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Brainwave-Reading Patents Spike On Increase In Commercial Mind-Reading Apps
smaxp writes: Consumer market researcher Nielsen leads the pack, with patents describing ways to detect brain activity with EEG and translate it into what someone truly thinks about, say, a new product, advertising, or packaging. Microsoft Corp. holds patents that assess mental states, with the goal of determining the most effective way to present information. "Neurotech has gone well beyond medicine, with non-medical corporations, often under the radar, developing neurotechnologies to enhance work and life," said SharpBrains Chief Executive Alvaro Fernandez at the NeuroGaming conference in San Francisco.
Cow say moo. MOOOOOOOO! Moooooo cow MOOOOOOOOO! The cows say moo. YOU COWS!!
Maybe there is something to the tin foil hat brigade. ;)
I have an idea for a possible application - variable airline fees. Using this sensor, you can maximize shareholder value by increasing various airline fees just short of inducing murderous rampage in the flyers. If we have access this technology, we can fine-tune this down to unprecedented resolution.
"Reuters also reported that Microsoft Corp. holds patents that assess mental states, with the goal of determining the most effective way to present _advertising_."
There. Fixed it.
On a serious note, advertising is proving to be increasingly ineffective, and that is why there is so much more of it. Suckers spend more and more, while we sane people pay less and less attention.
We have Adblock now, I hope that Brainblock is in the works...
captcha: anathema
Nielsen.
What bothers me is that people can patent algorithms that translate your brainwaves into your feelings... but many (most?) people cannot fully do it for themselves.
where you walk into an advertising and you're agreed to be imprinted with an addiction to Popsi or some cigarettes. Really lookin' forward to that. Like how some of our best computer scientists are working for google trying to figure out how best to make us look at ads. Thanks future!
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You don't want to read my brainwaves. Really, you don't.
You are welcome on my lawn.
On the opposite scale I had a friend who had CD's created to make him a better him, he was using it for salesmanship. You hooked up similar wiring as shown by the article to your head then went to sleep, he ended up giving it to me, which I've never used but come across it every now and again (or I might of tossed em out with the other old and useless CD's).
Snake oil, that's going to be very profitable to Microsoft.
Because making advertising more invasive and exploitative is really what we need as a society. Bill Hicks said it best: if you're in marketing, kill yourself.
This is definitely snake oil, but it's worth thinking about because some day (maybe in 500-1000 years) it could actually become reality. There's nothing impossible about it, it's just really really REALLY hard. Electricity was a parlor trick for decades, look at what we're doing with it now.
Personally, I think of all the inventions humans have made (nukes included) mind reading will be the worst overall for humanity. For a few decades or maybe even centuries, it will be held at bay by strict legal enforcement of readers, but at some point it will become cheap enough, easy enough to make at home, and possibly at a distance, and humanity will be truly screwed.
I think everyone alive (by a certain age) has at least thought about doing some truly horrific things, if not having committed unspeakable acts that have gone unnoticed or uncaught that could be revealed. I'm not sure we're evolved enough to handle knowing the absolute worst about everyone around us.
I wish they could feel what I feel when I see and hear these stupid ads, it would make them commit suicide.
Sadly I don't watch tv anymore, this is the 21 century, not the 20th, so I don't watch ads, so their device is useless on me and they will never know how much I hate these things.
You think your brain is read-only?
HA.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/5...
I can see it now. Next iteration of Windows Phone will automatically select your emoji.
Mind you, my brain pulses like a bad 50's B grade movie.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
More like 30-70 years at most. We can already alter people's minds with focused magnetism. You can trigger the pleasure centers of your brain, eliminate the ability to feel depressed (while the machine is on), produce crazy hallucinations (really easy to do with a simple headband device), distort specific memories, and prevent the formation of long term memories while the machine is on a specific point. My info is 5 years out of date, so we can probably do a bunch more now.
There was a research papers years ago about how the military uses a BCI to scan aerial imagery for enemies tanks, missiles, etc... A person watches the images flash by at a rate faster than they can consciously perceive, but slow enough for their unconscious mind to analyze the image. The computer detects when the unconscious thinks there's something interesting or odd about the image and the image is saved for a more detailed analysis later on. This technique worked better than the state of the art computer vision and significantly faster than human-only analysis.
Expect the field to be driven by enterprising drug users. It'd be much cheaper to zap yourself than buy drugs and such zapping isn't illegal and can do so much more.
Time travel or teleportation will be our worse inventions. If teleportation works to any point without a receiver you can expect people to teleport bombs, gas, etc... to random places to kill their enemies and/or just for the fun of it. We'll have people being teleported miles up into the sky or into solid structures. Maybe they'll just beam your heart out to transplant it into their dying kid. The world would be destroyed quickly. Anyone could beam a nuke into Yellowstone and almost instantly destroy North America. Any country demonstrating time travel will likely be instantly attacked by everyone else. Fear of the tech will destroy the world is someone doesn't manage to do it though time traveling itself. We will eventually develop replicators and replicators are effectively teleportation, but with a static end point.
From TFS:
Excellent. We'll be heading back into using sex to sell, then. I look :)
forward to the return of everything from short skirts on pretty airline
attendants, euro-style bare-top commercials, and of course booth
babes. And they'll probably FINALLY add a cheerleader channel to
the NFL stuff.
Bring it on.
Yesterday, I saw the most amazing "Joe Average" used to sell something.
Hardly worth my time, much less going to catch my interest.
But if there was a hot babe... I would have paid attention.
Totally.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This is an entire field of technology that is characterized by snake-oil products that barely work, if at all.
In the world of technology there are few product areas which seem to have such an incredibly low-bar for provable function, as "brain tech".
We've had "thought controlled' devices for some time now, and with every new generation we are told "and this is a field in it's infancy". Yes it is. The thing is, this is a consumer products space. If you can't appeal to the consumer -- typically by unveiling products that actually work -- then please get off the hype wagon.
Always wondered what my dog was thinking
On the opposite scale I had a friend who had CD's created to make him a better him, he was using it for salesmanship. You hooked up similar wiring as shown by the article to your head then went to sleep, he ended up giving it to me, which I've never used but come across it every now and again (or I might of tossed em out with the other old and useless CD's).
Snake oil, that's going to be very profitable to Microsoft.
If you really believe that hooking up wires to your head and listening to a CD while you're asleep will make you a better salsman, then it probably will.
The thing about snake oil, is that it's basically just the placebo effect, so as long as no one tells you what it really is, it will have some effect. There is no other explanation for homeopathy, for instance.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Time travel or teleportation will be our worse inventions
Fortunately, like actual mind reading, they will never happen.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Screw the adverts, where is my brain-wave keyboard to type faster than I touch-type on qwerty?