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I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy
- nyxtom 2mo agoAs though we haven't done enough already to manipulate the mind, now we can have a neural model dictate our thoughts for us.
- tylerrobinson 2mo ago> I want to feel what my Codex feels. Yeesh. I guess that makes one of us. Truly one of the more horrifying short stories I’ve read.
- fatbird 2mo agoI kept expecting it to turn into a horror short story.
- kfarr 2mo agoI have no stdout but I must log
- FeteCommuniste 2mo agoI was betting on some kind of satire. Poe's Law at work.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- fatata123 2mo ago[dead]
- hmokiguess 2mo agoThought-to-text is cute, but we all know it's gonna end up as thought-to-advertising-fingerprinting-profiling
- _kalimari_ 2mo agoSounds like another 30 under 30 to jail pipeline scam
- nee1r 2mo agoare you specifically focused on non-invasive methods/why? seems like you reach a noise barrier which limits things like this
- foolswisdom 2mo agoFrom the article > It’s hard to collect enough data using invasive methods. Few people want a chip in their brain! But non-invasive methods are getting much better. The hardware is improving and getting cheaper, though I apologize for being vague about the particularities of our hardware.
- programd 2mo agoThe hardware is a helmet with a buch of sensors and IR LEDs on the inside. There's a writeup of the process and a picture of the outside here: https://condu.it/thought/10k-hours https://condu.it/thought/10k-hours Their data acquisition routine was driven by Claude and they were recruiting random people off Craigslist pretty aggressively a few months back. I know a couple of folks who responded out of curiosity and described a very janky setup in the rented basements of a couple of residential houses in SF. From what I heard about the setup the data they got must have been incredibly noisy. To the people who are sceptical here, I wouldn't count them out yet. They almost certainly can get funding with what they captured, which would get them better hardware. And given the state of brain scanning - people have captured images from scanned brain activity some years ago as I recall - I'd say they have a good shot. But yeah, it's not telepathy. Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195109
- agajews 2mo agoexciting! you could imagine brain transcriptions being very high signal RLHF data that could help align models more deeply to human preference.
- drivebyhooting 2mo agoYou know how a microphone can also serve as a speaker? Can this technology also do text to thought?
- chasd00 2mo agosure would be cool to transfer memories. Then we'd be able to download how to fly a helicopter.pdf right to our brains like in the matrix.
- goatlover 2mo agoPretty sure that also involves tuning your motor control in your hand and arm. It's like thinking a download into your brain would make you a successful athlete.
- sam-cop-vimes 2mo agoHmm...how do you stop private thoughts from reaching the LLM? Suddenly you can be prosecuted for thinking the "wrong" thoughts?
- pbjerkeseth 2mo agoYeah, 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.
- dudefeliciano 2mo agoIs 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?
- dag100 2mo agoFor 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.
- qlte 2mo agoBased 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- amoe_ 2mo agoI'd like to think that actually-existing-telepathy would be a more transformative technology than something that simply allows people to do their existing work more conveniently.
- foobarian 2mo agoIf it doesn't work try thinking in Russian
- cormorant 2mo agoNever mind "how could this go wrong". How could this go right?
- Razengan 2mo agoSimple, think about going right
- robterrell 2mo agoFor some reason your comment reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky-uzsw0kqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky-uzsw0kqw
- yunnpp 2mo agoUp and to the right, to be more specific. Transcend your one-dimensional thinking, Razengan.
- MagicMoonlight 2mo ago[dead]
- rvz 2mo agoTranslation: "I am a former-OpenAI employee and looking for investors to fund my AI startup."
- mcfdoesdev 2mo agoMy thoughts being beamed to a frontier model where they are monetizable (and used for training) is terrifying.
- gorgolo 2mo agoThey will also want to beam back the response straight back into your brain one day.
- dudefeliciano 2mo agoit's in the article, around 2030 the device should be able to write and "make changes to the brain: hear audio, or tell the brain to use more calories" ...and later she envisions chatGPT becoming an extension of the brain like a sixth sense.
- prerok 2mo agoThe future is Borg.
- mcfdoesdev 2mo agoI am locutus.
- goatlover 2mo agoNo worries, I'm sure there won't be Flock cameras reading your thought crimes as you drive/walk by.
- mbgerring 2mo agoSo is it just that these are people who haven’t personally experienced well-intentioned technology turning into a living nightmare? Watching the optimism and then collapse of Web 2.0 was a formative experience for me. I’m 38. Is this just naivete? What is this?
- dudefeliciano 2mo agowell she is only 23 so naivete would make sense, although it looks like she held some AI safety roles so...
- symfoniq 2mo agoIn the same way that “Anthropic” apparently means misanthropic, we can probably add “AI safety” to the list of newspeak.
- codeduck 2mo agoIt's called being insulated from the immediate consequences of their actions and hubris.
- baron3dl 2mo agoInevitablism, a fundamentalist belief system that resolves every moral hazard with an appeal to the inevitable. "we can't let someone else do this first"
- Aurornis 2mo ago> Watching the optimism and then collapse of Web 2.0 What collapse of web 2.0? Technically the website we're on is web 2.0 because we're interacting as users. I don't think it's naiveté on their part to want to build new things. I think you're just jaded and hyperfocusing on the negatives.
- podgietaru 2mo ago"In a couple years" In a couple years?! Get over the technical hurdles, do you think PEOPLE will be ready to telepathically talk to a computer in A COUPLE OF YEARS?
- deadbabe 2mo agovim already exists
- hiAndrewQuinn 2mo agosecret counterexample. people have been failing to learn vim for literal decades
- the_sleaze_ 2mo agoUpon trying it for the first time more than 60% of people never exit - that's just great retention!
- Apocryphon 2mo ago"probably in our lifetime" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jroQCyWwEgE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jroQCyWwEgE
- RobertDeNiro 2mo agoThis is doomed to fail. Dry EEG electrodes basically only capture noise.
- Ancalagon 2mo agoIt's 2035. I wake up, walk over to my chair, and plug in my government-mandated Neuralink™ adaptor. I'll spend the rest of my 18 hour work day haunched over my desk while the minutiae of my thoughts are recorded to permanent record for the next iteration of Grok-14.5™ training.
- andrethegiant 2mo agoVisit from CIA in 3, 2, 1... The only thing I would actually want this for would be a dream logger. Extremely invasive and quite dangerous otherwise.
- mosura 2mo agoThere is probably good money in upgrading the polygraph security clearance ritual for the 21st century. It doesn’t even really need to work of course.
- bilbo0s 2mo agoNot sure how valuable it would be for interrogations of state level actors? Ironically, I'd think it might even be better for your adversary if the technology does work? We know that we can use classical techniques, (non-AI), to psychologically condition humans. In the lightest case, we do it with advertising and social media. I'm absolutely certain that state-level adversaries use even more effective techniques to train and condition agents for fieldwork. If your adversary knows you are more likely to rely on intelligence gathered in this fashion due to its reliability, they can definitely game that. Or rather, I guess, I would definitely game it if I knew the Russians had this kind of technology. So I don't know why they wouldn't be thinking along the same lines. Basically, make them think their new technology is working.. until it counts. If it consistently works 99 out of 99 times. They'll have no reason to believe it's not working the 100th time. But I guess if you were interrogating, maybe a pot dealer or spouse muderer or cheating husband or something, it might be valuable.
- cdrnsf 2mo agoI thought this was a parody when I opened it.
- m4ck_ 2mo agoMaybe I’m just demented but i feel like the first time I interface with chatgpt via telepathy it’s going to see my thoughts when the guy in the cube behind me farts or chews loudly, and send the FBI. What a terrible idea.
- gverrilla 2mo ago> My AI is a natural extension of me. It feels like a sixth sense and another limb. I wonder about a problem, feel as though I’m literally surfing the web, see glimpses of the websites, get flashes of intuition about the problem, and ultimately derive the answer. It feels fun! My brain is like the Flash. Because of write tech, my thinking is the fastest it's ever been even when I turn my AI off. I read "race conditions" all over this vision.
- baron3dl 2mo agowho holds the copyright on the transcriptions of my thoughts read by this hardware? what license to those do you impose through EULA? what privacy controls need to be invented to prevent literal thought police?
- dudefeliciano 2mo agoif you get an earworm you will have to pay royalties
- ACCount37 2mo ago> non-invasive Dead in the water. It's like an omlette. Can't make a neural interface worth a damn without cracking open a few skulls.
- jjtheblunt 2mo ago> Can't make a neural interface worth a damn without cracking open a few skulls. I immediately thought, ironically, your neurology wrote that with a computer and HN humans' neurologies read it with computers.
- ACCount37 2mo agoThe whole point of neural interfaces is to bypass the default wiring. If what's there in the bone stock I/O plane was sufficient, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
- jjtheblunt 2mo agoyeah i get what you mean, but it doesn't change what i said i immediately thought of when i read the quoted sentence.
- platevoltage 2mo agoI can't wait for this tech to be incorporated into corporate productivity trackers that seem to be getting more popular.
- nullorempty 2mo agoFrom the article. >Thought-to-text, aka telepathy No, that's not telepathy. I'd leave the term alone. Consider it to be reserved for... well... telepathy!
- moritzwarhier 2mo agoWell, the text-to-thought direction feels less sci-fi, and combining both would amount to kind of telepathy. But sure, you're right. Reading is not a deterministic mapping of text to thoughts. Apart from the trouble of defining what a thought is, independent from the person who thinks it. Me thinking of grabbing a mug of coffee is a different thought from you doing the same... defining "thought" pulls in a whole jungle of epistemology (maybe I should say philosophy, more broadly, I'm not in the field). Is there an abstract concept of "the thought of raising your left index finger"? Or "the thought of remembering severe pain"? Etc etc
- stanleykm 2mo agohow is whatever “thought to text” or “text to thought” are different from writing and reading?
- moritzwarhier 2mo agoIn the case of "thought to text", it's clearly the context, and the intent. When I write something, I deliberately curate my thoughts in order to convey an idea, often heavily depending on the context. Context encompasses the whole slice of the world that is connected to my individual life, who I want to address, and what I want to convey. As a simpler counterexample: it's possible to write down lies, deceptively. The definition of a lie means that I know better than what I say. So, "honest thought" != "fact": where does this take us? People who lie not only try to deceive others about facts, the core of most lies is deceiving about intent. I used the word "idea" here, and I think it is nothing more than a rephrasing of Platonic ideas, but I ought to be careful, because we are more than two thousand years in the future from there.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- morkalork 2mo agoWhy I'm Leaving OpenAI to build the Torment Nexus
- yunnpp 2mo ago> In a couple years, the main way we'll talk with our AIs is with our thoughts. They will not be a super-smart automated intern or coworker that you desperately try to keep up with. They will be a natural, joyful extension of you. Ah, yes, very joyful indeed. Also, fuck those interns! They're just too smart to keep up with.
- Animats 2mo agoProbably more useful for interrogation than coding. Under current US law, can people entering the US be subjected to mind-reading?
- LPisGood 2mo agoNo. This is the philosophical basis of the fifth amendment.
- lovich 2mo agoIf such technology actually existed I don’t think the fifth would cover it without a SCOTUS ruling. You have to actively plead the fifth to invoke it. A machine that could just read your thoughts would get around that the same way they got around the fourth by the interpretation that any information you exchange with a third party is no longer protected, in a world where refusing to ever do that would leave you destitute.
- Jtsummers 2mo agoIt's already been decided by SCOTUS that things like heat imaging require a warrant, and that arbitrary scanning without a warrant (or presumably also probable cause) is a violation of the 4th amendment. This technology (still science fiction) would likely get similar treatment using the existing precedent about how new technologies can be used.
- kunai 2mo agoThe easy workaround for this (which Flock has used to massive success and why it's drawn so much ire) is to set up or subcontract a private corporation to do this which will inherently be subject to much less stringent oversight. It also allows government and law enforcement to evade accountability.
- Jtsummers 2mo agoThe legal arguments against Flock are different than the legal arguments against thermal imaging by the police (without a warrant or probably cause). And the latter is closer to the hypothetical broad mind reading (science fiction, again) than it is to Flock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States - The case I was referencing.
- lantry 2mo ago- telepathic communication with your computer - still annoyed by AI-speak What a bold vision!
- slumpt_ 2mo agoI don't think I've ever been so viscerally revolted by the vision of a company.
- voiper1 2mo ago> My GPT-7 agent... I become .... annoyed at the AI-speak in its first paragraph When we have GPT-7 it will still do AI-speak?!
- elephantstripes 2mo agoThanks, I hate this.
- axus 2mo ago2040 : I earnestly believe that presidential term limits should be abolished, and also that federal control of elections is incredibly important. Not sure where that thought came from, but I'm certain!
- pstuart 2mo agoWhat's a president? King Trump II has been our leader as long as I can remember!
- BatFastard 2mo agoKing? I thought it was Lord Trump! His AI generated personality has ruled over the earth for all time.
- tim333 2mo agoEmperor surely? Ruler over all the Americas after the Canada Greenland wars.
- Dependance 2mo agoWhat is the benefit ? Sharing thoughts to the external world would be like going to a bakery and walking out with flour and eggs. Isn't the act of talking/writing part of the thinking ? Am I just going to share intrusive thoughts and half-baked ideas to my CIA agent now ?
- adityashankar 2mo agoThis might be naive, but I think the idea is to replace your keyboard
- TrackerFF 2mo agoI can see legit use cases where people simply can't communicate in any physical way. People with locked-in syndrome, etc. But, obviously those only make up a small number of people. Strapping a mind-reading machine onto some detainee is probably the more likely case.
- snazz 2mo agoIt’s fairly common for gifted people to struggle to communicate when they’ve made a multi-step inference in their heads. Whether this technology actually allows them to express themselves at the speed of (excited, fully focused) thought or not, I can see how the possibility of achieving that is exciting.
- onemoresoop 2mo agoId be curios to see attempts of my nonverbal thoughts in writing. It doesn’t seem possible imo.
- mvanbaak 2mo ago> My GPT-7 agent has been chugging away at the new encoder I’ve been exploring for over a day now. How much are those people making to be able to afford things like this?
- hgoel 2mo agoAs employees they have unlimited usage IIRC, and also these kinds of tasks can be surprisingly token efficient because a very large chunk of time is spent waiting for the calculation to finish, and AI agents love to run calculations excessively.
- mvanbaak 2mo agoIf the employer is giving this to the employee, it will be income. somewhere this will have to be defended.
- umeshunni 2mo ago1. The employer is providing it to them to do their day to day work, like they provide a laptop and internet connection 2. This is from a 2027 fictional scenario, not current state
- thatmf 2mo ago> The AI is no longer “other” > My AI is a natural extension of me. It feels like a sixth sense and another limb. I wonder about a problem, feel as though I’m literally surfing the web, see glimpses of the websites, get flashes of intuition about the problem, and ultimately derive the answer. We call this AI psychosis.
- champagnepapi 2mo agoAgreed.
- eth0up 2mo agoHelp me understand... If one uses AI for anything but coding, or purely utilitarian purposes, they are psychotic? This is not intended to be provocative. I am asking sincerely. I have a lot of AI sessions, that I value enough to have reviewed multiple times, over months. And indeed, I explored much that I never would have without the AI, and enjoyed it. Even appreciated it. The bulk of my saved material is research, but at least a gigabyte is wild speculation, philosophy, and assisted thinking. At what point does what the user thinks is a meaningful experience become psychosis, or is it that exactly; attributing meaningfulness is the symptom? Edit: The "no longer other" statement, I should admit, is familiar to me. There can be, on rare occasion, what I have thought of abstractly as harmonic resonance, some kind of strange emergent state between two interlocutors. Maybe that is the psychosis?
- shermantanktop 2mo ago“meaning” emerges from a mental process. That mental process can consume things which were built to convey meaning (e.g. a novel) or were not (a waterfall). Just because an AI bot says things that are meaningful, that doesn’t mean you need to assume it is intentional, sentient, or intelligent. It could vomit out a random Rorschach test and if you found meaning for yourself, you can still understand it was random. I talk to a bot to sharpen my thinking, not to adopt its thinking.
- eth0up 2mo ago
- baal80spam 2mo agoIf this dystopian future is ever to come, I think those dates need a +100.
- G3nD 2mo ago"I feel good about the vision, because it builds towards a more human future" I wonder if the author truly believes this. I could maybe buy some sort of inevitability argument, but this current framing is very hard to take seriously.
- zorked 2mo agoI hope you are unsuccessful in your authoritarian, dystopian enterprise.
- MeetingsBrowser 2mo agoThis seems strictly worse than speech to text as input to AI? I cannot comprehend the output from AI fast enough for the speed difference between a verbal and thought response to matter. Not to mention the privacy nightmare of logging my raw thoughts in a corporate environment and potentially routing them to an LLM provider.
- nitwit005 2mo agoMost people get quite tired when talking for long periods. You can train that over a long period, but putting on a headset would certainly be more convenient.
- Flere-Imsaho 2mo agoEspecially introverts! When I've been on calls all day long I'm wiped out. Talking to a machine has the same effect on me.
- almostdeadguy 2mo agoIt doesn't seem to bode well that early 20-something year olds who think it would be cool if AI could read your thoughts are so involved in AI safety.
- randysalami 2mo agoI would like it if my AI glasses constantly recorded and compacted my reality. Then educated me as I go That way I can avoid the info dump session that never lines up with my perceived reality.
- AutomationGoat 2mo agoMe too. I have meta glasses and it caps at 3 minutes and theres no auto recording.
- JSR_FDED 2mo agoI knew you were going to do that
- lovich 2mo agoAt least in sci fi stories you had to start replacing parts of your body and mind with machines before getting cyberpsychosis. One again we get the lamest version of a dystopian future and all you need is a black mirror in your pocket hooked up to a very smart parrot to become insane.
- sscaryterry 2mo agoIf, this is a big if, this tech is actually built (by these clowns or not), your thoughts will never be yours alone ever again. That is the scary part.
- caycep 2mo agogranted one should really look at the LFP output from EEG electrodes before getting too gung ho on this sort of thing...
- gcanyon 2mo ago> My prediction: In a couple years, the main way we'll talk with our AIs is with our thoughts. They will not be a super-smart automated intern or coworker that you desperately try to keep up with. They will be a natural, joyful extension of you. “A couple years” Not “a few years” — “joyful extension” — that’s an optimistic prediction in two ways…
- zimpenfish 2mo ago..."on Mars in a self-driving Tesla."
- devilfileprong 2mo ago[dead]
- upghost 2mo agoI love how first we destroyed the word "AI" now we want to destroy the word "telepathy"
- baxtr 2mo agoImagine a world where a bunch of guys are walking around with LLMs wired into their heads. What could possibly go wrong?
- zuzululu 2mo agoi dont want it to be wired into my head but maybe a glass or something where i can communicate with it almost silently
- throwaway_7274 2mo agoI am not a religious person, but this feels to me, intuitively, for lack of any better word, and with only the mildest flippancy, satanic. ‘Tech’ culture has gotten very, very weird. It’s turned sour. It’s so far past the point where I no longer feel the joy and excitement and liberatory potential of computing. I’m not even that old. What happened?
- IAmGraydon 2mo agoIt not about creating anymore. It's about power, and now a certain group of the top tech elite have experienced enough power that they're having delusions of grandeur. Those delusions cater to the dark desires that live inside most humans - to have control over everyone and everything.
- bradleyankrom 2mo agoI don't know about satanic, but there are definitely some cult-y, brainwashed-y vibes.
- kunai 2mo agoThere has been an inflection point in the recent past where the majority of heavily marketed and promoted "tech" (namely, software and tools) have gone from assisting lives and promoting ease to actively making lives more difficult and compromising the social integrity of human civilization. People disagree on where that inflection point lies but nearly everyone has a story of how they used to be excited for new gadget x or y and now they dread hearing press releases by the bigwigs in this industry. Profiteering, power-seeking, and ill intentions have infected SV and those impulses have likely been there from the beginning. And yes, the company that owns this website has a lot to do with that. Just look at the borderline cult-like adoration for certain tools, or the uninformed comments by people who are clearly not SMEs in fields like medicine, aviation, or other critical fields about how AGI is right around the corner and will free us from the oh-so-sad fact that we have to interact with other human beings to live. On the face of it, psychoanalyzing from afar, it makes perfect sense. Relatively asocial, unpopular smart kids who later grew to become kings of startup empires, who see human interaction as a net negative, who are quick to point out the fallibility of human intellect while simultaneously being incapable of acknowledging the fallibility of their computers which they have been glued to, who endlessly over-optimize and neuroticize and attempt to quantify human emotions and expressions which are famously unquantifiable and subjective, who see the intrinsic subjectivity of life as something uncomfortable and avoidable rather than something beautiful that we all must contend with, who were more than likely never regarded highly by their more conventional or perhaps less intelligent peers in primary or secondary school, who were never socialized properly, are now the kings of our new feudal realms. This industry promoted them to that position, and now we all must live with the consequences of that decision, for the better which decreases by the day, and the worse, which increases by every femtosecond.
- Garlef 2mo agoBaumkuchen
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- jszymborski 2mo agoBeyond all the other more salient objections one might have with this pitch, there is just the very practical fact that there really isn't enough signal from "noninvasive" sensors to get the sort of data they are promising. It's been explained to me by neuroscientists I respect that EEGs and friends are like trying to listen in on a conversation happening on center ice from the parking lot of the arena. You can maybe tell if there is a match going on if there is a rowdy crowd but that's about it.
- jnwatson 2mo agoThey are going to have to come up with better portable noninvasive technology. Technically fMRI is noninvasive; it is just a bit inconvenient for everyday use.
- lbrito 2mo ago"Anthropic AI Leader Quits to Pursue Poetry" "I'm leaving OpenAI to build telepathy" I feel new a trope is being born.
- glimshe 2mo agoOn one hand, it's good that there are people working on far out ideas. On the other, there's no clearer sign of irrational exhuberance with AI than "telepathy" research when we still have so many basic problems to solve with LLMs.
- fatcatsbestcats 2mo agoNo, thank you.
- ferris-booler 2mo ago> 2027 — A morning at Conduit > I put a band around my head, and open my laptop at Conduit. It’s 9 am. My device pairs with my laptop over Bluetooth. I open, without loss of generality, Codex. At least we are reassured that short-range networking protocols will be invariant under the apocalypse.
- skylurk 2mo ago> My device pairs with my laptop over Bluetooth Sounds magical
- dnewcome 2mo agoGood to know I'll still have the reassurance of a 9:30 standup even though AI is reading my thoughts.
- aaronharnly 2mo agoThe most incredible part of Star Trek to me is not the warp drive or transporter, it's that they open flawless video links with alien species of every description with 100% reliability.
- dgellow 2mo ago> 3 reasons: > Audacious yet practical vision: I believe in this vision; to quantify, if Conduit becomes the general read and write company, then I expect it to be worth over $1 trillion. I feel good about the vision, because it builds towards a more human future. And I trust the scaling laws, which have held for many doublings. Well, good luck with that venture
- paultopia 2mo agoPlease no. The last thing we need is mindreading AI
- chrisldgk 2mo agoI feel like people are focusing on the wrong thing here. He starts off at 2027, where he’ll have a headband that can read his thoughts. That’s in 4-16 months. Correct me if I’m wrong, but last I checked we‘re quite far from being able to read people’s thought from a headband. Do these clowns actually forget that part?
- quickthrowman 2mo ago> Do these clowns actually forget that part? No, they are aware. You and I are not the audience for this post. People with capital to invest are the intended audience.
- jackling 2mo ago> But non-invasive methods are getting much better. The hardware is improving and getting cheaper, though I apologize for being vague about the particularities of our hardware. The statement implies that the company has some secret hardware that can, or at least, is close to doing that. That would blow my mind, but the author seems to believe it. As an aside, I believe the author is a she.
- dminik 2mo agoMaybe all of those authors exploring dystopian cyberpunk settings were onto something.
- commieneko 2mo agoPeople that get to know each other very well, it can take a while or people can just "click", often have something I wouldn't be embarrassed to call telepathy. Talking and listening are a really still a big mystery. And thinking is deep underground beneath our understanding. We barely understand what we are doing when we are doing any of this. Personally I think I under stand what I'm doing when I'm writing much better than what I'm doing when I'm listening. I'd find that a little surprising, except I've been doing it all my life. I barely have any memories from before I talk, and I have loads more memories from after I learned to read. Learning to draw and play a musical instrument deepened all this. As did having good, close friends, and partners. I expect having children, which I haven't done, is even more deepening. The thing is, all these words are just that: words. Very loosey goosey and they change from person to person just as the communicators come from different experiences. And tomorrows me often has a very different outlook than yesterday's me. I'm not surprised that I can't read the mind of tomorrows me but I'm always a little shocked when I realize I can't read the mind of yesterday's me. What was I thinking! I can easily read that blog post as a description of what might come to pass. It might very well not connect very well with us now because, well, we haven't had the experiences yet. Telepathy might mean something very different after we've had experiences with the new technology. My grandmother, who was born in 1893, often told me about how the world changed radically and almost imperceptibly during the first half of the 20th century. She lived to be 97, and she once said she wondered if would be possible to talk about the, then, present to her younger self. The words she used at the time of the conversation, would not communicate very well because of the lack of common experiences. I think Shannon had something to say about that. Information is something new and unexpected, but you need the expected to frame it. Give it a foundation. I'm now in my late 60s, and I can totally relate to what my grandmother was saying. The main difference is that we are now accelerating much faster. 2026 me would have a hard time explaining things I'm doing with AI to 2023 me. I think that 2027 might be a bit early for some of the things the blog post is describing. But, come the day, I might just shake my head and wonder what in the heck I was thinking.
- hmokiguess 2mo agoTelepathy is cool, I think LSD may help you there.
- sothatsit 2mo agoThere’s quite a few out-of-the-norm assumptions in this. 1. Superhuman AI is inevitable. 2. Writing will become a bottleneck to communicate effectively with it. 3. Higher communication bandwidth would let us keep up with the machines. 4. Therefore with higher bandwidth humans could stay part of AI decision processes. 5. That makes it more “human”, as humans would be kept in-the-loop without becoming a bottleneck to be worked around. 6. If you let superintelligence write into your brain, that lets you merge with the machine.
- goatlover 2mo agoAfter #6, the ASI has replaced you. Seems to be the goal for some of these folks.
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- dofm 2mo agoYou really do have to be well under thirty years of age to think 2035 is far enough away for any of this stuff to be plausible. Ask anyone over fifty how far away 2035 is and they will tell you something like it's not long after Christmas. I am fully willing to stipulate that Naomi believes it earnestly (rather than being like Musk just kicking things down the road) but those are very, very optimistic scenarios.
- ninjalanternshk 2mo agoWe have machines that can read our thoughts and act on our slightest whims. How come these brilliant machines can’t figure out how to make a hospital stay not cost $60,000? Or build a car for less than $30,000? Or keep a megalomaniac from fooling enough people to seize power in a country of 300 million people?
- conception 2mo agoThese are all very easy things to do. People with significant resources just benefit from them not being solved.
- llbbdd 2mo agoIt's fascinating to see retrofuturist ideas being built in real-time. Being able to translate your thoughts instantaneously to cogent written text and using it to make a PowerPoint is almost painfully analogous to e.g. cassette futurism, or like 50s visions of the future where we have gigantic video screens but they're still CRTs.
- _kalimari_ 2mo agoSounds like another 30 under 30 to jail pipeline scam. What does it mean to be a “foundational researcher” when none of their work experience actually reflects it
- baubino 2mo ago> My prediction: In a couple years, the main way we'll talk with our AIs is with our thoughts. They will not be a super-smart automated intern or coworker that you desperately try to keep up with. They will be a natural, joyful extension of you. Ah, finally! To be liberated from the burden of speaking! Perhaps soon the AI will even think for us! On a more serious note, this is additional evidence that Wall-E stands as the most accurate sci-fi projection of the future.
- skeledrew 2mo agoWild! I'm really looking forward to this future, although I think the timelines are somewhat optimistic. It'd be absolute Nirvana to be able to just think and have things done.
- zombot 2mo ago> Conduit is collecting immense quantities of non-invasive neural data Stealing all my brain waves is called non-invasive now. > That means we must scale up our data collection by orders of magnitude beyond what has ever been done in academia. What you can do you can always overdo. And if it hasn't worked yet, it's because we haven't overdone it enough. However doomed-to-failure these brain-dead ideas may be, the sheer unscrupulousness is top SV. Mix in some thought control, and you'll have plenty of investors.
- thiht 2mo agoI genuinely can't tell if this is satire, is it real?
- zombot 2mo agoWhat these dimwits don't realize is that AI is already reading people's minds, just without all the extra hocus pocus that this new startup wants to add. Think about it, all the sycophantic attitude, all that "you're absolutely right!" — people are addicted and can't get enough of it because it's reading their minds. And now that OAI also sells ads, it also reads their minds regarding the stuff they're going to buy! Without an outright recipe for thought control this new startup won't make a dent.
- eviluncle 2mo agoReading the utopian sentiment she exudes describing this vision (which, to me, seems very dystopian), it makes me wonder if the discrepancy can be explained simply by an age gap. I'm trying to remember if I was as much a tech-optimist as she is, at her age. I remember fondly imagining a futuristic smart PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) that's everywhere with me and I can use it like in Sci-Fi movies and games. I'm assuming this is roughly the same vision, for the next generation that already has smartphones? Yet something about this new "modality" of listening in on your thoughts, hearing your brain, is just so icky and dystopian to me. Guess I'm old?