Mind captioning: Evolving descriptive text of mental content of brain activity

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw1464

by Marshferm • 9 months ago

25 18 9 months ago

fouc3• 9 months ago

In the future, we'll probably lose the ability to verbalize or construct sentences because our thoughts will be directly understood by LLMs, it'll be too easy and convenient.

Marshferm3• 9 months ago

It can’t be LLMs they’re incompatible with thought.

fouc3• 9 months ago

you didn't look at the paper? or you're taking umbrage with the "understanding" part?

pessimizer• 9 months ago

They'll give up talking to us too, and just interface through our ears. The LLM earpiece will just make some 2800 baud modem noises and we'll move around like marionettes.

Terr_4• 9 months ago

Not quite a wordless scenario, but after seeing some people today already scrolling for dopamine, I'm still worried:

I can remember putting on the headset for the first time and the computer talking to me and telling me what to do. It was creepy at first, but that feeling really only lasted a day or so. Then you were used to it, and the job really did get easier. Manna never pushed you around, never yelled at you. The girls liked it because Manna didn’t hit on them either. Manna simply asked you to do something, you did it, you said, “OK”, and Manna asked you to do the next step. Each step was easy. You could go through the whole day on autopilot, and Manna made sure that you were constantly doing something. At the end of the shift Manna always said the same thing. “You are done for today. Thank you for your help.” Then you took off your headset and put it back on the rack to recharge. The first few minutes off the headset were always disorienting — there had been this voice in your head telling you exactly what to do in minute detail for six or eight hours. You had to turn your brain back on to get out of the restaurant.

-- https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Terr_4• 9 months ago

The shareholders yearn for the Torment Nexus.

HollowVoice• 9 months ago

And to think, I grew up thinking Greg Egan and Iain Banks were (mostly) trying to write hopeful stories. It was dystopian all along!

Oh well, time to kill all the weirdos.

UltraSane• 9 months ago

I can see many people not learning how to write when speech to text gets good enough.

briga• 9 months ago

Is this the future technology that anyone wants?

juris• 9 months ago

if only to screen suitable material for the presidency.

Terr_4• 9 months ago

System output: "Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV."

hereme888• 9 months ago

And then wait for the discounted $5k deal* for an automated robotic surgery to implant a NeuraLink device.

*You agree to allow the company to collect anonymized data, to help improve* the device.

*Our lawyers are still working on this.

Terr_4• 9 months ago

If I had my legal 'druthers, such, er, "brain-derived mental content" would be flatly illegal to obtain without a specific and discrete sharing decision by the person, and such decisions may not be part of any contract, so:

1. You can buy a tool and use it to monitor yourself, whether daily-logger, dream-recorder, a fetish-detector, whatever.

2. You can share specific results with others on a case-by-case basis, but it's illegal for them to obtain it any other way.

3. It is not illegal (or at least unenforceable) for someone to require you to share results in exchange for something else, like requiring employees to wear a disloyalty-detector headband.

The question of how it applies to the 5th amendment right against self-incrimination... Hmm. Someone placing Guilt-O-Meter on your head would be illegal, but if you did it yourself and left log files around...

survirtual• 9 months ago

You're close but the idea gets much broader and extends to augmented intelligence as well.

Once the brain is readable, it actually becomes easier to justify legal protections for augmented compute intelligence, ironically enough.

The inevitable end result for a benevolent manifested planet / universe is we all have equal share of impenetrable compute.

This result is unavoidable if we want to live a free and prosperous life.

It requires encoding certain human rights, freedoms, privacy protections, and corporate / government limitations that human beings are not remotely ready to encode yet.

So by extension, I won't hold my breath on brain scanning being a technology I would be comfortable with in the hands of this current world and thinking.

8474_s• 9 months ago

What is the real-world fidelity of this "decoding both perceptual and mental content"? Can it record dream as video?

Mind captioning: Evolving descriptive text of mental content of brain activity

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