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Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

> The part where they can pair the phone via bluetooth made me want to vomit.

I had the same reaction. I just recently had a lot of trouble pairing Airpods to Macbook (both no more than 2 years old). If Apple can't make it work between their own devices, it's doomed. A piece of shit technology, a black stain on the whole stack.

The demo is impressive otherwise, and I don't think it's weird to control a device with your mind. Or, if weird, it's the interesting kind of weird.

I'd like to see a multi-modal GPT successor that learns not just text, image and video but also neural brain signals. It's one modality we haven't touched on yet. Maybe it will be able to extract speech directly from the brain, which is orders of magnitude harder than controlling a joystick.

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> Maybe it will be able to extract speech directly from the brain, which is orders of magnitude harder than controlling a joystick.

Check out https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1119-1

And yes it is definitely orders of magnitude harder than controlling a joystick

Imagine the wonders it would do for interrogation /s

There is a big difference between decoding covert and even "imagined speech" and decoding "thoughts". In covert/imagined speech decoding, the user actually tries very hard to imagine the action of speaking and moving the corresponding vocal articulators, without actually doing it. This is similar to mental motor rehearsal done in sports training.

It works because there is direct correlation between the speech-motor cortex and how the vocal articulators (larynx, tongue, etc) move, and how that combine to produce speech.

Abstract "thoughts", on the other hand, are not so straight-forward. For one, there's no central location in the cortex where the concept of "car", for example, lives. The distributed representation of abstract thoughts within the brain makes it orders of magnitude more difficult than decoding speech for one specific individual. Then add orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude to generalize that to different people.

Maybe you're onto something. Assuming your intent is to obtain information from a captured enemy at all costs, an implant like this is probably far more humane than waterboarding or actual torture.

Also, unlike torture, it would work.

I assume your /s was meta-sarcastic.

With a few decades (years?) of refinement, this technology absolutely has the potential to capture private thoughts.

Sure, it may require an implant, but just like we all carry tracking beacons that have become indispensable to daily life today, in 20 years it may be “the done thing” to have an implant to control your home automation, etc. Or maybe the tech will improve to where it just needs a hat. And at that point, certain authorities will have no qualms about using it in interrogations, with or without “due process.”

Sounds like the point in history where we should be practicing doublethink explicitly. Is this the evolutionary niche psychopaths are meant to fill?

Btw this appears to be a common failure mode for AirPods. You need new ones :(

Yay for planned obsolescence.

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