10 ms·
Mind-reading devices can now predict preconscious thoughts
- Terr_ 11mo agoFrom some dystopic device log: [alert] Pre-thought match blacklist: 7f314541-abad-4df0-b22b-daa6003bdd43 [debug] Perceived injustice, from authority, in-person [info] Resolution path: eaa6a1ea-a9aa-42dd-b9c6-2ec40aa6b943 [debug] Generate positive vague memory of past encounter Not a reason to stop trying to help people with spinal damage, obviously, but a danger to avoid. It's easy to imagine a creepy machine argues with you or reminds you of things, but consider how much worse it'd be if it derails your chain of thought before you're even aware you have one.
- iberator 11mo agoYou should make text based game
- fainpul 11mo agoThis reminds me of "Upgrade" – a sci-fi movie about a paralized man who gets an AI brain implant, which can move his body for him. It's pretty decent. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6499752 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6499752
- foobarian 11mo agoAlso "Common People," first episode in season 7 of Black Mirror. One word: ads [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
- callamdelaney 11mo agoCan you imagine having chatgpt in your brain to constantly police wrongthink? Would save the British media a job.
- tim333 11mo agoIt might be able to react fast enough to prevent the horror of the wrongthink reaching twitter.
- ftrsprvln 11mo agoWhen it infers illicit intent, it "corrects" you by biasing the output: a misclick here, a poisoned verb there... phantom intention drift™ injected into your parietal lobe milliseconds before your conscious even boots.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- rpq 11mo agoI think the real danger lies in how many will accept that output as the unadulterated unmistakable truth for actions, for judgment. Talk about a sinister device.
- smilebot 11mo agoYou don’t need a sinister device. This is essentially how propaganda works.
- analog8374 11mo agoA handsome, well-dressed alpha speaking with confidence and certainty. That's truth right there.
- rpq 11mo agoPropaganda is mostly without Science. This is with.
- guiand 11mo agoSplit brain experiments show that a person rationalizes and accommodates their own behavior even when "they" didn't choose to perform an action[1]. I wonder if ML-based implants which extrapolate behavior from CNS signals may actually drive behavior that a person wouldn't intrinsically choose, yet the person accommodates that behavior as coming from their own free will. [1]: "The interpreter" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-brain_interpreter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-brain_interpreter
- brnaftr361 11mo agoSplit brain experiments have been called into question.[0] [0]: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170125093823.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170125093823.h...
- pinkmuffinere 11mo agoWow this is fascinating, and gets rid of one of my eldritch memetic horrors. Thanks for sharing, I’m going to submit it as its own post as well!
- tmp10423288442 11mo agoSubmission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038194
- rf15 11mo agoI don't understand this view (although I hear it often enough): isn't it commonly accepted that the brain and its resulting mind is extremy modular, with all components (trying to) play together?
- empath75 11mo agoThat's a great paper, but I don't think it calls into question anything about post-hoc rationalizations, and it might actually put that idea on more solid ground.
- idiotsecant 11mo agoIt's interesting that the path from 'decide to do something' to performing the action is hundreds of ms long. It's also interesting that grabbing the data early in the process and acting on it can perform the action before the conscious 'self' understands fully that the action will take place. It's just another reminder that the 'you' that you consider to be running the show is really just a thin translation layer on top of an ocean of instinct, emotion, and hormones that is the real 'you'.
- svieira 11mo agoI rather prefer the holistic take that we are our whole selves and not just the part that reflects on what we do or the part that reacts to external and internal material stimuli. We know we can change the instincts, emotions, and hormones when they conflict with what we know by reflection to be just and good. To put it another way, we know that we can do things "without thinking" that are either just or unjust and by reflection can achieve some level of mastery over the direction of our impetuses.
- sturbes 11mo agoI’ve been saying “There is a real you, unfortunately, you’re not it.”
- throw4847285 11mo agoI think the opposite is equally true. "There is a real you. Unfortunately, it's you."
- technothrasher 11mo agoI watched an interview with Carrie Fisher years ago where she was talking about her struggle with drug abuse. She said something that I thought was quite inciteful, "I am but a spy in the house of myself."
- Terr_ 11mo ago"That's ridiculous", said the hivemind-module of a mobile megafortress powered by a swarm of nanomachines.
- fjfaase 11mo agoI wonder how much this experience is similar to the Alien Hand Syndrome, where people experience that part of their body, usually a hand, act on their own.
- handedness 11mo ago> is it time to worry? Shouldn't the device be the judge of that?
- keybored 11mo agoUnlike the vast sea of the subconscious, we can try to take direct control of technology. But we don’t. So we are left to fret about what technology will do to us (meaning: what people will power will use it for).
- analog8374 11mo agoThe Amish take control of technology like that. If it doesn't pass review it's forbidden. It's a pretty good idea. Consider that heroin used to be legal. We might have a dozen such technologies that we know are hazardous but have yet to kill enough people to force the issue.
- cma 11mo agoRather than the Karpathy thing about in class essays for everything, maybe random selections of students will be asked to head to the school fMRI machine and be asked to remember the details of writing their essay homework away from school.
- Lerc 11mo agofMRI machines are not cheap, nor plentiful. If, one day someone can make a small, cheap device that can do the job of a fMRI it would be more world changing than you can imagine. If you had easy access to realtime data about what is going on in your brain, there is evidence to suggest that you can learn to influence the data and literally change your own mind.
- fy20 11mo agoThat's actually happening. Commercially you can buy a 0.55T system such as the Siemens Free Max for around $500k. There are also developments in ultra-low-field fMRI (<0.1T) which use permanent magnets, which are estimated to retail in the five figure range, however it's more for structural usage (can identify a tumour or stroke progression). What you are saying sounds like being able to control your own heart rate if you see it on a monitor. Maybe combining low resolution fMRI with models trained on higher resolution data, could give you enough visibility that you could learn how to activate other areas of the brain that you wouldn't normally use for tasks.
- j45 11mo agoMaybe skulls will need a faraday cage.
- amarant 11mo agoI find the take a quirk in how the state of the art assistive technology works is reason for privacy fear mongering to be tired, unimaginative, and typical of today's journalism that cares more for clicks than reporting fact. It's a very interesting quirk of a immensely useful device for those that need it, but it's not an ethical dilemma. I for one am sick and tired of these so-called ethicists who's only work appear to be so stir up outrage over nothing holding back medicinal progress. Similar disingenuous articles appeared when stem-cell research was new, and still do from time to time. Saving lives and improving life for the least fortunate is not an ethical dilemma, it's an unequivocally good thing. Quit the concern trolling nature.com, you're supposed to be better than that
- pixl97 11mo agoThis is quite the spicy take for something that could have far more than one purpose. The problem with humanity is some people pick up the hammer and build a house while others will crack your head open with it and eat the pink gooey insides. The discussion of technology should be able to withstand the good and bad points of its conception.
- amarant 11mo ago>The discussion of technology should be able to withstand the good and bad points of its conception True, but that's a poor excuse to make up hypothetical problems that don't even exist. Tying it into the current craze about data privacy is a bit too transparent imo. The journalists should do better, the article makes a downright dishonest interpretation of the issue by shoehorning it into a lens of a long ongoing controversy about data privacy that is in no way applicable to the technology they're discussing. The privacy issue is not only hypothetical, but far enough off in the future that it'd be a better fit for a sci-fi novel then nature.com reporting. The problem is not discussing the downsides, the problem is doing it dishonestly, as the article does.
- fsckboy 11mo ago>it's an unequivocally good thing. the miracle that is humans and humanity came about through millennia of unrestrained fertility and lots of sex℠ producing many babies, most of whom didn't survive to adulthood. Insects and fish still do this on a grand scale. It's where we came from and who we are, and that's Not Bad™ and I think it's unequivocally a bad thing that we keep thinking we know better and interfering with it. we are failing miserably to propel our species forward for the future. "survival of the fittest" is a mistake, it's destruction of the no-longer-adequate that works the magic. (pretty proud of myself for realizing after I put in the tm that I could go back and put in a service mark too)
- zh3 11mo agoAI following the Libet ([0]1983) paper about preconscious thought apparently preceding 'voluntary' acts (which really elevated the question of what 'freewill' means). * [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6640273/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6640273/
- criddell 11mo agoWell, what does freewill mean to scientists?
- czl 11mo agoThere is no single definition for all scientists. However if you define free will as choices that are completely free of deterministic or even statistically deterministic causes that science could in principle predict, then most scientists would say: no, that kind of free will probably doesn’t exist.
- Lerc 11mo agoThe prima facie case for free will* is that it feels free. If you can predict the action before the feeling it removes that argument (unless you want to invoke time travel as an option) *one of the predominant characterisations of free will, anyway. I'm a compatiblist, so I have no issue with caused feelings of decision making being in conflict with free will. I also have a variation of Tourette's, so I have a different perception of doing things wilfully when compared to most people. It's really hard to describe how sometimes you can't tell if something was tic or not.
- kelseyfrog 11mo agoThere are a lot of things I feel that end up not being "real," like embarrassment, a failure. and anxiety. Why should free will not be like any of those?
- nicoty 11mo agoLike how capsaicin makes food feel hot even when it isn't?
- alan-jordan13 11mo ago[dead]
- mostertoaster 11mo agoOk does anyone else’s mind just immediately go to “The Minority Report” is soon going to no longer be just a sci fi dystopia?
- retox 11mo ago[dead]
- thousand_nights 11mo agoyes, first thing i thought of. although i'm quite confident it's still outside the scope of our lifetimes, i do worry for future generations
- absoluteunit1 11mo agoFor me, it immediately made me think of Psycho-Pass. It’s a cyberpunk anime where society uses a system called the Sibyl System to constantly scan people’s mental states and “crime potential” (their Psycho-Pass). People can be arrested before they’ve done anything - just because the system picked up certain signals from them. Very, very interesting idea
- mostertoaster 11mo agoOh that sounds cool. Thanks for sharing. I’m definitely going to check it out.
- bryanrasmussen 11mo agoI guess I will start paying attention when it can predict word choice in my internal monologue.
- robot-wrangler 11mo agoOf course, for shallow people in need of validation, doing exactly that is the point of sycophancy. "I have a great idea, I will ask the AI.." followed immediately by "What an insightful question, this gets to the heart of the matter"
- thomastjeffery 11mo agoSeems like they are really jumping to conclusions here. > Smith’s BCI system, implanted as part of a clinical trial, trained on her brain signals as she imagined playing the keyboard. That learning enabled the system to detect her intention to play hundreds of milliseconds before she consciously attempted to do so There are some serious problems lurking in the narrative here. Let's look at it this way: they trained a statistical model on all of the brain patterns that happen when the patient performs a specific task. Next, the model was presented with the same brain pattern. When would you expect the model to complete the pattern? As soon as it recognizes the pattern, of course! > That learning enabled the system to detect her intention to play hundreds of milliseconds before she consciously attempted to do so There are two overconfident assumptions at play here: 1. Researchers can accurately measure the moment she "consciously attempted" to perform the pretrained task. 2. Whatever brain patterns that happened before this arbitrary moment are relevant to the patient's intention. There's supposed to be a contradiction here: The first assumption is correct, and the second assumption is also correct. Therefore, the second assumption does not invalidate the first assumption. How? Because the circumstances of the second assumption are a special thing called "precognition"... Tautological nonsense. Not only do these assumptions blatantly contradict each other, they are totally irrelevant to the model itself. The BCI system was trained on her brain signals during the entirety of her performance. It did not model "her intention" as anything distinct from the rest of the session. It modeled the performance. How can we know that when the patient begins a totally different task, that the model won't just "play the piano" like it was trained to? Oh wait, we do know: > But there was a twist. For Smith, it seemed as if the piano played itself. “It felt like the keys just automatically hit themselves without me thinking about it,” she said at the time. “It just seemed like it knew the tune, and it just did it on its own.” So the model is not responding to her intention. That's supposed to support your hypothesis how? --- These are exactly the kind of narrative problems I expect to find any "AI" research buried in. How did we get here? I'll give you a hint: > Along the way, he says, AI will continue to improve decoding capabilities and change how these systems serve their users. This is the fundamental miscommunication. Statistical models are not decoders. Decoding is a symbolic task. The entire point of a statistical model is to overcome the limitations of symbolic logic by not doing symbolic logic. By failing to recognize this distinction, the narrative leads us right to all the familiar tropes: LLMs are able to perform logical deduction. They solve riddles, math problems, and find bugs in your code. Until they don't, that is. When an LLM performs any of these tasks wrong, that's simply a case of "hallucination". The more practice it gets, the fewer instances of hallucination, right? We are just hitting the current "limitation". This entire story is predicated on the premise that statistical models somehow perform symbolic logic. They don't. The only thing a statistical model does is hallucinate. So how can it finish your math homework? It's seen enough examples to statistically stumble into the right answer. That's it. No logic, just weighted chance. Correlation is not causation. Statistical relevance is not symbolic logic. If we fail to recognize the latter distinction, we are doomed to be ignorant of the former.
- analog8374 11mo agoInstall one of these on every citizen!
- pedalpete 11mo agoI believe that training a system to understand the electrical signals that define a movement is significantly different from a system that understands thought. I work in neurotech, I don't believe that the electrical signals of the brain define thought or memory. When humans understood hydro-dynamics, we applied that understanding to the body and thought we had it all figured out. The heart pumped blood, which brought nutients to the organs, etc etc. When humans discovered electricity, we slapped ourselves on the forehead and exclaimed "of course!! it's electric" and we have now applied that understanding on top of our previous understanding. But we still don't know what consciousness or thought is, and the idea that it is a bunch of electrical impulses is not quite proven. There are electrical firing of neurons, absolutely, but do they directly define thought? I'm happy to say we don't know, and that "mind-reading" devices are yet un-proven. A few start-ups are doing things like showing people images while reading brain activity and then trying to understand what areas of the brain "light-up" on certain images, but I think this path will prove to be fruitless in understanding thought and how the mind works.
- fainpul 11mo agoDoes it make sense to think of thoughts, consciousness etc. as an emergent property of the neuronal activity in our brains?
- PaulRobinson 11mo agoWe know that the brain is a structure that works through electrochemical reactions. Synapses transmit signals sent by axons to neurons. We can test this. We can measure it. There's nothing else going on that we can describe using known science. Ah, we might say, maybe there is an unknown science - we did not know about so much before, like electricity, like X-Rays, like quantum physics, and then we did, and the World changed. The difference is that we observed something that science could not explain, and then we found the new science that explained it, and a new science was born. It's pretty clear to me - but you may know more - that we can explain all brain activity through known science. It might be hard to think of us as nothing more than a bunch of electrochemical reactions in a real-world reinforcement learning system, but that's what we are: there's no gap that needs new science, is there?
- ryandv 11mo agoYou don't need a device to do this.
- rpq 11mo agoIt’s so much more convincing with a device though. Backed by scientific consensus. Where do I leave my brain and offload my judgment effort and let it tell me what i need to know about anyone
- ryandv 11mo ago> It’s so much more convincing with a device though. Backed by scientific consensus. Hold on, I dropped my Nobel Prize for lobotomy on the ground somewhere... going to need some help looking for it... On second thought, maybe it's better off not being found.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- stego-tech 11mo ago20-year old me would’ve been amazed at how much closer technology is getting to Ghost in the Shell. 30-year old me is firmly in the “nope, no thanks” camp. I love seeing the advancements still, don’t get me wrong, but in the current data, advertising, and attention economies under Capitalism? No fucking way that shit is ending up in my head.
- cindyllm 11mo ago[dead]
- kazinator 11mo ago> That learning enabled the system to detect her intention to play hundreds of milliseconds before she consciously attempted to do so, says trial leader Richard Andersen, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Sounds like Libet's Delay and all that. Conscious awareness is just a documentary covering something that has been decided some half a second ago.