Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Discover What You Are Thinking
neurospace writes "Caltech scientists have successfully decoded movement plans from the brains of awake humans. This work has direct application to the development of a neural prosthesis, a brain-machine interface that will give paralyzed people the ability to move and communicate simply using their thoughts. The lead scientist on this project will be interviewed on Sunday, March 20, on the SETI Institute's weekly radio show, 'Are We Alone?'"
"Nothing for you to see here, please move along."
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It seems like slashdot has not yet decoded my movement plans
If thoughts can be decoded and translated into binary and transmitted across the net , can we have the real cybersex ????? :P
This is NOT a sig - billy
In a word.
Porn.
It already has (to some extent) http://www.brainwavescience.com/HomePage.php
Oh dear please, no.
Talk about a literal interpretation of "thoughtcrime"! I shudder to think of the outcomes if our very thoughts could be used against us. How many slashdotters have thought some nasty things about our current president?
Besides, it says "what you are thinking" and not "anything you ever said, did, or thought."
~Rebecca
The problem with that is our words for things may be confusing, but they are far more standardized than our thoughts for things.
Words are the handles that we put on our reality. They are difficult to standardize often even within one language because of the variety of experiences that different speakers will have associated with each word.
In computer terms it's like this:
A Mac, a PC, and a Linux box are all using the same HTTP protocol to access websites. They have identical interactions with the exception of the User-Agent header. This is like people using words.
If we were to plug directly into a person's brain in order to attempt to translate the meanings behind words it would be like removing the abstraction layer of a standardized http protocol and looking at the innards of each computer system. As each computer handles internal communication in wildly differing manners it would be much harder to understand what these computers were trying to do than if we experienced them only through their web browser.
So a person using words is not unlike a wrapper or abstraction layer - it makes meaning MORE accessible, not less. Universal translators will be impossible until we have properly mapped all the different meanings in all the different brains.
For more info, I recommend The Language War by Robin Tolmach Lakoff
World Changing - News for Humans, Stuff about our planet
Thougts deal with perception and interpretaton, not necessarily with fact. This means that some people can be very convinced of their own innocence or guilt, wile this not being the case. I forgot the psychological term for this.
.. it has to be 'beyond doubt'. Camera's, DNA, and digitally tracking are the more likely options. And unfortunately governments, in a need for control, will be willing to victimize 99.9% of the innocent civilians to such controlling measures and lack of freedoms, using the 0.01% as an excuse. It's happening as we speak. Fear threatens sense of safety and fuels need for control. So far, it's natural. But this control will can and will be abused for political and economic interests. That's pretty much a fact too. Power corrupts. As this info is made public, you'll be subjected to public (uneducated) judgement more and more, like looking for a job.
;-)
I think you can make brain-joysticks by sensing brain activity in parts of the brain, but to interpret the miniscule complex traffic and put it all together to make sense of it, would require devices that are as intelligent and complex as the human brain itself. So I find it highly unrealistic.
The only way it could be used is a bit like lie detectors. When you're lying, you have physiological responses, pupils widen, breath increases, voice shakes, transpiration increases, blood pressure increases, etc. But unlike the US, here that can not be used as evidence, because it indicates fear, but that's not proof of guilt. As an innocent man in a chinese torture chamber, I'm sure I'll have much of the same signs. (Because the flawed digmatic theory is that "those who have done nothing wrong, have nothing to fear". It's how alot of ignorant people give up civil rights that protect privacy).
They could scan the brain and measure brain activity in response to names and other things that will or will not sound familiar to you. They might be able to differentiate between a 'succcessful cache hit' or not.. in memory. But it remains human interpretation as to what you can conclude from this.
Information retrieved in such fashion is by far not as accurate as let's say 'statistics', while even statistics (dealing with likelyhood/probability) on their own say nothing unless you attach the right conclusion to them. Reminds me of the bell curve: when the majority of the 'black' people scored lower at educational tests, the conclusion was that it meant they were less intelligent races, rather than consider the socio-economical (environmental) conditions for these. Here the statistical proof supported a completely incorrect conclusion. In the same way, fysiological changes may be a fact, but their interpretation would be highly questionable. I don't believe 'likelyhood' is good enough,
An effort for more control, includes need for abstraction and simplification, a more black/white view. Being criminal or not becomes a binary rather than continuous scale of severity, zero tolerance, etc.
So I think we have alot more to worry about right now (people not being able to get a job anymore because of a fairly minor incident 20 years ago.. since most employers who know about this, will choose to be certain and not take any risk of hiring you again.. thanks to services like www.ussearch.com), rather than worry about brainscans to prove guilt or innocence.
Besides, I bet it doesn't work on the many braindead people I see roaming around
Mod parent up; I totally agree with this. Too often people try to get at the "pure" intention behind language, without realizing that language formalizes and refines abstract thought, similar to how mathematics and physics formalize and refine intuitive, but sometimes faulty concepts about how numbers and objects work.
I doubt I would like to see it in my lifetime.
While language can be a barrier between people, it also allows for a suitable wording of your ideas, for diplomacy etc. If everyone could 'read' other's real ideas, people would not necessarily get along better...
Rarely do I read about something that makes my jaw drop but this is one of them. All I can say is wow. I can't even imagine the possibilities that this could bring to disabled people. It's things like this that make me believe that anything is possible.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
Arn't jokes supposed to employ humour? At the very least, a joke should have a punch line. I just see a rambling "Pinky & Brain" thing.
slightly OT but we are talking about reading data out from the brain - we are not necessarily that far away from a true lie detector. Yes there are some technical issues, but it is a realistic possibility, certainly within our lifetimes. Think about what that means though - the equivalent of 24/7 direct-to-tape surveillance of everything memorable you ever did (because if you can be forced to answer, they can just ask "were you involved in any way with X?"). I can forsee only two long-term outcomes - the people use this tech to control the government, or the government uses it to control the people. If we can force our elected reps to regularly go through a lie-detector-based ethics test, that would be great - the alternative is the most powerful and permanent autocracy the world has ever seen. Think 1984 only more so.
If you don't think it could get that bad - think of this: suddenly torture becomes an effective interrogation technique to force people to answer questions accurately. First on terrorists, then on pedophiles, then murderers, car thieves, software pirates...and eventually all the way down to people who think nasty thoughts about the president. And then again the next day, to see if they still think those nasty thoughts. And again, and again and again, until they develop an abiding Pavlovian love for the great helmsman...