Slashdot Mirror
Major Breakthrough in Direct Neural Interface
jd writes "In a major breakthrough, neurologists are reporting that they can decypher neurological impulses into speech with an 80% accuracy. A paralyzed man who is incapable of speech has electrodes implanted in his brain which detect the electrical pulses in the brain relating to speech. These signals are then fed into computers which covert these pulses into signals suitable for speech synthesis. As a biotech marvel, this is astonishing. Depending on the rate of development it is possible to imagine Professor Hawking migrating to this, as it would be immune to any further loss of body movement and would vastly accelerate his ability to talk. On the flip-side, direct brain I/O is also a major step towards William Gibson's Neuromancer and other cyberpunk dark futures."
How do they know they're accurately converting the signals to sound, if they're basing this off a man who has no ability to speak?
Maybe telling him "try to say X" or something, or having him write down what he's trying to say.
But the article leaves off a little bit as to where they pull 80% from.
In the next few weeks, a computer will start the task of translating his thoughts into sounds.
"We hope it will be a breakthrough," says Joe Wright of Neural Signals, which has helped develop the technology. While this is indeed promising, and I hope that this 'unlocks' this poor fellow, this 'unlocking' has not happened yet. Hopefully, when they are able to decipher these signals, he's not saying, "Kill me" over and over again.
and not a 'techno-biological' failure. The future's darkness comes from a tyrannical plutocracy which misuses the technology, which could have just as easily been used to save mankind. It is in fact an outgrowth of current economics and politics, not technology. Please, get your stories straight.
Words to men, as air to birds.
And yes, that entire story was just so I could "drop" that I have a wife in a slashdot post. Cunning, huh?
Your wife's recovery and you staying with her, through all of that, is the most poignant thing I have read on Slashdot, ever.
A story like yours deserves to be told, and demands that we listen.
May the winds always be at your back.
This is my sig.
But your kind of reasoning could also be used inside out, eg: "Mr. Gibson's dark future is a technological failure and not an economical/political one. That nasty future comes from a tyrannical group of technologists who misuse the social system."
What I want to say is technology and politics/economics are all a creature of humans. It's just as misleading blaming "economics" and "politics" instead of the people misusing the system (who are basically all of us), as it is to blame a particular technology for all of our miseries.
Thanks, that's quite helpful. I could find no details about this on my own, lacking a New Scientist subscription. He isn't "imagining" these sounds - he's trying to produce them. I suspect they've tapped into the motor cortex, where one of the last stages of motor processing. They're not tapping into "speech" centers - it's simply a motor area associated with articulatory muscles. Not that it isn't impressive, but it's not a step towards mind-reading or better computer-human interfaces unless you suffer from a muscle- or nerve-based speech disorder. We've understood to specific relationships between regions of the motor cortex and muscles in the body for quite some time. Actual language centers are far more mysterious.
> you would need to do some sort of heroic measure of training for each individual
Not be be callous, but I'm pretty sure they can find time in their busy eating, sleeping, and bedpan changing schedules in order to regain the ability to communicate with the world.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
As a slashdot.dot reader it goes without saying that I love to revel in the latest tech but, stories like this one prove that it is people like you and your wife that are the true inspirations in the world. All the tech and science is wasted if it can't benefit people with "real lives" like yours. Like tjstork said: "A story like yours deserves to be told, and demands that we listen." Any that don't listen, cut them selves off to reality and lose out on more than they can dream of. -papvf
Tyranny has been around since before the stone age. What has technology got to do with it other than increasing the tyrant to subject ratio? The desire to oppress is inherently a human social one. Some will claim (neocons for instance) that we can use tyranny to make things better, but it doesn't work that way. Technology, on the other hand is much more legitimately separable from human motivation (there are a variety of motivations that can lead to most technologies.) Moreover, unlike tyranny, we have a chance of using a given technology only(or at least predominately) for good. Technology is a double edged sword, in part because it and its fruits are actually tools, not motivations unto themselves.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
The majority of Western values do not trace their roots to any of the Middle Eastern religions. They come from other places, such as Greek philosophers.
In fact, the philosophical foundations of the US are in many ways opposite to the so-called Christian values. Cruel and unusual punishment, for example, is condoned--actually commanded--by the Christian god. Slavery, and the belief that all men are NOT created equal, is a common theme in the Bible.
The statesmen/philosophers who founded this country may have been Christian, but the documents they wrote to found this country were quite the opposite.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Assuming your story is genuine rather than a dramatic device, you're missing the obvious, which is that she wasn't nearly as badly injured as some incompetent doctor told you. I've worked with several people who have had, to not trivialise your case too much, serious, permanent mental disorders after an accident; they have tried extremely hard to reach any sort of level of normality, but their short-term memory is completely shot, they might suffer psychoses, simple aptitude exercises that do not phase the average 5-year-old are a great challenge to them, etc. "Able to pull a 2.0 average but improved each semester" already demonstrates a massive range of abilities within normal range; the implication that "positive thinking" helps all but the more trivial cases is as insulting to understanding of reality as telling a blind man that all he needs to see is faith.
What I find saddest about your post, however, is the replies that express surprise that you actually looked after your wife. Anglo-Saxon culture is depressing. My family is a mixture of Spanish and Asian, and I'd be a pariah among everyone I'd ever known if I did anything but provide the utmost care to my partner under those circumstances. Thank goodness the proportion of doctors India is exporting is comparable to the number America is producing for its own shores; then we'll see a better spirit of care and fewer ridiculous prognoses like your wife's, so far from what happened that you felt the need to discuss her recovery in terms of "impossible goals" keeping her going, to imply that she got of our her wheelchair "because it frustrated her". All the drivel of an evangelist, falling just short of appeal to deity. Bring Aristotle back to Western classrooms, please!
Posting AC because I'm writing this in a horribly unprofessional manner out of sheer frustration; I'm across the hall from a geriatric consultant who would kill me if he saw me writing like this. But I hope the underlying message is clear. Really, I am glad your wife got better, but it's almost certainly because neurological damage was not nearly as bad as claimed, and very little to do with her attitude (though this will have helped accelerate recovery). Sorry.
Actually, most of the founding fathers were Deist, not Christian.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I still can't scan a 50 page document and OCR it without spending hours to clean it up afterwards. Nor can voice recognition software really understand or interpret what I say and lay it out with correct punctuation on paper.
Those are 2 basic advanced tasks I would expect to be perfected at some point, and until they are I take all these great human-machine interface "breakthroughs" with huge grains of salt.
One has to wonder who is doing the work. Is the paralyzed man adapting to the computer or is the computer learning the brain signals. Either way, it's good work, but I would bet that the way to perfect this type of technology is to "teach" the human to control his neurological impulses. I doubt the technology is directly eavesdropping on his speech.
Chris Mesterharm