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Microsoft Wants To Read Your Brain
Simon Night writes "Microsoft has entered the realm of brain machine interfaces, attempting to patent a method of classifying brain states from EEG input. 'Human beings are often poor reporters of their own actions,' the patent application notes, so reading directly from your brain is a preferred option."
It would be interesting if they would be liable if there was a bug that left the system easy to hack. I mean your wife finding out your thoughts about her friend, are can't wait for our date this Friday, probably wouldn't go over too well. And the user could agrue they made personal information available that they didn't wish to disclose. Damages: ~50% of life time salary, ouch.
But the thing here is that there is no science behind using these signals to interpret what one is thinking even with the invocation of Bayesian networks.
It sounds like they were using this method to optimize the complexity of interfaces depending on the user's level of "confusion". (E.g., when the user is in a state of panic, the graph wizard in Excel could offer three or four styles of graph, instead of 12. One of the Linux makers with Microsoft patent licensing could adapt it to look at such a user and decide "Y'know, you probably don't need the GIMP...") I doubt they've tried anything as ambitious as knowing what the user is thinking.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
What it doesn't say is that humans are also great at altering their own memories -- false memories -- I have experienced this myself where, say I remember someone like a Highschool friend doing something at my 18th birthday party and then when I view the tape and he wasn't even there!
I don't know about others, but I certainly don't put a lot of stock in human memory past a certain point. It's like an analog signal and everytime we re-remember something, we write a new record down that may introduce random errors (perhaps associations) that shouldn't be there.