From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery

Saying "this is the most pessimistic take" doesn't make for good discussion.

Something can have "good takes" but still run an unacceptable risk of ending badly

Lightspeed briefs, for the discriminating crotch!

>There is just no way to go past what we have already observed by their behavior since dogs can't talk or write.

There are many dogs that have been trained to press buttons corresponding to words, in the extreme case tens/hundreds of buttons/words, and they can even construct rudimentary sentences. It doesn't seem insane to me that we could perhaps do a very rudimentary version of this for dogs, given a large enough training set.

The ultrasound technique there is more like MRI, static imaging, not measuring dynamic electrical signals. Also, regardless of static vs moving, all of this hinges on massive relatively expensive devices (ultrasound is never going to be dirt cheap or miniaturized compared to a smartwatch or even a VR headset) and for the subject to remain perfectly still and probably go through regular calibration sequences. All for <75% accuracy on simple classification tasks. The information mixes in the propagation out of the skull, erasing information. It's analogous to trying to do a row hammer attack on a CPU from outside the computer case.

Also, in the Meta result here, "while actively typing" is actually quite different than passive mind reading because the motor cortex sits nicely near the top surface of the skull, and the muscle memory from past typing makes for a nice well formed signal to measure and classify. It's the same trick over and over since the Brown BrainGate days where you can have people perform or imagine movements and get a decent but not good classification result, and it never gets much better after that trick is exploited. Project dies, VCs and grant writers forget or never appreciated the effect, time goes by, a grad student or corporate research lackey rediscovers it, media puts out an article claiming mind reading is here, and the cycle repeats...

what sleep lab does your spouse work at? i'm curious about studying dreams

I'm glad that, with any luck, I'll be dead before this kind of thing is commonplace.

2034: brainwave readers are now production-ready

2035: every phone comes with one so you can can do things without clicking any yucky buttons

2036: China mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and promote social harmony. EU and US condemn. the media condemns.

2037: the EU mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and fight malinformation. the media applauds.

2038: the US, ruled by the blue party, mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and combat white nationalism. the red party condemns.

2039: the US, now ruled by the red party, abolishes the previous law and introduces a new one, mandating phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and combat illegal immigration. the blue party condemns.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Don't be snarky."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I can actually see this happening someday. Theoretical physicists could charge thousands of dollars an hour.

If this happens, I'll be listening to music with the most annoying lyrics on repeat.

Wouldn’t a wrench work just as well?