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Comment by sxp | Hacker News Reader

Johnson was on the Lex Fridman podcast recent and discussed the helmet there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YbcB6b4A2U

The most interesting thing is that one of their helmets, Flow, is using IR backscatter sensing rather than the electric or magnetic sensing that most other BCI devices (including their other helmet, Flux) use.

The system is still pricey at $50-100k or $3.6k/mo, but they're also planning on selling a simplified version at $5k: https://docs.kernel.com/docs/how-much-does-a-flow-system-cos...

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So what is this tech good for in the first place.

If I was wearing one I could wait until I'm in a flow state and write something witty, instead I just knocked out this worthless quip.

I’m not sure we can just “wait” to enter flow state.

It's a little like asking "what is this tech good for in the first place" when the internet started becoming a thing. And many people did ask such a question.

There are almost limitless possibilities. For example, if such a device were good and sensitive and accurate enough, I bet you could create some software that would let you quickly compose and produce music in a DAW via thoughts. And perhaps also even something more abstract like semi-implicit or subconscious "intentions" or notions. And if you might ask "okay, but what would that be good for?", I could write a whole essay I suppose.

(Disclaimer: I've been waiting for years for something to come out that would let me try to build something like this. I'm sure it'll likely still be a while before it's possible to make and practical for consumers to buy and use, but I think it could potentially happen within our lifetimes.)

It'd be much harder, but I think you could maybe even program certain things via thoughts. Maybe only a limited subset of things to start with, like visualizing a web page and having the basic skeleton, shapes, and colors quickly filled in, but if you look on the span of centuries, maybe eventually full programs, too.

I'm not sure at all if this would actually be the case, but maybe some people could potentially achieve a very high WPM if their thoughts were converted into text. Much higher than anyone could type by hand. Especially if it were something where you were reciting text/speech from memory, so that it could happen at your raw speed of thought, rather than writing an essay where you have to think about what you actually want to say as you're doing it, in which case it might be fairly close to your typing or handwriting speed.

Maybe this particular iteration of it won't be that great or that useful, but some future thing definitely will be.

No one cares about someone’s improvised broad generalizations and “one day it’ll be great” patronizing speeches.

The question was what’s it good for as it is today, based on people with knowledge about it.

In particular the only thing you demonstrated here is that you have absolutely no knowledge about it.

>No one cares about someone’s improvised broad generalizations and “one day it’ll be great” patronizing speeches.

I was just matching the patronizing, brusque tone in your original post.

>The question was what’s it good for as it is today, based on people with knowledge about it.

I apologize, then, because I don't think that was clear from your post, which contained only the text "So what is this tech good for in the first place." If your question were "So what are the device's current capabilities?" or something similar, then I would've responded differently.

>In particular the only thing you demonstrated here is that you have absolutely no knowledge about it.

I do, actually. Your question (ending in a period) came across as extremely condescending and dismissive, and as if you were questioning the value of BCIs in general. So my goal with that post was to try to make an argument for the potential of what BCI tech is good for in the first place, as I interpreted your post.

If you want an overview of what their company's devices can do today and what's planned, this recent podcast episode with the CEO is a good start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YbcB6b4A2U

> I was just matching the patronizing, brusque tone in your original post.

My original post simply asked: "what is it good for". If you insist to see this as a rhetorical sarcastic question, that's your problem. I asked it as a question.

> I do, actually. Your question (ending in a period) came across as extremely condescending and dismissive

So, the fact I asked a question and didn't end it with a question mark resulted in this emotional outburst and interpreting it as "extremely condescending and dismissive". Think about that. It's illogical and outright hysterical.

I wasn't thinking about "BCI tech" in general at all. I was curious about this device. You're completely, utterly off the mark.

> If your question were "So what are the device's current capabilities?" or something similar, then I would've responded differently.

I don't want to know what are its current capabilities because I understood that from the article. But I don't know what its current capabilities are good for in practical use for their potential customers. You may want me to ask the questions you want me to ask, that's cute, but it's not how asking questions works. People ask what they want to ask, and you answer if you can and want to answer. You don't go around insulting people and inferring ill intent in their questions for not asking the questions YOU want them to ask.

You see, when you sell $50k device, you believe you're providing $50k of value. It's not an internal research device anymore. That implies they see some uses for it, and I was wondering what those are, without listening to an entire podcast.

And you clearly don't know. And that isn't my fault.

Having worked on BCI tech a little bit as a student assistant (which were not fNIR based though) there were a few directions:

* Medical settings in which patients are slowly losing the ability to move or communicate, being able to look at a keyboard to type messages to your loved ones or perform basic actions (e.g. turning music on) make a terrible situation a tiny bit better.

* Entertainment/gimmicks: you go to Disneyland and you put on a cap/helmet and suddenly you can interact with objects just by looking at them (they have a flickering light next to them that pulses in a certain binary pattern) - it's like magic.

The second usecase is very difficult today though, the tech that I worked with (+5 years ago) needed to be trained for every new user and a training time of 10 minutes was considered very short. That of course makes the Disneyland usecase more difficult. Also you need to make sure you don't move or blink too much - maybe fNIR has less issues with that.

I think the podcast is worth a listen, i found Bryan to be refreshingly pragmatic about the tech and his vision for it. In short hes just focused on improving the observability of the brain in action. He seems pretty confident that whoever gets this right will spur an avalanche of new applications and technologies.

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