9 ms·
Facebook has a mysterious team working on tech that sounds like mind reading
- thieving_magpie 10y agoThis reads like a big joke. I do not think Facebook could get remotely close to figuring out this technology. But watch me get quoted in a post in 2022 about how naive we were.
- mdrzn 10y agoAlexa, remind me in 8 years.
- AznHisoka 10y agoAlexa, go unclog the toilet... oh wait, you can't? ok, not asking for much, go fold my laundry!.. No?! Is Pluto a Planet? Wait, I want a real home assistant, god damn it!
- pavel_lishin 10y ago> I do not think Facebook could get remotely close to figuring out this technology. Why not? Their money hires engineers the same as anyone else's.
- thieving_magpie 10y agoI just mean it doesn't pass my personal "what do I think is possible in the near future?" test. I'm not claiming to be objective, just a gut reaction that we might quietly read how this project team was transitioned into some other project in a couple years. Nothing wrong with that at all, by the way. I love that companies fund careers for people to explore big possibility ideas and experiments like this.
- floathub 10y agoI suspect there are an awful lot of very good engineering types who would never go and work for Facebook. No matter how much you paid them (well, let's say bounded at the upper end by a very, very large number). Although (nearly?) everyone has their price, few people with _serious_ technical chops want to play on Facebook's side of the garden wall. I suspect Facebook worries about this. [edit to remove oops; double negative]
- ironchef 10y ago"few people with _serious_ technical chops want to play on Facebook's side of the garden wall" I fear you suffer from some form of bias. Or maybe I do; however, I know some folks there who, in the devops or data engineering world, get it. I mean you had Taner (who also lent his hand to building battle.net's infrastructure), Keith Adams, JPC, David Reiss, John Allen, eric huang, sam rash, etc. Their largest hadoop cluster has _several_ hundred PB of data. You don't manage / run things on that without having some chops. Period. If you read the under the hood series, you might be able to see a different viewpoint.
- LunaSea 10y agoThe ethical viewpoint is very clear though. They just chose to be morally bankrupt.
- Gargoyle 10y agoDo you have any examples?
- pavel_lishin 10y agoWho else is working in this field, and throwing this much money at it? If this is your dream job that pays your dream salary, and nobody else is offering you the same pay or experience, I think you just might consider working for Facebook. You can always leave.
- abrichr 10y agoThe directory of Facebook AI Research is Yan LeCun, one of the top minds in the field of deep learning.
- debt 10y agoscience != engineering
- apeacox 10y agoNext step: Thought Police
- mseebach 10y agoIs there a "someone's razor" for sensational, speculative "news"? Chances are they are looking at something like this (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12990211 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12990211 -- control a mouse cursor with your thoughts anno 2011) to make a better interface for the Oculus Rift than (I can't believe this is a quote) "the mind reading and telepathy of science fiction movies".
- chuckgreenman 10y agoI'd like to propose "Abstract Jumping" as the term here. We see it a lot when journalists just read the abstract of a scientific paper or the overview of a project and then draw conclusions.
- TallGuyShort 10y agoYeah that needs to be a term. It's a pattern I'm sure many of us have seen in scientific studies too: Facebook post: "Scientists prove X causes Y" Various layers of science news: "Scientists link X and Y" Abstract: "We observed a moderate correlation between X and Y. The results are surprising because they contradict previous studies of similar populations." 6 months later and there are new-age parenting guides about why you belong in jail if you let your kids anywhere near X.
- neuromantik8086 10y agoBetteridge's Law of Headlines? There's no question mark at the end this one here, but I think that the Law is at least conceptually close.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- thrusong 10y agoDoes anyone know why "8" seems to be such an important number at Facebook (f8, Building 8, and I believe way back when they were using Fedora 8 the first time they stated their server operating system, though that is probably coincidental)?
- zitterbewegung 10y agoThis is a guess but only thing I could think of 8 is a lucky number in Chinese culture and Zuckerberg is married to Priscilla Chan who has Chinese heritage.
- saurabhjha 10y agoI read it was something like their hackathons started at 8 PM.
- samastur 10y agoBecause in Slovenian you pronounce 8 almost the same way as "awesome" in English ;) (true, but not the reason)
- josephmx 10y agoFacebook has 8 letters?
- guptaneil 10y agoI'm fairly sure this is the primary reason, just like a11y is shorthand for accessibility and i18n is short for internationalization. It also helps that F8 looks like "FB" and sounds like "fate" but those were likely just bonuses.
- adtac 10y agoF8 looks like FB? Dunno, just a guess.
- mtberatwork 10y agoAn existential reminder that bowing to Facebook is our eventual "fate/F8"?
- svkkfnisgkcn3ta 10y agoRelevant: Eben Moglen - Why Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media and Why Free Media Require Free Technology Video [0] https://archive.org/details/EbenMoglen-WhyFreedomOfThoughtRequiresFreeMediaAndWhyFreeMedia https://archive.org/details/EbenMoglen-WhyFreedomOfThoughtRe... Transcript [1] https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-thought-requires-free-media https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-...
- rudolf0 10y ago>“One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology," Zuckerberg said during a June 2015 Q&A. "You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you’d like." This sounds like a real possible future, but how could this be implemented so you only transmit the thoughts you want transmitted? Some sort of internal dialogue with an implant like "OK Facebook", "OK John, please end your thought by imagining a pound sign"?
- burkaman 10y agoIn the same way that lifting your arm is different than thinking about lifting your arm, I imagine you could train your mind so that transmitting a thought is different than thinking a thought. And hopefully it would turn off if you fall asleep.
- rudolf0 10y agoI could see that happening, but I feel like slip-ups or crossovers ("oh shit, I meant to think that, not think and transmit it") could still happen sometimes. Also, I wonder what it'd be like for someone with a psychotic mental disorder... But yeah, who knows, maybe the two processes will be so distinct that it's not an issue.
- burkaman 10y agoI guess a better analogy would be talking. You can think about talking or you can talk, and I'm not sure anyone could really explain what the difference is, but it is relatively unusual to speak by accident while you're conscious. I can imagine training myself to add a new mode of "talking" that actually transmitted a thought. Slip-ups would definitely still happen, but I think they would be more expected and less of a big deal with such a fluid communication system. And maybe you could build in a delay that reads your thought back to you before it sends.
- zardo 10y agoIf we can solve the problems that allow thought understanding, then catching a mental slip should be as doable as a spell checker.
- known 10y agoaka fMRI
- neuromantik8086 10y agofMRI is not mind reading. Not even close. Functional fMRI is making repeated observations of a proxy for neural activity (blood flow) until you have enough data to potentially localize task-specific actions to some part of the brain. Resting-state fMRI is trying to extrapolate basic, enduring networks in a given individual or group's brain while trying to silence all the noise from breathing, head motion, etc. Did I mention that not all slices in a functional scan are acquired at the same time, so you also have to make interpolations so that the data looks like it's all acquired at once? So no, not mind reading at all. Only in the vaguest sense at best.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoThis proxy argument can also be applied to EEG. Anyways, the signal you get from fMRI is enough to reconstruct sequences of images: http://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ http://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ EEG can't even come close.
- nom 10y agoI don't think so. Unless they figure out a non-invasive technique that spatially samples brain activity with a high resolution at high speeds (think sub-millimeter @ several kHz), that is also cheap and wearable, there is NO way you can extract any high level information. It just doesn't work. Current non-invasive methods mostly involve EEG - electrodes that measure the electrical potential across the brain surface. The potentials are a mix of the activity of every single neuron - almost all information is lost and you can't get much out of it at all, even with infinite computing power. It's comparable to the task of reading the contents and activity of a CPU by attaching sensors to the surface - but without knowing the type of CPU, OS, what programs are running, what the user is doing etc. It's clear that it can't work. Mind reading simply sounds sooo good in a news article and makes people dream of a sci-fi-esque future, I don't expect it to go away soon.
- cryoshon 10y ago>It's comparable to the task of reading the contents and activity of a CPU by attaching sensors to the surface - but without knowing the type of CPU, OS, what programs are running, what the user is doing etc. but you could easily map the bulk EEG data of an individual person in different brain states. just have them go through a calibration routine where they are prompted "think about apples" and then you record what comes back. now, you know what it looks like when they're thinking about apples in an intentional way. it's a start. there's still plenty of noise, but the signal is going to look the same every time, if you can find it. the other question is whether your detection apparatus is going to be able to tease out the difference between "thinking about apples" versus "thinking about oranges". at present, my guess is no, which speaks to your point. i get the feeling these problems are going to be solved as time goes on...
- Nydhal 10y ago>The signal is going to look the same everytime. What makes you think that it will look the same? I don't think it is that deterministic to be practical. Even so, would it generalize to different people?
- 10y ago
- seltzered_ 10y agoSurprised they didn't mention Mary-Lou Jepsen, who worked as a Facebook VP but is now working on her own startup related to mind reading with opnwatr.io . Here's a talk she had at media lab recently which hints at this: https://youtu.be/VS810aV_PW4 https://youtu.be/VS810aV_PW4 Forgot there's a tedx talk that's more focused on it: https://youtu.be/BP_b4yzxp80 https://youtu.be/BP_b4yzxp80
- azinman2 10y agoExactly. I have a very strong hunch this is what they're referring to.
- nooron 10y agoAlong these lines, has anyone heard of Neurable? http://neurable.com/ http://neurable.com/ They raised some money (https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/21/neurable-seed-funding-brain-computer-interface/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/21/neurable-seed-funding-brai...), and are from my town.
- brilliantcode 10y agoWhile I was reading 1984, I had to put it down because it was so depressing. It would be the end result of our experimentation with surveillance state coupled with AI management that outperforms even the smartest human being. In the end, it won't be our willful submission to AI overlords but economies of scale heavily valued by our capitalist economy that will be our undoing. but this also means untold riches that build & sell the new AI driven economies of scale. we've previously seen titans arise from the industrial revolution by doing the same thing. It's no time to be a Luddite.
- malux85 10y agoI think one way to help with this is the democratisation of A.I. It's not a silver bullet to the problems you describe, but a step in the right direction. They key is that the technology is available to everyone very cheaply. Having worked with hundreds of data scientists and data engineers over the last couple of years the common theme is that they want to get into A.I. but configuration hell or poor documentation has stopped 50-80% of them from being able to experiment. So I built SignalBox - a Deep Learning web platform with a set of "blueprints" for common tasks. It deploys to a bulk standard linux platform and once deployed has a web interface for generating neural networks, evaluating them, training them in parallel. Coupled with common ingestion patterns and data collectors, and from any point you can jump into iPython and start modifying the code for yourself. This gives newbies a pre-built, optionally GPU accelerated platform that they can play with, but also the flexibility of jumping to code so they can grow. You know what I would love? 10 million pounds. Yes I am dreaming. But then I would release SignalBox for free, but due to the capitalistic nature of society I'm forced to sell it, which I am doing. If I had 10 million, I would pursue some of the advances in computational chemistry for drug discovery, I do this for fun when I'm not working on platform, did you know that about it's estimated 10^8 molecules have been synthesised, whereas the range of potential drug like molecules is estimated at between 10^23 -> 10^60. I think there's real potential here, also I would like to explore epistasis modelling which I have been reading a lot of papers on too, and auditing some code from some PhD students I am mentoring, it's showing some good promise. I dont want to work for a living, I want to spend 100% of my time working on using AI to help large numbers of people, but I've set my goal at 10 million first, that should be enough for me to never have to worry about money ever again, and buy enough GPU servers to advance state of the art
- rrggrr 10y agoSomething to ponder for a future generation: How important really is our physical being? Reproduction, social interaction and sustenance are transitioning from physical necessity, to augmentation, toward replacement. We talk of AI as replacing humanity, but it could be they are inexorably merging and will evolve along their own path that really belongs to them. One would have expected the neanderthal to have experienced existential stress about the emergence sapiens. It may be that in evolutionary terms, bipedal man's time may very slowly be nearing an end.
- JPLeRouzic 10y agoI am very pleased by this post. I am 60, people around me age and it is sometimes a not very pleasant experience. What is important when you are very old and impotent? I think that is to, still be able to interact with other people. The time we spend on social networks, including this one, shows that interaction is what matters. Here it is very limited, but what if we would be able to couple HN with some kind of "social network butler" to interact with the physical world. It would fulfill both the need of social interaction and the capacity to do stuff. After that, the need for a physical body, at least for the people who are very old, would not be so important. And if young people can enjoy living in the fast lane, I am sure some new experiences can be created in virtual worlds, that would match, if not replace, experiences brought by the physical body.
- rrggrr 10y agoWhat I really like about your post is the reminder that virtual/cyber interactions are meaningful and supportive of the human condition for people whose ability to interact may be limited by age, geography, health, etc.
- moonshinefe 10y agothis very much reminds me of the TV show episode black mirror - san junipero
- jordache 10y agowhat's so breakthrough about this? scientific community have already demonstrated the ability to map brain wave patterns to thoughts, or specific words.
- RichardHeart 10y agoThis doesn't sound ominous at all. At least facebook doesn't have a history of experimenting on changing it's users minds for them. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/02/facebook-sorry-secret-psychological-experiment-users https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/02/facebook-...
- beebeebush 10y agoFacebook should not give out fake news anymore. It's really misleading people.