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A proof-of-concept neural brain implant providing speech
- yaris 1y agoI often wonder how such teams build their devices - I assume it requires quite a few pieces of equipment that can't be bought at a nearby shop. Are such devices ordered from some manufacturer or are they built in-house somehow?
- numpad0 1y agoUniversity researches in general? The boss always knows a small company that can make one, and staples a bidding notice to campus notice board for formality as the device is getting made and delivered. Isn't that how they do anywhere it might be?
- niemandhier 1y agoThere are specialized companies selling components, what you cannot get you manufacture yourself. Assembling the device for prototypes like this is usually done in house. 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.
- pingou 1y agoTelepathy is on its way. Next step they just skip the conversion of brain signals to words and just directly send the signals to another brain. But I think some conversion/translation would still be necessary.
- mettamage 1y agoThe year is 2100. The brain of the Eurasian president got hacked by the Antartic Federation. While humans have hard coded a moral code since birth, there are illegally born babies that do not undergo brain modification treatment. Moreover, the South Pacific Whale Society has no moral code. We should’ve never implanted this stuff into whales. The world will never be the same again.
- thrance 1y agoI think it would be deserved if whales started bombing our streets.
- serf 1y agoGhost in the Shellfish. I'll see myself out.
- icoder 1y agoSo Long, and Thanks for All the Krill
- coldtea 1y ago>The year is 2100. The brain of the Eurasian president got hacked by the Antartic Federation. They'd stil have a president? They would probably already have a dictator that controls everybody through a mind-reading police state...
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoI think (futurology / science fiction) that they will make some kind of brain link, but there won't be any translations happening in between, just raw brain signals from one to the other, like an extra sensory input; there won't be any encoding or data that can be translated to speech or images, but the connected brains will be able to learn to comprehend and send the signals to / from each other and learn to communicate that way.
- falcor84 1y agoThat sort of connection would be very susceptible to psychic attacks - I'm thinking of the telepaths in Babylon 5, being trained for offensive capabilities, as well as just plain old spam advertising. So while "defaulting to trust" is often considered societally useful, I believe that it would be better for everyone if cross-brain messages are sent in a format that can be analyzed (and entirely blocked) by a filter on the receiving side.
- z3t4 1y agoWe are so different, but I guess with a lot of training we could interpret each others thoughts. A first step would be to record your own thoughts and then replay them in order to see if you experience the same thing you did when the thoughts where recorded. It's possible that our brain is constantly re-configuring so that even your own recorded thoughts would make no sense.
- aspenmayer 1y agoThis is sort of explored in the film Strange Days, which is probably not very well known generally but perhaps would have a large fan base on HN. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film) 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.
- voidUpdate 1y agoI think the main problem with that is that different people thing in different ways. I think in full sentences and 3D images, whereas other people might think without images at all. How do you translate that?
- msgodel 1y agoYou could skip a lot of stuff by training a transformer on some kind of neural embeddings. You probably get effective FTL communication and limited immortality that way.
- falcor84 1y agoHow did you arrive at FTL? At best we'll have comms at radio transmission speed, right?
- msgodel 1y agoIt's faster than light because your model is already there so no information has to be exchanged.
- throwaway34564 1y agovery cool concept - kind of like an offline inference model of your conscious. You could have periodic (over the wire) sync updates to your real self
- falcor84 1y agoBut isn't it the same sort of FTL and "immortality" that a creator gets from us listening to a downloaded podcast that they prerecorded? 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.”
- msgodel 1y agoSeems like a technicality tbh.
- goopypoop 1y agoI look forward to learning that your favourite fruit is AAAARRGGHHHH
- dotancohen 1y agoMaybe he was dictating?
- coldtea 1y agoNext step: techno-slavery
- aspenmayer 1y agoWe’ll probably call it something less on the nose, more euphemistic, almost clinical, medical even. Nerve stapling, perhaps? https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fridge/SidMeiersAlphaCentauri https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fridge/SidMeiersAlpha... George Carlin - Euphemisms - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isMm2vF4uFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isMm2vF4uFs
- midtake 1y agoLike the trisolarans
- spinlock_ 1y agoDon't forget the injection of ads for the basic subscription plan, Black Mirror S7/E1 vibes.
- Lapsa 1y agoIt's already here. And likely you are deliberately trying to deny that. Here's a nice little rabbit hole for you: https://pastebin.com/raw/8TQyPKUF https://pastebin.com/raw/8TQyPKUF
- goopypoop 1y agothe scary thing isn't the sci-fi in this stuff, it's that the tech already exists to do the polygraph scam again
- seydor 1y agoNot without ads being injected. But it's a small price to pay for such amazing capabilities
- germinalphrase 1y agoTelepathy, or maybe memory and experience sharing media machine, or maybe humanity id unification device, or maybe flesh robot actualizer, or maybe a looping torture horror show mask. The possibilities are endless!
- dylan604 1y agowould you need an antenna for your brain implant to tx/rx those signals? what shape would that antenna need to be? would it need to be a rigid antenna that would have to stick up out of one's head? would it be a curly pigtail style or straight semi-rigid yet flexible so it could bend when passing through doors like the CB antennas of yesteryear? Could it be very flexible like a cable so you could run it down your back and under your clothing? 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
- lambdaone 1y agoI think you might find that the Teletubbies have already solved this problem, in a variety of different configurations, including the rigid and curly antenna you mention above. The benefits of the circular and triangular configurations are as yet unclear to me, but I'm sure the Voice Trumpets and Sun Baby know what they're doing.
- andrybak 1y ago> In this second test, the word error rate was 43.75 percent, meaning participants identified a bit more than half of the recorded words correctly. > [...] > “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".
- dang 1y agoOk, I've taken "near instantaneous" out of the title and put "proof of concept" in there, which is a phrase used by one of the researchers in the article.
- aitchnyu 1y agoCant wait for a man-choker that executes "I'm having costlier rice, check if glucose spike is lower than usual rice". Yes, both devices are outside my body.
- stephenlf 1y agoI don’t understand what this means. Did you use a translate app?
- TheCapeGreek 1y agoI think it's perfectly legible? 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.
- shawabawa3 1y agoit's legible but a very confusing sentence 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?)
- dylan604 1y ago> or just "wearable"? 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???
- x187463 1y agoCurious how much intentionality is required from the user to produce sounds. It would be unfortunate if this device just started firing off speech for what would otherwise be thoughts one would not say out loud. I suppose that depends on the mechanism required to activate the neurons to which the device is connected.
- dylan604 1y agoI hope it's something better than "Hey Siri, say..." Otherwise, yeah, that would be a new sort of hell where you had no private inner monologue
- connicpu 1y agoThe brain is incredibly adaptive, I guarantee eventually it would learn to avoid firing the neurons the device is probing when you don't want your inner monologue spoken aloud as long as there's a feedback loop where you experience negative emotions when something you didn't want spoken aloud was broadcast.
- Winsaucerer 1y agoWithout having RTFA, I'd guess/predict that it will be possible to learn to only do this intentionally, much like we can think about raising our arm without actually raising it.
- AnotherGoodName 1y agoEven without this device there's been some consideration to the thought that the conscious brain is merely an observer since it appears to activate after the unconscious brain takes actions. You just go along with what the unconscious mind did in actions and speech and you convince yourself you meant to do that after the fact. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3746176/ 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.
- N_Lens 1y agoThe main challenge appears to be the neural-computer interface - the electrodes. As the article states, there are several startups in this space all bottlenecked by the same constraint, and accurately translating neural impulses into digital (Or even analog) signals is the key to unlocking a whole arena of transhuman development. 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.
- swader999 1y ago"a high fidelity synthetic neural fiber is the holy grail here" I'm fairly confident there's nothing Holy about this.
- spauldo 1y agoDepends if you worship a god that encourages mankind to reach its full potential instead of one that's strangely obsessed with people not doing butt stuff.
- newcommiedeal 1y ago[flagged]
- akomtu 1y agoThat's the plot of movies Upgrade (2018) and Rakka (2017).