Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people’s minds
news.utexas.edu
news.utexas.edu
This will obviously be abused decades from now. Why wouldn’t authoritarians listen in on brains that have trained transformer models based on forced textual consumption over years.
We'll have an indie scene. We'll share them on internet platforms. Remix them.
There's so much more good that will come from this than bad.
"His older work was much better," ChatGPT will proclaim. "... what older work?"
By most objective measures, this is false. More people are being lifted out of poverty than ever before. People are also less bored, more creative, and more productive.
> because of climate change
Hasn't happened yet. Barring a runaway effect, it looks like we'll have fewer species (lamentable) but more arable land. We're still in an ice age and we're nowhere close to Cretaceous climate.
We're closer to inventing transcendent intelligence than killing it off completely.
> forced to live underground like rats
This is just vivid imagination. We're not Morlocks.
[unpleasant thought]
> This is just vivid imagination.
The progression above is why I regard your vision of imagination as a consumer good so immediately off-putting. It's all glitz and glamor until you encounter an idea you don't like, and then you're immediately dismissive of it.
It's called defeatism.
I think it's a sad way to spend our short ~60-80 years as temporarily thinking matter in a brilliant and infinite cosmos.
Downer dispositions suck the wonder and awe right out of the air.
Work. Build. Grow. If you have a complaint, throw yourself at the problem and fix it. Or maybe the problem isn't so big relative to the opportunity cost and the short scale of our lives.
I comment on HN as I wait for CI.
This is dangerously fantastical thinking. Global heating gives us less arable land. It becomes harder to grow crops as the temperature increases. This is a much bigger negative effect than any positive effect from CO2 increases. A lot of current arable land in the tropics will become unusable.
Or are you thinking of growing crops in recently-defrosted tundra in Siberia? In which case, how are you going to get political agreement to grow stuff there, get high enough soil quality, irrigate it, and move all the farmers from, say, India to there to work it?
How do you know we aren't already? Someone might've invented this already and you might be living in your pod already hallucinating a full human experience from years ago. Similar concept to "the universe is a simulation" meme.
Anyway, your post reminded me of the "The Futurological Congress" by Lem.
I've worked on a documentary about the effects of coastal erosion in Guyana, which won the 2020 Godrey Chin Heritage Journalism 1st prize.
You can see the trailer as well as the complete documentary over on https://hammyhavoc.com/audio-post-production-for-coast-land-...
Will check it out! Also got Neal Stephenson's Anathem recommended earlier. I had no idea how many people on HN read SF! :- )
It is not clear whether this is language dependent or not. If it is, I hope being bilingual or multilingual is a viable defense against this technology.
Edit: sorry, maybe I’m misunderstanding. Are you talking more about multilingual people thinking more abstractly, which would make it harder to tie information to any specific words?
If true, everyone who took part in it should be tried as terrorists for crimes against humanity and never see the light again.
Thats pretty scary. Who would work on this?
Refine this and in 10 years put it into wifi base stations that scan everything and you can read the thoughts of anyone in a room. Auto scan for "dangerous" keywords and voila: automated police state!
The US is already a police state. The police uses military grade equipment and vehicles. They can literally get away with murder in many cases. They can rob you in open daylight, legally. They can arrest you for no crime, detain you and then dump you in the middle of nowhere. They can shoot out your eyes by directly firing rubber bullets (which are supposed to be deflected off surfaces) straight on. And if you end up in prison, you can be forced into indentured servitude.
Of course this is an exaggeration because all these things don't happen to all the people, but that's the point. Concerns about thought crime are just concerns that the apparatus could be aimed at you, too, when you've been less affected so far. The concern shouldn't be for whom it is aimed at but for the scope, scale and supposed necessity of apparatus itself. The problem isn't that we might oppress the wrong people, the problem is that we think we need oppression.
you know where the water is coming from. you know it's water.
oh. they don't need the fancy machine to interface. it's remote. they reply. you don't know where it comes from, either. or who.
trust me. you don't want to know what it's like.
It's fMRI, there's nothing remote about it.