
Facebook gets closer to letting you type with your mind - rbanffy
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/30/tech/facebook-mind-reading-research/index.html
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melling
Previous submission with comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20566499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20566499)

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carapace
Just to point out (again) that you don't need fancy equipment to do this.
Connecting electrodes to the brain is unnecessary. Some simple external
sensors† and hypnosis and you're good to go.

The basic idea is to set up simple binary signals between your unconscious
mind and your sensors. This is trivial.

Then you can take e.g. eight data plus one clock and gang them together to
make a simple parallel port between your brain and the computer. Easy. (The
obvious thing to do is use eight fingers plus a thumb.)

The brain is already a hugely sophisticated information processing device. The
problem is not to get the raw signal out of it and then decipher it. That's
just pushing sideways on the train. Just use simple hardware and let the brain
do the pre-processing to get legible signals (with the subjective perception
of direct mind-to-screen typing, say.)

†Galvanic skin response, or these days use little IMUs in gloves to detect
twitches. The signals you're generating are not subtle. Another thing, the
brain already has a high-bandwidth output device: the face. These days it
should be trivial to train a NN to read expressions and "micro-tics" from e.g.
some HD cameras trained on your face, and co-evolve a protocol between mind
and machine.

\- - - -

Edit to add, you guys have seen "Forbidden Planet" right? Take heed of the
fate of the Krell, design your tools well, raise no "Monsters from the Id"...

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wildduck
Much of these can be done via EEG sensors.

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briga
>Machine learning algorithms eventually determined how to spot when
participants were answering a question and which one of the 24 answers they
were choosing

Seems like it might be a bit of an overstatement to say that Facebook is close
to anything of the sort. Assuming that neural typing is as simple as running
some real-time classification algorithm on brain states, to predict words
correctly you'd have to be able to predict about tens of thousands of
different possibilities. Not to mention the more difficult problem of
individual idiosyncrasies in neural architecture and language embeddings for
any given brain. Building a word classifier for a single brain is one thing,
but I doubt if any two brains process language in the exact same way, so
building some general-purpose classification model that works on all brains
still seems intractable with current ML techniques. It's a nice start, but I
think we're a long way from fully automatic neural typing.

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boltzmannbrain
hmmm
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jroQCyWwEgE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jroQCyWwEgE)

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nexuist
You just know there's some $30,000 voice activated potato cannon stuffed in a
Menlo Park basement...

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rhegart
Appreciate this a lot. Cousin is disabled and can’t speak enough for voice
software nor use the computer but is a smart guy. Would open so many doors if
this works.

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HomeDeLaPot
I can already type with my mind. I had my brain internally wired to a pair of
biomechanical "limbs" with graspers on the end that just happen to interface
with a standard keyboard really well. I trained a neural net to run the setup,
and since then it's served my needs very well. Granted, some of the inner
workings are mechanical rather than electrical, but I can already type faster
than I can think.

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gorzynsk
Why would anyone want that? People never post what they really think on
Facebook...unless of course they write without thinking enough.

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Stubb
Facebook gets closer to reading your mind. FTFY.

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visarga
> Facebok

It's funnier when they don't proofread.

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Finnucane
So, eventually more completely unfiltered stream of consciousness posting?
What could possibly go wrong?

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thepangolino
One step closer to stopping wrongthink.

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MildlySerious
Hard pass. There is not one good argument why Google or Facebook of all
companies should be in charge of this technology.

I am all for advancing technology, but not by all means and not at all costs.
Advertising companies (with a bad track record nonetheless) being the first to
gain from this kind of technology is reckless at best, and dangerous at worst.

