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Comment by sam-cop-vimes | Hacker News Reader

Hmm...how do you stop private thoughts from reaching the LLM? Suddenly you can be prosecuted for thinking the "wrong" thoughts?

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That's easily solved!

The Conduit® Thinkerface® Pro Band will contain a small 90B dense local model that pre-screens your Conduit® NeuroTokens® stream for compliance against the Conduit® Acceptable Usage Policy applicable for your region and subscription tier.

If non-compliance is detected you'll be promptly notified via a small current applied to the Conduit® ThinkRight® Human Training Electrodes embedded within your band. Intensity and duration are dynamically adjusted until compliance is restored.

Even better, because this all happens on-device before your Conduit® NeuroTokens® are sent to the Conduit® NeuroServer®, non-compliant thoughts don't count towards your Conduit® Daily Thinking Allowance or expend credits from your Conduit® Additional Thinking Purchase Plan.

ha ha - how do people write these sort of blog posts in all seriousness. Are they perpetually high?

realistically, it will be used to beam ads to your brain.

Yeah, this whole area of UX scares me. Silent speech techniques could strike a balance, but it seems obvious it wont stop there - consider what a state actor would do if they could skip interrogation altogether?

Unfortunately I think this is inevitable because as a species we perform a steady march toward collective desires for items of science fiction, so start your adversarial double-think practice now.

Is it really collective desire or are these products being pushed upon us? And why does it always have to be the dystopic "destroying human nature and society as we know it" science fiction and not the utopic "everyone lived happily ever after" science fiction? Or does it just feel that way to me?

For a utopia to exist, everything has to go right. Dystopias are almost all modelled on some existing facet of human behaviour. Naturally one state is unstable as it requires practically complete co-operation in most cases while the other one is stable as it usually exists as some sort of undesirable equilibrium between competing forces.

Based on the HN “realists” I routinely see in comments, I expect it will go something like this:

  I’m generally pro-privacy, but here’s the hard truth: at my startup, we disabled keyboard input in our app Slopgen and switched the default to Conduit Thought Input™, and only 2% of users bothered to navigate the 17 submenus and submit their SSN and face scan to re-enable typing. Yep, 2%, that’s all.

  DAUs only decreased by ≈11%, but our ARR is already up 170% thanks to our AdThink™ revenue sharing agreement, and only 1% of users argued with our Fin.ai bot for the 45 minutes needed give a thumbs down feedback about the change.

  Let’s face it: talk is cheap but users *want* these features, revealed preference *always* tells the real story. Better get used to it now or get left behind.

Desire is probably the wrong word, fixation is more accurate. Like the skiing advice that you shouldn't look at things (trees) that you want to avoid.

As for Utopias/Dystopias, I don't know how to answer that without waxing poetic about ideas like chaos being the natural order, or beauty being in the eye of the beholder, <insert other platitude>.

As someone with OCD, this tech is pretty far up there in terms of potential nightmares.

"My AI just sent my boss a 12 paragraph screed because I thought about how much I hate him"

Just wait until advertisers can get in on your real-time mental stream of thought.

This is a Black Mirror episode coming to life.

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