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Comment by bawana | Hacker News Reader

This too will be weaponized. How? Capture a North Korean official, put one of these in his brain and siphon off all the juicy intel. Capture a narco trafficker. ditto. Capture a terrorist. ditto. Have we made the world better? It seems that whenever we develop ANY device for improved information processing, it disrupts the world we live in and displaces the uniquely human style of information processing-rendering humans less necessary. It is paradoxical. We make our lives 'easier' and human talent is lost.

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This doesn't work like this. Braingate (and all brain implants of this nature) require very active effort/cooperation in order to produce output. Here's what it feels like:

- Imagine, very hard, the act of moving your arm to write a message.

- Do everything that you would do to speak a word, except the actual act of articulating a word. Get as close as you can while stopping the actual muscles involved from firing.

These are not mind-readers. They hook into your normal brain circuitry. It mostly works the same way that you can type out a message on your keyboard without thinking about the keyboard: it's a brain HCI, `/dev/input`, not kernel-space.

Really wouldn't surprise me if they figured out a way to do this in an unsupervised way though. (We might be decades from that though who knows.)

Maybe you could even do supervised by force-feeding known stimuli a la Clockwork Orange.

This bypasses the desired capability, that of getting info from the hard disk.

If you connect input in a feedback loop with an output and train on a particular output, of course you’re going to get the output you’re training for. It’s just not going to bear much resemblance to the data that’s on the hard disk without cooperation from the host system.

It depends on how much control the host system has over the output (can consciously drown out the signal). Suppose you just show YES and NO in big flashing letters while asking your subject the questions you already know the answers to and measure the output when training the device. Then it boils down to whether it can pick up what you "really think" over what you "try to think" better than the current generation of polygraphs (which is very bad at its job). So these technical specifics would decide where exactly it falls within the range from "comically unreliable" to "dystopian nightmare".

I think you are overestimating the power this kind of stuff has.

Quite a big leap from being able to identify a letter someone is thinking of REALLY HARD with the express purpose of making the software recognize it to randomly implanting something in someones brain and being able to browse through their thoughts.

This nightmare scenario fails the "rubber hose" test[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis

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