A proof-of-concept neural brain implant providing speech
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3746176/
So here it could indeed just fire off speech and you know what? We'd probably convince ourselves that we absolutely meant to do that. In fact it could be a very interesting experiment (with willing participants). Mess with the inputs the device receives so it's not really the person activating it, let it do it's thing and see if they notice when they do/don't have control of it.
But they are separate systems. Harsh experiences (traumas) can teach your body some bad lessons in such a way that not even your conscious mind can overcome. In these situations, you can't "think your way out" of these traumatic consequences in, say, a talk therapy session; you need to deal with the body directly/somatically to recover instead.
Quotation needed.
The original paper [0] mentions electrodes are placed over Broca’s area (speech production, translates words to mouth movements) and motor area (adjusts the mouth movements). It’s attempted speech, not thoughts.
There is a lot of fear in mainstream media and populace of devices decoding thoughts, but that is a significantly harder problem, at this moment on the level of sci-fi of Civilisation Type II on Kardashev scale. There is a reason why the electrodes are not over Wernicke’s area instead (language comprehension and production).
Otherwise, yeah, that would be a new sort of hell where you had no private inner monologue
Established labs often have a specialised section that cultivates all the little tricks how to do these things.
Knowledge is transferred by hiring postdocs that have the skills you need or by sending a phd student over to be trained.
As a scientist, if you do this for a while you end up with insane skills, but there is no place for them on the job market.
Everybody else is living 15 years in the past from your perspective.
Most such startups are scaling up the number of electrodes interfacing with the neurons to overcome this bottleneck, but I wonder if an unconventional approach could overcome the limit more gracefully. I may be a dreamer, but a high fidelity synthetic neural fiber is the holy grail here. I do remember reading people partially healed of paralysis due to spinal injury, because of electrical conduits that bridged the injured neural gap.
> [...]
> “We’re not at the point where it could be used in open-ended conversations. I think of this as a proof of concept,” [Sergey Stavisky, a neuroscientist at UC Davis and a senior author of the study] says.
The ability to produce sound without a use of a dictionary sounds awesome. It is an interesting result, a proof of concept as the author of the study says, but the title is editorialized at best and effectively clickbait at worst, because most readers will assume that "near instantaneous speech" means "clear intelligible speech and ability to communicate".
I'll see myself out.
They'd stil have a president? They would probably already have a dictator that controls everybody through a mind-reading police state...
For example, I see a tree and my brain generates a unique signal/encoding/storage representing the tree. Another person sees the tree and generates a unique signal/encoding/storage representing the tree. How would my brain communicate "tree" to his brain since both our "trees" are unique to our brains?
My brain device reads my brain signal "1010101" for tree. My friend's device reads brain signal "1011101" for tree. How could we possibly map 1010101 to 1011101. Or is the assumption that human brains have identical signals/encoding for each thought.
The only way I see is by textual or auditory mechanism between people who speak the same language ( standards agreed upon a priori ). But that wouldn't be brain to brain. It would be brain to text/speech to eyes/ears to brain.
Your intermediate protocol woes are a red herring.
And machines would of course also use the Universal Common Embedding to communicate, as man and machine meld into a seamless distributed whole.
It all seems a little bit too inevitable for my liking at this point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)
Had no idea til I looked it up just now that James Cameron did the story, of Avatar, which shares a lot of tech influences with Strange Days. They could even be in the same cinematic universe, though many years apart.
> “We recorded neural activities from single neurons, which is the highest resolution of information we can get from our brain,” Wairagkar says. The signal registered by the electrodes was then sent to an AI algorithm called a neural decoder that deciphered those signals and extracted speech features such as pitch or voicing.
for how the brain chip chooses to function
Nerve stapling, perhaps?
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fridge/SidMeiersAlpha...
George Carlin - Euphemisms - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isMm2vF4uFs
would your antenna be susceptible to crosstalk, and would that interference come across as new voices in your head? in fact, i wonder what the signalling protocol would be so that the message is only be received by the intended recipient, something like wifi? to that, would someone be able to tune into the spectrum around them and see the metadata of these telepathic signals to see who was talking to whom, when, and for how long. obviously, i'm assuming the actual signals will be encrypted so that these conversations will be private. will the NSA be able to pick up these signals from their satellites and be able to listen in? or will the gov't force backdoors into these communications?
i know this might sound conspiratorial, but all of these are valid concerns being dealt with now, and only sound conspiratorial if you've have your head in the sand. these are also questions that startups tend to ignore. look at the IoT market that never considered any potential security issues, and now we have massive bot farms. i know i wouldn't want to be used as a bot because my neural implant manufacture never considered what a hacker might do once they gained access
To quote Woody Allen:
> “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”
man-choker would just be a choker (you know, the accessory usually for women) with some tech on it, in this case to accept a command to check with another bio-device if the glucose spike of more expensive rice is better or worse than cheap rice.
man-choker is not a word, and choker is a niche garment, why not "necklace" or just "wearable"?
Then it "executes" a question?
and then there's a reference to "both devices" - what devices?
You need to put together a lot of context clues and assumptions to get to: They are probably a diabetic with a glucose monitor and pump, and they want a smart device to analyse the data with natural language (but again, why a choker specifically? Wouldn't a smart watch or something make more sense?)
The CGM example was so out of place that I thought they meant to post in yesterday's CGM thread. And I spent a moment wondering why "costlier rice" was qualified. Maybe they are hoping their more expensive yuppy rice is absorbed more slowly?
And man-choker sounds like a word that Frank Herbert made up for Dune.
The sibling reply to mine is getting lost in the weeds: you can admit that something is written in a confusing way while also being able to understand what they meant or even appreciating it. And telling someone to "Get over it" sounds like you aren't tracking what the convo is about.
wearable where? A choker is not some niche garment. It is a well understood accessory that maybe not everyone wears, but it's not because it is not well known. Describing it as a man-choker while a made up word, get over it that's how language evolves, is very descriptive. Calling it a choker means that it will be around the neck. Wearable could be a watch, and that's not what was meant. Using the word choker explicitly tells you where it was proposed to be worn.
> and then there's a reference to "both devices" - what devices?
one is the speech device, the other the glucose monitor. separate devices, but worn on the choker which is now becoming a tool belt. But I'm guessing you'd have a problem if it was described as a tool/utility belt worn around the neck like a choker???