> His employer could have prevented such a “disastrous” outcome, said Farahany, with a “simple wearable hat” that, using “embedded electro-sensors,” could measure brain wave activity and gauge “what stage of alertness the person was experiencing and whether or not they are starting to fall asleep.”
Sure... or 5 other ways that don't involve reading brain waves.
Perhaps cameras that feed some sort of AI vision service trained to detect how much time has been spent driving, and automatically call their boss? How else could a trucker possibly be stopped from driving so far? Lol
Off the top of my head, I was thinking a simplistic CAPTCHA-like device.
* "Here's 2 shapes. Press the triangle."
* "Here's 2 numbers. Press the bigger one."
It would have to be something a trucker can easily solve at a glance, barely taking their eyes off the road. And they get a couple tries, a couple warnings, and then a loud siren and the event gets logged with their employer. 3 strikes system or something.
There's a dozen ways this could fail, but it's a fun thought experiment: "how do you determine a trucker is awake and functioning, without distracting them too much, annoying them too much, getting too many false positives, or putting electrodes on their brain?"
I remember, many years ago, using an alarm clock on my phone that used questions like that.
It was a clever solution to the problem I was having at the time, which was that I kept oversleeping because I got really good at shutting off the alarm before waking up enough to remember what alarm clocks were for.
If there won't be a massive change of laws, all this stuff will be deployed everywhere. First the workplace and then everywhere. The whole idea of "no expectation of privacy in public spaces" doesn't work when the tech exists to deploy surveillance everywhere. The control freaks will take over.
> [Farhany] believes an important defense against potential abuses of privacy using such technology is pre-emptively “recognizing a right to cognitive liberty, a right to self-determination over our brains and mental experiences,” and added that “it requires that we update existing international human rights … “Speaking as a CEO, I’m sure all CEOs will use it completely responsibly,” said moderator and Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson, to the laughter of Farahany and the audience.
Read-only sensory proxies for brain state include:
iris response, via headset camera
facial expression, via image analysis
heart rate, through walls via Wi-Fi Sensing
gait analysis
schizophrenics often reject medication in the midst of psychosis, while agreeing it's necessary when they're lucid.
lots of addicts genuinely want to kick the habit, but their willpower fails them. drugs like disulfiram and naltrexone can help by making highs unpleasant or unattainable.
sex offenders who abuse minors are sometimes chemically castrated with GnRH agonists as part of their parole. this reduces their sex drive by depriving them of androgens, reducing the risk they'll reoffend.
where to draw the line is complicated, but at least in the schizophrenic case I really think forced medication compliance helps everyone. if you're not lucid you aren't competent to make medical decisions.
I do not hold those views, but I respect your right to state that you have them, and be met with an understanding that that is the case, and that I don't have the right to change your mind by violence.
It always comes down to absolutes, if you're sifting the question finely enough (warning, at some point this process will distort the grains, and you won't be processing reality anymore, but the result of your own mind, the cycle is fatal).
Anyway. This moment is a _very_ direct test of this question. Answering it, or more carefully, your emotional reaction on reading this, will expose some of your absolutes.
I've had a friend go off psych meds for religious reasons (Christian Science) and nearly die (waxy catatonia from severe bipolar), so my objectivity is impaired. however:
my rule of thumb is that if the patient, after being returned to lucidity by meds, agrees in retrospect that meds were necessary, then it's the right call.
the other exception is if the person is at substantial risk of hurting others if unmedicated. then the violence of mandated medication is warranted.
barring that, if someone on psych meds wants to go back off them, I wouldn't prevent them from doing so.
The contents of the mind should be sacrosanct- the deployment of technologies for reading the mind should go no further than it has except in medicine and research, and only then with explicit informed consent, of course. Honestly if this tech advances and becomes the norm for employers/the government/etc. to use, that's when it's time to drop out of society and become a hermit or something.
I worked on custom EEGs and all I have to say is, "so long and thanks for all the fish!"
Seriously though, is this really what this beautiful tech will end up being!? Come on people - have some humanity - think beyond these neanderthal brain use cases. These examples show little imagination, almost as if they are already shepherded by an AI.
This tech could create true equality like nothing we've ever seen. No matter where you are on earth, even with the poorest of educational systems, we could know what you naturally 'master' with this tech. That means knowing what subjects and concepts you can commit to memory with a gifted efficiency!! Imagine the sorting hat coming to you and picking you out to join the guild of X or Y!
But instead we want to talk about "productivity" and "throughput" - as if everyone should be treated as an input / output device for yet another interface.
"That's only one bit of information" - too many times I heard that... but guess what, sometimes that's all it takes between contributing to the whole or selecting out.
Current dry electrode technology is nowhere close to being useful for high fidelity applications. You will need a breakthrough in ML/signal processing that can solve the cocktail party problem for a very large n. (Given the current advances in ML, I won't be surprised if we start seeing improvements in this area)
To quote professor Mike Cohen, all of neuroscience (the EEG BCI part at least) is source separation.
The author of the “great text” of EEG - where we started, too. Yeah; I was surprised with our results, but if you follow his instruction, there’s a lot one can glean.
> This tech could create true equality like nothing we've ever seen. No matter where you are on earth, even with the poorest of educational systems, we could know what you naturally 'master' with this tech. That means knowing what subjects and concepts you can commit to memory with a gifted efficiency!! Imagine the sorting hat coming to you and picking you out to join the guild of X or Y!
>
> But instead we want to talk about "productivity" and "throughput" - as if everyone should be treated as an input / output device for yet another interface.
Did you really intend to write that as "but instead"? It confuses me greatly, because I feel that your first example is about as bad as TFH.
Yeah - my team and I fought for the good in this tech. I still have hope the opportunity will come around to realize that vision - but you’re right, without a true steward, this gets inhumane quick.
I’m gzipping the point, but you’re pointing out the exact benefit of ‘the good’ neuroscience. “Suck at” does not mean what you think it means… your brain could be engaged at an optimal level, finding a rejuvenating cycle of effort and rest. That’s the stuff you should chase
Do we want true equality like that? I certainly don't.
I will be the first to admit I derive a lot of meaning in life from being capable in my domain the being depended on by others to succeed in that domain (where many others can't). I'd argue that a lot of human drive is rooted in exactly this: being depended on by others and the feeling of belonging and purpose that gives.
Flattening the world until we're all equal just means there's no role any of us can uniquely fit, and really no difference between each other at all.
> Imagine the sorting hat coming to you and picking you out to join the guild of X or Y!
Is it really reliable to such an extent? It sounds a bit "IQ 2.0" to me and outside of predicting university admission likelihood I feel like IQ isn't necessarily a strong indicator of much.
> That means knowing what subjects and concepts you can commit to memory with a gifted efficiency!! Imagine the sorting hat coming to you and picking you out to join the guild of X or Y!
You are describing Isaac Asimov’s novel “Profession”.
> Funny thing - in business (as I’m war) the ones with least compassion win.
I don't remember that happening in 1945. I think being compassionate has some significant propaganda advantages that you are failing to value. To return from war to business I would suggest that working for a company that is compassionate might make hiring good candidates much easier in contrast to a company that isn't. Combined with assumed turnover and associated loss of productivity the compassion could translate into a competitive advantage.
> His employer could have prevented such a “disastrous” outcome, said Farahany, with a “simple wearable hat” that, using “embedded electro-sensors,”
I figure if I'm doing an illegal shift my boss has pressured me into I'm going to take the hat off because either my boss tells me to or its uncomfortable over the course of a 20 hour shift. I don't think it solves the problem in the way they pretend it does.
Nor do I buy the argument that copying what Chinese firms are doing (the example of the rail company) is necessarily a strong reason, given we might be just following micro-managing idiots into a dead-end of their own construction.
The true horror is this monstrosity is the oppression of neuro-divergent individuals by automated models trained on typical minds following happy paths.
if the intent of this is to moniter people with 20 hour shifts then they better not have the training model be following happy paths, neurodivergent or not. train it on the most miserable people you can find, that will be the kind of people who will be wearing this thing.
Imagine you're a 12 year old in 2065 forced to wear a shocking device that forces you to "pay attention" in class but for whatever reason it incorrectly identifies you as never paying attention.
You could argue that it is poorly made but perhaps the model was trained in a rush because it was a cheap, knock-off produced en-masse for school-scale.
Even if its well-made; imagine you're some 1 in a 1,000,000 non-typical. Who is the school going to believe, some irksome child or the system that works perfectly fine for 99.99% of other students? "Obviously" in such a case, the child is lying and just needs to learn to pay attention.
I don't think it will solve the micro sleep problem because that's arguably more of a political issue than a technical one. The issue is rarely the drivers trying to drive till they drop but rather the businesses themselves trying to force the drivers to take on extra shifts (due to lack of drivers) or drive longer to deliver sooner rather than sleeping. In such cases in the future people will find a way to simply turn off the checks and still crash.
Regardless these long-haul issues should be resolved by automated driving anyway given that long highway journeys are a decent use-case for automation.
This is a weird, right-wing, conspiracy-theoretic tabloid site that doesn't belong on HN. I'm sure the talk was bad (all of Davos is bad), but if it's important, somebody credible covered it somewhere else.
Besides the immediate thoughts about how one could extract more from their Human Resources — which is completely gross and feels like property rather than a meaningful trade, the example she gives is pure solution in search of a problem.
She uses the example of a truck that while driving dangerously — and illegally — fatigued kills somebody that could be stopped by brain reading devices, because they’re better than existing driver impairment detection devices.
Maybe so, but losing mental sovereignty mighty high price to pay for the mere employee.
You know what also would prevent employees from dangerously pushing themselves too hard? Tighter regulation and enforcement against the employers’ / clients’ policies that encourage this behavior, including making them liable for the accident.
No one chooses to drive 20 hours straight (to use her example) just for the hell of it. They do it because they’re afraid they’re going to lose their job.
It may be possible to flash visual stimuli fast enough for it not to be consciously noticed — but for an EEG to still reveal whether the visual pattern was familiar or not.[0] The ERP circuit of interest is the P300 circuit.[1]
Effectively a brain side-channel that could let someone fuzz your brain for pin codes while you type out jira tickets.
hey don't worry, all these people tweet about how much they love black people and trans rights when it's beneficial for them to do so. they definitely have our backs.
Use of such a device or any existing systems such as cameras or computer software by an employer to check on employees is highly illegal in Switzerland. In fact because some businesses have security cameras it is specifically forbidden to use this to track employees [1].
> LifeSiteNews (or simply LifeSite) is a Canadian Catholic conservative anti-abortion advocacy website and news publication. LifeSiteNews has published misleading information and conspiracy theories, and in 2021, was banned from some social media platforms for spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
Ooooh "misinformation" and "conspiracy theories"... also often (but not always!) known as "spoiler warnings"
edit/addendum: The source of the original talk is the CEO of The Atlantic, so accusations of media bias of the middleman source may be casting stones in a glass house...
My take is that the human brain isn't magic. It's mysteries will be cracked. Mind reading machines will be built. Some good may come from that, but the risk of much bad does weigh on me.
The dismissive attitude v WEF this year is interesting. The generic globalist-capitalist vision does not sell as much as in the past, it seems (for good reasons). Good signs, maybe there will be a generational shift from the gerontocracy that controlled the global agenda
The amount of people that see this tidbit on facebook from this website and parrot it without concern for the actual speaker or the context she said it in is concerning. You people are supposed to be intelligent
This is not a goal and not a plan. It was a prediction, a possible scenario of where we could be headed. An extrapolation of current trends.
Using the full quote would make it far clearer that that's what it was:
> “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. What you want you’ll rent, and it’ll be delivered by drone.”
> Danish politician Ida Auken, who wrote the prediction in question (here), said it was not a “utopia or dream of the future” but “a scenario showing where we could be heading - for better and for worse.”
> All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realised that we could do things differently.
Obviously I did, or I wouldn't have said what I said.
I think that quote fits "a pretty dumb over-simplistic extrapolation of some current trends" pretty well. It's pretty dumb to select some trends to extrapolate, and ignore the ones that are not trending correctly. I'd call it "over-simplistic", but I already did...
What it doesn't describe is a plan to make the world this way. It's a prediction. A dumb prediction.
Fair enough, I'd encourage anyone else reading this to read the original piece and not just her damage control as well. Cause to me it reads like a thought experiment, the express purpose of which is to make the case that the western world's problems (western world = capitalism via property rights) are due to said property rights and the freedom to use that property as one wishes. I know that might seem like a shocking conspiracy theory argument if you are westerner, but the idea that property rights don't exist is standard operating procedure in the eastern world, and a idealized view of such a scenario where property rights are no longer a hinderance to economic/state activity might not be considered an outlandish position in the World Economic Forum, where I believe Ida Auken was just trying to score clout, without realizing what exactly she was saying.
Once people noticed, the damage control spin started. That's my take, disagree all you like.
To me it just comes off as apologetics for more extractive/rent-seeking arrangements. Of course capitalists would like you to pay a subscription for everything you use.
Yeah fair enough, a rationalization for the ownership classing owning more and more it being great for everyone. In any case I don't take her at her post-hoc word.
I love the idea that the secret goal of the World Economic Forum is to subvert capitalism. Again, bringing us back to the question of whether the modal critic of the WEF knows what the WEF is in the first place.
People with strong opinions about the World Economic Forum tend not to know (let alone understand) what it is. It isn't the Stonecutter's Lodge; it's something closer to the TED Talks organization. It's random executives networking and trying to make themselves seem more important than they are. Fun fact: companies that participate in the WEF underperform the S&P.
> Fun fact: companies that participate in the WEF underperform the S&P
That's irrelevant. What is worrying is that they are among the biggest and involved in all critical industries and have a quasi monopoly on their industries and as a whole. By collaborating together over political goals they form a plutocratic autocracy.
The links you've pasted here make my case for me. Canada sponsored a series of TED talks, for a pittance relative to what they send to other NGOs. Therefore: the WEF has "infiltrated" governments around the world. This is lizard people stuff.
Important people show up at Davos because it's a networking event and an easy way to get publicity. Important people have attended TED talks, too. That doesn't mean TED is a shadowy extragovernmental puppetmaster.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it - whether by design or not, their public statements are serving them very well. They have a strong following (no doubt here, and on LinkedIn all the time I see people "liking" the pap they post), so they are playing to their base.
Second, if your enemy had a choleric temper, antagonize him. The people most sensitive to their stuff (eat bugs, personal carbon budget, whatever insane crap) get bent out of shape, and are still on the fringes enough that they look like the ones who are "conspiracy theorists" (they often are) and make it easy to dismiss criticism as crazy, while out in the open they do their thing.
Like I said, it's probably not intentional, but there is no countervailing force to prevent them from pushing their stuff, and plenty of upside, so they keep doing it.
I don't think they care. They can just shrug and say "Misinformation" and "You need to stop letting the alt-right scare you." And ten years later when you're squeezing the last of the bug-paste ("New Crunchy style!") out of your pre-third shift meal supplement packet and reading on the telescreen how the chocolate ration has been increased to five grams, well, you won't want to do anything rebellious in your safe little pod, lest your social credit scores sink enough that Amaflix and Marv-Ney deplatform your connection, and your options are twiddling your thumbs hoping another gig job makes itself available or you're reduced to leaving your head in the Satisfaction Tracker for one Hertz sampling of "engagement" as a nameless studio shows you pre-vis dumped out of MediaGPT-7 in between ads. Between your worries, your woes, and the relentless twenty smash cuts per second delivery of anything, your attention will be so atomized you won't be able to think back to how it all started.
Could simply be false or misleading reporting. LifeSite doesn't seem to be a very reliable news site. According to Wikipedia:
> LifeSiteNews (or simply LifeSite) is a Canadian Catholic conservative anti-abortion advocacy website and news publication. LifeSiteNews has published misleading information and conspiracy theories, and in 2021, was banned from some social media platforms for spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
Sure... or 5 other ways that don't involve reading brain waves.