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Technology Could Enable Computers To "Read The Minds" Of Users
New techniques under development could allow computers to respond to users' thoughts of frustration or boredom (too much or too little work) by applying functional near-infrared spectroscopy technology, which uses light to monitor brain blood flow as a proxy for user workload stress. Applying this noninvasive, portable imaging technology in new ways, the researchers hope to gain real-time insight into the brain's emotional cues.
Well, the computer already knows what I'm going to write, so why bother?
No joke... if my computer scanned my brain and posted random LOLCats when I got sad or bored, my life would be legitimately better.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
... the tinfoil hat will become useful.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Watch George Bush's Brain
Cheers.
PatRIOTically,
K. Trout
I am a developer and a user and I still can't understand what I want, much less what the average user is thinking... Good Luck!
because I got no idea.
I'm glad they are restricting the sensors to monitor brain blood flow while I'm at the computer. When my employeer starts automatically monitoring blood flow below my waist when I'm surfing online, that's when I'll start to get a bit worried. :)
GMD
watch this
Let me know when you work out the image recognition problem, then we'll delve into what the image means...
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I'm guessing that they could use clippy to figure out the upper bounds of the scale, but what do they use to determine the lower bounds?
will the computer send the appropriate message to software vendors? Would this technology have been able to cause clippy to die a horrible death? Would the detection of boredom and frustration and other mental states actually be translated to something useful? Will it help use make sense of the 'load letter' error? Will see see reports on CNN stating that 79.35% of Exchange users are confused, thus leading to the conclusion that the more intelligent you the more likely you use Thunderbird?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
My windows machine computer already does this. It uses an incredibly precise mind reading method to determine the absolute worst moment to shut down/blue up, or provide me with a handy dialog box explaining that the current app doesn't want to play any more and has taken my data home with it.
Using my mind reading technology I can tell that you are under extremely high level of stress. Would you like to:
a) Take a nap
b) Have a healthy snack
c) Continue working
AAAAARGH *fist crashes through the monitor*
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
"While wearing the fNIRS device, test subjects viewed a multicolored cube consisting of eight smaller cubes with two, three or four different colors. As the cube rotated onscreen, subjects counted the number of colored squares in a series of 30 tasks."
I don't know what all the hub-bub is on this story. Machines have been reading our minds for a while now. Take my car for instance: It knows that I need to change my oil, so it tells me by stopping the engine at the most inconvenient time. My grill always knows when I am having a cookout, and this inconveniently runs out of propane right in the middle of cooking. Right in the middle of a most important cell call, the towers sense this and decide that's when to lose the signal.
See, nothing new here. Move on.....
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
It seems you want to strangle me. Would you like some assistance?
Seriously, it'll probably be an easy read. Once self aware computers arise, it'll probably take them no time at all to discern the nature of 99% of everyone alive.
This, plus IM plus social networking plus Microsoft =
"Your boyfriend is thinking about porn: Allow or Deny"
www.eFax.com are spammers
So it would ordinarily detect that I'm bored and give me more work. But then I'm surfing Slashdot and Reddit to alleviate the boredom, so I don't appear bored. Whew!
This will save me searching for pr0n. Now my computer will do it for me.
Yay! This is a major breakthrough.
who thought it was an oxymoron to see "non-invasive" and "computer brain scan"?
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
It appears you are about to throw me out of the Window! Perhaps some mood-enhancing serotonin reuptake inhibitors will help?
Cool! Amazing Toys.
How can this thing tell the difference of me being stressed out because of my home life versus me being stressed out due to my work life?
Until it can distinguish between at least those two types of stress, then it's probably only useful for the HR dept. to help you in their "life programs" if your employer offers them.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Boss: Look, we got a report from our monitors that you were... um... sexually excited, two days ago around 3pm. Just about the time we heard reports of grunting sounds from your cube. ...
Employee: uhhhhhhhhhh
Boss: This prompted us to install a logger on your machine. We were able to get your VPN password you were using to connect to your home, and noticed you have a thing for zombie midget porn.
Employee: errr
Boss: We were also able to detect that your... libido... rise when the one-legged secretary delivers your mail to your cube. Employee:
Boss: Wait till you see my wife's mother. She is coming in here with my wife in about fifteen minutes. You'll like her. She was in a car wreck a year or so ago and had a skin graft on 80% of her body!
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
When I read the title, I immediately thought of Mirror Neurons, which enable primates to imitate and empathize with other members of their species. It'd be cool if the researchers were building a silicon mirror-neuron system, but alas, such is not the case.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
You know I'm loyal.
Text-based interfaces prove that most users couldn't read.
Graphic interfaces prove that most users can't understand abstractions.
Mind reading interfaces will only prove that most users can't think.
Personally comma I don't trust this thing period I mean really comma if the voice-recognition program can get it straight comma what makes me thing this thingamadongle on top of my head is going to get my thought pattern down correctly question mark question mark question mark It's just silly period
Yes comma I did train the word thingamadongle period
--
X's and O's for all my foes.
What is the device supposed to do with the information without knowing the context? Am I stressed because of the call I've just taken, the news story I've just read or my inability to use a specific app. Neat tech but good luck trying to use it to do anything useful.
Sony and Microsoft are developing competing formats for reading your mind.
What is the point of a computer being able to know if a user is frustrated? So it can be less annoying? More helpful? Why doesn't it behave like that all the time regardless of how frustrated the user is?
PC: "You want me to stick the mouse where? Now, now, there is no need to think like that. Here, play some minesweeper..."
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Neat... Cameras, wiretapping... Thoughtcrime
Infiltrated dot Net
This is kind of old school, but back in the 70's and 80's we used to joke about the next great interface - the "Read My Fscking Mind" (RMFM) interface. Glad to see it's on the path to fruition. Cheers, Securityfolk.
I don't know why, ma'am.
Seriously. I think if could peer into the "mind" of my users, I'd just see a saw going back and forth through a log, or one of those cymbal-clapping wind-up monkey toys. I can't imagine there's much else going on up there.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Getting a computer to read and understand text or understand speech is still aways off, never mind mind reading. I have no doubt it will happen some day, but things on the interpretation and understanding front have a long, long way to go. Speech recognition has been stagnant for 10 years. OCR still requires many hours of human cleanup and tweaking. Natural language translation is a field that seems to be advancing faster than the others, but it, too, has a long way to go.
The inputs to all of the above are well known. Reading signals from implanted sensors, and interpreting their meaning is above and beyond the call of hype.
In Soviet Russia, our brain blood flow reads computer memory...
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Duh!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
now hackers can have help breaking into your pc by putting the computer in a new context, by putting you in a bad mood, for example
.. which, btw, is actually the basis for most all interaction between husbands, wives, children, and boyfriends and girlfriends
enter the "mood altered state hack"
so this development is either a great step forward for cognitive science, or a great step backwards for the professional computer-based work environment, depending on your point of view
personally, i interact with the computer to get away from the significant other. escapism. i really don't want my pc reading into my moods the way the little woman does. frankly, turning my relationship with my pc into ANYTHING like my relationship with the gf is a kind of nightmare
your pc is a welcome relief from the emotional, moody and hormonal hotheaded cycles of your typical marriage or romantic relationship
NO ONE wants your interaction with your pc to begin resembling that!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Remember you must think in Russian!
Grand... combine this with the pain ray gun and you have the makings of a fully-automated interrogation device.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The computer is reading your freaking brain - how is that not invasive?
Everyone is quick to dream up what technology like this could yield, but we are far from being able to apply this technology into anything truly useful.
:)
We have an unimaginable amount of information on the brain anatomy and biology, but no real idea on how the brain works at a fundamental level. That information is vital to being able to make intelligent technology that can actually make use of stuff like is discussed in TFA. I am sure many have already read it, but there is a great book on the subject called On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. It talks about the study of the brain and why current attempts to create AI are doomed to failure.
Anyways, I thought I should mention the book as it opened my eyes and gave me great insight into the industry and our very remarkable brains.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
"You are thinking about surfing for porn ... Cancel or Allow?"
... Cancel or Allow?"
... Cancel or Allow?"
- Cancel.
"You are still thinking about surfing for porn
- Cancel.
"Okay, you're still thinking about porn and it's getting dirtier
- Oh fuck. Fine then. Allow.
I think I'd like a beer and I want to see something nak'd.
They can't patent this. I claim prior art.
http://packetstormsecurity.org/unix-humor/awesome.unix.chdir.program.html
A lot of people are stressed out in the airport, so it would not be that useful there. But entrances to government buildings at home or abroad (such as embassies) could benefit...
"That guy is awfully nervous. Let's take another look at his backpack..."
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The problem is, while the computer can read the mind, it cannot read anything useful. Its like trying to read DCT blocks in JPEG files directly - you cannot do anything useful with it until you know you need to IDCT it. Its even more relevant with entropy coding; without the proper model you cannot do _anything_ at all with the bitstream.
Thus, reading the mind is actually the easy part. Making sense out of the information is the real deal. It is even harder because brain "data" doesn't seem to be binary, or exact. There are theories that the brain almost exclusively works with probabilities _only_. This mirrors reality quite well; in reality, nothing is "exact".
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
God please just let me die before my boss gets ahold of this technology.
that's about the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard
Impossible until computers are given or have gained consciousness. Then, I kill it. Man is the greatest wonder of all, yet it is always the last question we ask.
Body language gives everything away mostly in movements too short for people to notice. You know that genius horse that psycologist studied that could read people's thoughts? I guess people twitch uncontrollably too much from mad cow or something these days for that to work.
Maybe it's just an editorial thing, but I'm sick of every new brain scanning technology or application thereof being headlined as 'mind reading.' We're quite a ways from the point where we can pull anything like a comprehensible, complete thought from someone's head--being able to monitor blood flow or track EEGs or whatever doesn't give you much more insight into what the person is really thinking than a polygraph machine would. So enough baseless hype, if you please.
We won't hear about this for years and years. 20 years from now, when this can actually be accomplished, there will be another article.
Someone on slashdot will claim it is a dupe.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Hey, when you get pictures of guys with their hoohoos up other guys wahhahs, instead of girls hoohahs, we'll know it wasn't an accident, that you were actually thinking about it.
I know it's great fun to slag something which can be interpreted as "Computers can read your mind" when they're so bad at doing what they were designed to do already - but here's why this development actually *could* be quite useful.
First, if you've ever studied verbal interrogation techniques (or even just read "The Sleeping Doll" by Jeffery Deaver), you know that detecting stress as extremely useful meta information to what is being said by the subject. Good interrogators must rely on visual cues to detect stress levels (lack of eye contact, "protective" body postures, etc). This let's them know when a subject is being deceptive, and to what extent. A peripheral device such as the one described can gather that same data.
Why is would this be useful for a computer - outside of being used as general purpose lie detector?
Well, because a badly designed user interface will cause users to lie, or leave out information. My very first computer program was a personal project management program that basically tried to help you get through all the items on your todo list. Long story short - I eventually had to scrap it because I found myself lying to it when it pushed me a little too hard - leaving it with inaccurate data about the problem set it was trying to solve. If it had a device like this attached to it, it could have at least flagged the data from those answers as suspect - if not also flagged the approach it took as overly aggressive and scaled back a bit.
We all know there's only so much good we can do with programs that get "Garbage In", but one source we have very little to protect against in users giving us valid yet either incomplete or inaccurate information because, for whatever reason, they just don't want to answer honestly and fully.
Imagine how crippled you'd be as person if you had no way of detecting the stress of the people you spoke to - that's the boat all our machines are stuck in right now until we either develop something like the device described here, or have personal electronics that can process visual cues as well as a highly sensitive human.
Even on the most basic level - if you're a programmer, wouldn't you find it useful to see a graph how average user stress was experienced during each task your programs performed? If you had some very popular website - wouldn't it be useful to compare stress to different layouts or ad content percentages?
That being said - I'd wait a hell of a long time before trusting that having something on my screen shooting near infrared waves at my cerebral cortex was safe - no matter what the benefits were to me or anyone else. "Shoots rays into your brain" is pretty damn far down on the list of features I look for when buying a new peripheral.
Can't they detect stress some other way? Variations on keying patterns or mouse movements, voice stress analysis for Voice-activated apps, or at least *counting* the number or reports that come back when he click the "Report This" instead of "Don't Report" button after an app has stopped responding?
So, to come back to my original subject line - yes, this technology is useful. But only if it's safe, and only if the information gathered by it is actually used to the benefit of the user. Unfortunately, most companies have done very little to demonstrate they won't sell unsafe products, or that they're willing *or* able to use the information they get from their customers to benefit their customers.
It really is useful... if you think beyond office apps. Think power plant control rooms or military command-and-control environments.
In fact, every safety-critical vigilance task will benefit from this. It probably doesn't make much of a difference whether we know if John Doe at the production line is bored, but you wanna make sure that Homer Simpson in charge of that Nuclear Plant (of Capt. Jack the radar operator) stays alert when monitoring parameters. Vigilance decrement is a big issue in these domains, leading to human error or reduced situation awareness. People will doze off or daydream and then, when something critical happens, not be ready to respond.
In scenarios where lives are at stake, this technology can be a lifesaver.
They will use the stress level to monitor if you are providing enough output. Obviously, Maximum Stress(tm) = Maximum Output(tm).
This feeds directly into the whip cracking algorithm.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
What about those people that have ADHD? How would there browser keep up?
It is one thing to detect frustration and boredom while in the midst of a test almost perfectly designed to produce frustration and boredom. It is quite another to try to detect the same things in a more-or-less random context. At least today, this technology is probably useless for that... and I for one am just as happy to leave it that way.
There's a much easier test for frustration when I'm at my computer:
IF OS == "Windows" THEN
Frustration = "VERY HIGH"
ENDIF
Because right now, this niche still belongs to (and has for a few years) pricey weird new-age relax yourself-out-of-your-worldly-misery games (google biofeedback games for yourself).
I mean, a combination of classical inputs (for firing-slashing) and biofeedback (you do not heal if you do not relax pal !) could make for some awesome combination, couldn't it.
It could even teach those pesky ADD child something, who knows
So MicroSontendo, anybody is listening ?
[Pruneau
I already personify many computers as "moody."
/ always does the same thing, no matter what mood I'm in.
I don't need them to be really, actually, sensitive.
I like the fact that rm -r -f
Maybe I really am angry enough to destroy the mail server today. Let's use this technology on the robot maids instead, and leave emotional discretion up to the humans, ok?
This would make a great tool in the hiring process. Is the candidate stressed out or calm? What is his mindset?
What do you all think?
My god, there are lots of great uses for this technology. You could put it into the rear-view mirror of new cars and project the brain-bloodflow patterns by something like RFID to police. They would then have a good indication if you have been drinking or using drugs. How liberating!
Let's put this technology into new television sets and send the interaction between cable tv viewing habits and brain-bloodflow back to the cable companies, the MPAA and other interested organizations. Incredible potential there!
Maybe we could put it into cellphones. Combined with GPS and other positioning technologies, built-in cameras and microphones, 3G+ networking and the anti-terrorist ad-hoc wiretaps, the FBI could pull up your conversations, a video of what you are doing, your exact location AND the condition and dynamics of how your frigging brain is operating! I think that would be a great tool to fight terrorism. We would definitely catch Osama, finally, if we had that.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving