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Facebook to acquire CTRL-Labs, a startup for controlling computers with the mind
- michannne 7y agoI have still never owned an Oculus Rift simply because it is owned by Facebook and while I can't know for sure what they are doing with data collected, I can try my best to not walk straight into the fire. Maybe it would actually be better for Facebook to spin off an acquisitions/ventures arm associated with the main company as loosely as possible, and leave out data and privacy concerns by not using any data from their ventures until they are wholly incorporated into the Facebook business, but I'm no legal expert and Facebook is definitely not the type of company that would stay it's hand at an opportunity of collecting even more data
- Allvitende 7y agoAgreed. If they were smart, they would break themselves up as Alphabet did in preparation for future investigations etc. They could then acquire companies more "quietly". Mark should also take a page from Larry's book and transition to the background more while lettings someone else run Facebook.
- corobo 7y agoI don't think Facebook is able to get away with that, at least not as easily. With Google my #1 concern is they'll shut it down. With Facebook I know it's going to sniff up all my data it can get its grubby hands on (which is also the #2 concern with Google if the product survives) In any case on the subject I don't want anything but my own hardware processing anything thought related. That is not something the cloud should be involved in
- imglorp 7y agoFor those that buy Oculus Rift headsets in the near future, you might want to start looking for metal contacts in the headband where it touches your skin.
- tudelo 7y agoAre you suggesting they will secretly put this technology in to oculus headsets?
- imglorp 7y agoNo implication. In lots of applications like this the hardware will ship with new features before the software supports them. Teslas shipped with all the autopilot sensors while the software is still catching up. In the most charitable case imaginable, users would be invited to enable the feature in software and experience mind control of their games, uav's, or whatever. I envision this might end up like laptop lid cameras: there won't be a hardware disconnect switch for the feature so people will put tape over the sensor pads if they don't trust the hardware not to read their eeg.
- baby 7y agoThe Oculus Quest is much better imo
- sergiosgc 7y agoIt's strange not to see Valve's offerings referred when people talk about holding out on Oculus VR. The original Vive is a great device, and the Index is the current king of the hill, in this area (pricey, though, unless you compare it to an iPhone).
- 5trokerac3 7y agoMakes sense, with their main business being the inverse.
- jakelazaroff 7y agoHa, I came here to make the same joke.
- the-dude 7y agoEco 101 : https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement
- buboard 7y agoThis seems fit to complete the loop, however it s redundant. FB already knows what you want to do with your computer
- asdkhadsj 7y agoInteresting that this is a tech I've wanted for ages, yet with these days of privacy issues where mere mouse behavior can lead to identifying signatures... I'm not letting anyone near my brain patterns. I'll wear a tinfoil hat on this one.. but not knowing what possible behavioral/emotional/matchable patterns might exist in my waves is a bit terrifying. Thanks no thanks Facebook. If there even was a company I'd trust with my brain signature, it's sure as hell not you. edit: I should note, it sounds like this is not specifically brain waves.. but still. My opinion in this arena doesn't change hah.
- sambull 7y agoIf it's any consolation, they won't ask you. It will be used against your will; much like a torture method; then when your brain tells them what they need. It will end
- afiori 7y agoI am always all in for some good old Facebook bashing, but even I must say that probably won't end this way.
- drusepth 7y agoI imagine this'll take an Oculus route: awesome tech bought by Facebook with an initial "I'm not giving Facebook my data!" backlash, followed by high-quality products that edge more and more into the market by actually being pretty good. Hopefully (or not).
- BOBOTWINSTON 7y agoThis is still one of the reasons I won't buy one of their headsets. Which sucks because the Quest is really cool, at least PC VR has better options/alternatives.
- wavefunction 7y agoUnfortunately Oculus lost me as a potential customer when facebook acquired them. Palmer Luckey's various misadventures reinforce this feeling for me.
- throwaway122378 7y agoCan we learn from our mistakes (Instagram, WhatsApp) and just block this.
- throwaway1777 7y agoThe main difference is this isn’t an up and coming social network.
- WilliamEdward 7y agoIt's worse; facebook no longer have to play guessing games with what we text one another, and can instead have a direct interface to our actions and possibly thoughts.
- LeonM 7y agoWhy was Whatsapp a mistake?
- elyobo 7y agoLetting something owned by Facebook anywhere near my mind is the last thing I'd want to do.
- qnsi 7y agoIt’s going on your arm not brain
- uptown 7y agoIt's going on neither.
- elyobo 7y agoThe mind might be largely collocated with the brain, but I did specifically say mind :D Where the device goes is irrelevant to my concern; what it might be reading, and what I'd trust them to do with it, is not. To be fair this concern is not only about Facebook, I'd have similar concerns now about anyone, but Facebook have already shown themselves to be bad actors. Fool me once, etc.
- rejectedstone 7y agoHas Black Mirror taught us nothing? ;)
- stakhanov 7y agoSeems fitting. They're already controling minds with their computers, why not close the loop :-)
- i000 7y agoNice addition to their current technology controlling minds with computers!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pcora 7y agoIn a way, they are already on our minds with all the weird techniques they have to make people addicted to their stuff. But that is definitely going way too far.
- Yuval_Halevi 7y agoAfter cambridge analytica and Libra, I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg is the right person to own a this kind of technology
- ravenstine 7y agoHe just wants to make the world more connected. /s
- vlaaad 7y agoThere is a presentation about tech in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8pB8sNBGlE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8pB8sNBGlE Looks very interesting, but I would prefer it not to be owned by facebook.
- Ajedi32 7y agoThis doesn't seem like a neural interface at all. Yes, technically the device is measuring neural activity, but it's measuring neural activity in your arm, not in your brain. In effect, this seems to be way closer to gesture control than it is to a neural interface. If that's all they're doing, the title of this post is very misleading (and consequently, most of the comments in this thread are irrelevant).
- buboard 7y agoyep. it's totally a surface electromyography device that feeds into a neural network to recognize the gesture you are making from your wrist. There are alternatives of course, such as gesture recognition from a camera. This is interesting regardless, but wonder how useful it is. Gesture recognition is not new , it's just has not surpassed other input devices yet.
- dclowd9901 7y agoThis doesn't look as interesting as described in the article. It looks like it's just reading muscle electrical signals, and that movement is required to make it work. I mean, isn't that just a Power Glove?
- kaibee 7y ago> and that movement is required to make it work. Did you watch the full video? They show someone playing Asteroids without any movement. Movement is not required.
- buboard 7y agoThe motoneuron needs to fire, which (unless your hand is cut off) will result to some muscle movement. Apparently it's either too little movement to be visible , or it's blocked (such as when holding his hand or when arms were folded).
- avip 7y agoSo it'll be like voice control where I have to speak slowly and clearly, hide my accent, control my pronunciation... just to get Siri to tell me the weather... but with my thoughts? I don't even know how to think slowly and clearly.
- bilbo0s 7y agoDon't worry yourself, if you're a "terrorist", the drugs they give you during questioning will help you interface with the device more smoothly.
- dpau 7y agoAnd the justification will be "more humane than waterboarding".
- logicprog 7y agoWhat's funny is with Siri and Google Assistant I can mumble barely-intelligibly and they understand exactly what I'm saying. I guess I should thank my lack of an accent?
- 19CTO 7y agoSounds like a very interesting tech. I'm curious if the Facebook brand is the right place for it though. Facing public scrutiny I don't think many people trust Facebook anymore to share the intricate info of their lives.
- GistNoesis 7y agoAs a D&D fan I enjoy associating companies with creatures. This acquisition fits the picture well. Let's see if you can associate each FAANG with its creature. Dragon, Lich, Illithid, Beholder, Djinn
- gaogao 7y agoFacebook - Beholder (Obvious) Apple - Dragon (Pile of gold. Ancient. Has good variants.) Amazon - Lich (Seeks to conquer everything) Netflix - Djinn (Not actually as scary as the rest.) Google - Illithid
- GistNoesis 7y agoAlmost :) I swap F&G. With the article hint about mind reading, mind flayers (or Illithid) connect their minds together in huge cities. They are also famous for manipulating minds with their psionic abilities. Beholders have plenty of (non-googly) eyes and look everywhere, gather ancient knowledge, gather various artifacts, but usually don't care about you except for when they zap you for coming too close. Djinn are masters of illusions rocking you with dreams while they drain you. The lich (or maybe semi-lich soon) is in the business of dealing time. He has a special relationship with time, which allows him to trade advantageously to fill its boundless ambitions. The cash hoarding behavior and love of beautiful shiny things is indeed a characteristic of dragons.
- justforfunhere 7y agoOk, this is the kind of tech I would like to see come up and mature in the coming ten-twenty years. Having dozens of employees and four years of development period with VC money suggests that they have something more than just a POC. With any great technology/innovation, the next obvious question always is, how can it be used at a mass scale, so that it gets accepted as just another part of a person's life. To put it another way, how can it be assimilated into the common services/products that we consume in our daily lives. Only then it will produce the value that it's makers were hoping for. So what kind of void could this technology fill? That depends on the vision of the creators and those who own it. I guess, if it was Apple that was buying this startup, we would see very different end usage of it. If it was Google, we would see something absolutely different. If it was Amazon, who knows what they might use it for? But since it is Facebook, we have to feel a bit apprehensive. Because what is it that Facebook intends to do in long term? What is it's vision? Being one of the biggest tech companies in the World right now, it is of paramount importance that we know what do they intend to do with the tech they acquire? And this tech could be revolutionary! It is the kind of stuff that we read in Sci-Fi. Hope they make something good/useful out of it.
- WilliamEdward 7y agoFacebook will try to use it to make profit in favour of using it to benefit people, which is what automative technologies should be for. That is the nature of the beast, and in facebook's case making profit ends disastrously, as opposed to any other particular company.
- bryan_w 7y agoOculus connect 6 is tomorrow and Thursday. You should watch the keynotes to get an idea about what they will do with this
- WilliamEdward 7y agoThe technology they produce itself is pretty decent, but in the hands of facebook this is one step away from being a dystopian nightmare.
- jchook 7y agoDavid Brin’s (sci-fi) version sits in your mouth and detects minute muscle movements to determine which words you are thinking of saying.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- joestr 7y agoI'd have called it CTRL ALT Labs, but other than that this is pretty terrifying.
- rackad 7y agoThis is really terrifying. Now they want to control our minds or at least read our minds???
- oceliker 7y ago> uses a bracelet to measure neuron activity in a subject’s arm to determine movement that person is thinking about, even if they aren’t physically moving I don't understand how this could possibly work with an armband. They presumably are reading electrical signals from motor neurons, but why do they fire if there's no movement? Is it possible that they are detecting incredibly small movements that are involuntarily caused by thinking about moving your hand?
- martin_a 7y agoThis sounds straight like future-future-tech. My Fitbit can't even measure my heartbeat or steps with sufficient precision and they want to measure electric signals from neurons? Sounds (yet) impossible.
- qnsi 7y agoThey had demos online. Unless they faked those
- mncolinlee 7y agoIt's not even that new. A professor was using a much earlier version of this same tech to steer his boat in the 90's. It was very easy to read left and right signals to control a rudder as a prototype. There have been commercialized versions of this tech already. The Myo was Kickstarted in 2015 and then acquired by CTRL-Labs. I have one and that generation of the tech was still tricky to use effectively. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/312488939/myowaretm-harness-the-power-of-your-muscle-signals https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/312488939/myowaretm-har... Here's a pretty decent paper on the quite long history of Brain-Machine Interfaces: https://www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/physrev.00027.2016?view=long&pmid=28275048& https://www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/physrev.00027.20...
- tashoecraft 7y agoThat's exactly what's doing. If you just think about moving your hand, pinching, whatever, then you are sending signals down that can be read.
- turc1656 7y agoDefinitely one of the top 10 most terrifying headlines I've ever seen.
- api 7y agoOf all companies Facebook should be kept as far as possible from any kind of Neuralink type interface. We are literally going to lobotomize our species in a quest to get people to click ads.
- tenebrisalietum 7y agoCould it not be said that people who are so in to Facebook that they would like and want this are already (self-)lobotomized to a degree, by whatever factors make people revel in boring social stuff/ignorance and not wish to pursue higher knowledge or goals? I mean most of Facebook seems to be: 20% of - saying "I was at this location" - pictures of food - pictures of people's kids - pictures of people at events like concerts, family gatherings, etc. - complaining about traffic/weather/money and 80% of - reports of memes People whose Facebook interaction is pretty much just the above, which is probably the majority, aren't really going to achieve much more in life without Facebook, whether it's reading your brain or not.
- api 7y agoPictures of kids for viewing by grandparents and relatives is literally the only legitimate use of Facebook as far as I'm concerned. It's basically an over-engineered photo sharing service.
- pulkitsh1234 7y agoRelevant post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21039955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21039955 What I think FB is probably going to use it for: * Some sort of peripheral to "unlock" advanced features in FB, which will basically give them a never-ending stream of neural-data to train models on. * Ad impressions, no need to track clicks anymore, if user reacted to it in a "positive" manner they will be getting a cut. * Bundle with Oculus (Something like: https://youtu.be/D8pB8sNBGlE?t=638 https://youtu.be/D8pB8sNBGlE?t=638)
- mattrp 7y agoagreed - this is all about improving ad engagement metrics. If they can demonstrate that the user was engaged even if they didn't click the ad, then the acquisition is worth the $500m-$1b they reportedly paid for it. I also see the wrist band as becoming linked to payment / libra functionality -- that way it's always on the user and it opens fb to greater awareness in the physical world as well. It's funny how the tech future is finally materializing just the point where we are realizing that instead of utopia, it is turning out to be an utterly repulsive sci-fi nightmare.
- wonderwonder 7y agoAfter acquisition: "You know how you created a system to control a computer with a mind? Well we want you to keep doing that, just the other way around."
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rpmisms 7y agoHelp, facebook was reading the old joke headlines again.
- projectramo 7y agoThe best part is it is totally free. In order to activate the band, you simply imagine yourself buying a product from one of the advertising partners.
- dogman1233 7y agoSource, BSidesLV presentation on Brain-Machine Interfaces: - for those in the know (basically, a bunch of PhD labs and a few private companies, small network of people), FB's efforts with this have achieved `read` capabilities, and the thought is they have have achieved `write`.
- TecoAndJix 7y agoHey - off topic but what do you think of BSides? There is one soon in my area and have been on the fence about attending. Is it hit or miss on location?
- dogman1233 7y agoyeah def location dependent. BSidesLV is the mothership, few other cities do big ones as well. Conversely, an underdeveloped BSides local to you is a good opportunity for you to get involved and make a name for yourself in the local sec scene.
- kristopolous 7y agoNew frontiers for how to commodify and sell you
- ingsoc79 7y agoAs someone who works with EMG, the hype CTRL-Labs has been pushing regarding their tech is over-the-top ridiculous. In short, it's a wearable band that uses electrodes to measure your forearm muscles' activity (electromyography, or EMG), coupled with accelerometers to capture motion. It's awesome technology, but contrary to all the "neuro" buzzword bingo, you can't "control computers with your mind" – you have to physically contract the muscles in your forearm, just like if you were using a mouse or keyboard. This video gives you an idea of what the device is actually capable of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD4efk8T2X4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD4efk8T2X4 Either way, it's exciting to see this kind of tech make it into the consumer space. Even if it doesn't catch on with AR/VR, it will have a lot of positive effects for researchers as well as for users with accessibility and mobility challenges.
- anaisbetts 7y agoWhether you have to move your muscles isn't so important, the goal here is to create a control surface that is usable in VR/AR, which this technology can totally still do. Walking down the street with AR glasses right now sucks because you can't actually do anything without disruptive gestures (holding your hand to your face, talking out loud to nobody, etc). If you could tell the glasses what to do simply by making small imperceptible movements in your hand, that's a huge leap forward towards making AR actually something usable
- buboard 7y agothe question is if this device is more expressive than , say, wearing a glove.
- anaisbetts 7y agoEven if it was equally expressive, it's probably far less obtrusive to wear a bracelet than wear a glove (though that depends on the design of the bracelet I guess)
- ingsoc79 7y agoNo doubt it's an interesting product, and if they provide a good SDK for it then a lot of researchers and tinkerers will be happy :).
- drewda 7y ago"Facebook to acquire CTRL-Labs, a startup for controlling computers with the ~~mind~~ brain"
- buboard 7y agotechnically all personal computers are controlled with the brain
- neonate 7y agohttps://outline.com/tnfGyL https://outline.com/tnfGyL
- 0xADADA 7y agoThis app requires new permissions: Will you grant Facebook permission to access your thoughts?
- vchak1 7y agoFor a moment, I read that as controlling minds with the computer, and thought: Wait, Facebook does that already!
- honkycat 7y agoI love fancy/zany new HCI stuff, and I have been waiting for the CTRL-Labs product to come out for a LONG time. In my head, the compromises CTRL-Labs are making is brilliant and I believe it can create a compelling product. This could FINALLY be the keyboard killer. I would love something I can walk and use easily, use from a reclining position, and avoid having to use my hands for typing while programming. I have bad wrist pain from typing all day, so I am sure to use only ergonomic keyboards and mice and take frequent brakes. Not having to deal with that would be great.
- Alonski 7y agoI built a Smart House system "mind" controlled by EEG made specifically for ALS patients 8 years ago. https://youtu.be/mQrytBbSbsA https://youtu.be/mQrytBbSbsA I'd like to be bought please.