authoritarian despots just looking for an excuse who would just love to be able to look inside your mind?

Somehow, I imagine the first number is dramatically dwarfed by the second number.

This is a technology that, once it is invented, will find more and more and more and more uses.

We need to make sure you don't spill corporate secrets, so we will be mandating that all workers wear this while in the office.

Oh no, we've just had a leak, we're gonna have to ask that if you want to work here you must wear this brain buddy home! For the good of the company.

And so on.

I'm blind, but if you offered to cure my blindness with the side effect that nobody could ever hide under the cover of darkness ( I donno, electronic eyes of some kind? Go with the metaphor!) I would still not take it.

What's important is how we prepare for and handle inevitable change. Hoping no negative change comes about if we just stay the same is a far worse game.

When I read the previous comment, I had been imagining a gun (in the sense of a weapon that shoots a bullet from a barrel) which “does what the user intends for it to do”, which, I didn’t see how it would differ much from a usual gun, unless it just, had auto aim, or perhaps acted according to user’s impulses rather than deliberate decisions, which could be bad, but doesn’t seem like it would top the list of “things thou shalt not build”.