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Comment by spogbiper | Hacker News Reader

brain-computer interface will kill the keyboard, not voice. imho

I disagree. A keyboard enforces a clarity and precision of information that does not naturally arise from our internal thought processes. I'm sure many people here have thought they understood something until they tried to write it down in precise language. It's the same sort of reason we use a rigid symbolic language for mathematics and programming rather than natural language with all its inherent ambiguities.

Dijkstra has more thoughts on this

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

why can't the brain interface be a virtual keyboard that i "type" on?

If that ever exists.

A BCI able to capture sufficient nuance to equal voice is probably further out than the lifespan of anyone commenting here.

5 years ago, almost everyone in this forum would have said that something like GPT-5 "is probably further out than the lifespan of anyone commenting here."

It has been more than 5 years since the release of GPT-3.

GPT-5 is a marginal, incremental improvement over GPT-4. GPT-4 was a moderate, but not groundbreaking, improvement over GPT-3. So, "something like GPT-5" has existed for longer than the timeline you gave.

Let's pretend the above is false for a moment though, and rewind even further. I still think you're wrong. Would people in 2015 have said "AI that can code at the level of a CS college grad is a lifespan away"? I don't think so, no. I think they would have said "That's at least a decade away", anytime pre-2018. Which, sure, maybe they were a couple years off, but if it seemed like that was a decade away in 2015, well, it's been a decade since 2015.

GPT-4 was a massive improvement over GPT-3.5, which was a moderate improvement over GPT-3.

GPT-5 is not that big of a leap, but when you compare it to the original GPT-4, it's also not a marginal improvement.

GPT-2 to 3 was the only really "groundbreaking" one. 3 to 3.5, 3.5 to 4, were all just differences in degree, not in kind.

it really just needs to let me create text faster/better than typing does, i'm not sure it needs to be voice based at all. maybe we "imagine" typing on a keyboard or move a fantom appendage or god knows what

It needs to be as accurate as the typing, though. Voice can do that. A BCI cannot capture a nuanced sentence.

I can't get voice accurate. For some people it might be but nothing understands my accent. It's very frustrating.

They're ~10 years or out so, based on current research.

Perpetually 10 years out you mean? BCI tech has not meaningfully changed in the last 10 years.

Agreed, but feels like brain-computer interfaces ready for mass adoption will not be available for another decade or two.

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