Slashdot Mirror
Facebook is Working On a Way To Let You Type With Your Brain (theverge.com)
From a report: Facebook today unveiled a project from its secretive Building 8 research group that's working to create a brain-computer interface that lets you type with your thoughts. Regina Dugan, a former director of DARPA and the ex-head of Google's experimental ATAP research group, announced the news today onstage at Facebook's F8 developer conference. Dugan, who now heads up Building 8, says the goal is "something as simple as a yes-no brain click" that could fundamentally change how we interact with and use technology. While it does not exist today outside of very specific medical research trials, Dugan says her team is actively working to make it a reality. Dugan refers to the technology as a "brain mouse for AR," meaning it could be an ideal way to receive direct input from neural activity that would remove the need for augmented reality devices to track hand motions or other body movements. For instance, the Microsoft HoloLens uses hand tracking to let you tap your finger in front of you as if you were clicking a mouse. Facebook's theoretical device could also be used for patients with severe paralysis, acting as a "speech prosthetic" Dugan says.
Wouldn't Facebook rather figure out a way for people to just pick strings of emoji to send to each other.
There are probably dozens of places that are working on similar things and more likely to succeed. Why mention the facebook effort?
love is just extroverted narcissism
There is no way I'm letting Facebonk have access to my brain even if it's just to read a brain signal that says "click". Next I know they'll tap into the pleasure centre and post a facebook post everytime I get sexually aroused.
I don't want everyone on Facebook to know when I visit the farm.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
In the very long-run, once we have functionally built in direct brain to computer interfaces, what is going to stop people from sending a lot of half-baked emails and the like? At least with a phone, you can take it away from someone when they are drunk, but frankly given how incoherent my very late night/early morning thoughts are, I'd be more worried about accidental shitposting that way, or sending really stupid emails.
When someone bragged in a comment about dropping $3K per night on wine, my reply was that they had drinking problem and a financial problem. I got six paragraphs of barely strung together sentences, no capitalization and obscenities about my dick size. The follow-up post was more of the same. Now imagine that person's brain typing into a comment. Not pretty.
A commercial company making a device which can read my mind? I'm sure it won't be abused in any way, where do I sign up!?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
As described, this project could be be made to use any of the popular smartphone virtual keyboard layouts as input. A QWERTY with three or four 'best choice' words at the top would be easy to use for someone already familiar with such a keyboard. As users gain skill in think-punching the virtual buttons, an option for reducing the size of the keys to avoid having multiple keyboards for special characters would be popular.
Please, designers, don't succumb to TV Remote Interface Disease, in which virtual keyboards are specifically designed to be as unlike any keyboard the user is familiar with as possible.
I've given all of my personal and financial information to Facebook, already. All of my thoughts will be a nice addition. But when can I give them my bodily fluids, too? I want them to be able to analyze my DNA, and tell me what I'm likely to die from, and I want them to analyze my blood to tell me what I ate last night. I'm concerned that Facebook and Google simply don't know enough about me yet.
I don't respond to AC's.
Which is why I don't have a Facebook account.
This is easy:
Step 1: Open up skull
Step 2: Take out brain
Step 3: Press the keys with the brain from Step 2
here's some sponsors in the area that provide fast food...
i am so very tired....
I propose the verb we use to describe someone using this device should be "mem". He memmed on the icon. He's memming a thank you letter. Don't mem that email attachment, it's a virus!
Now to just teach the average FB user to use their brain...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
This is already possible if you bash your head on the keyboard sufficiently hard. Next problem?
That's just disgusting.
Are also also vegan and have not owned a TV for over a decade?
Join our group!
We've watched companies like Dragon Systems struggle to perfect speech recognition software.
Decades later, we watched Siri struggle to understand the proverbial brogue associated with converting various languages to English, falling victim to parody videos.
Now, I'm supposed to believe we've magically eclipsed all that to type with my brain? This is like NASA claiming we've gone straight to plaid with regards to fast space travel.
There's a valid reason we're all still banging away on keyboards in the year 2017.
So does Zuckerberg. Maybe I'll open a Kickstarter with the goal being hiring a hitman to kill Zuckerberg, I'd be doing humanity a favor.
This is exactly what Facebook wants to change. Typing with your brain.
The biggest problems I foresee is upper back and neck problems over time. And you would probably need keyboards with larger keys.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I can kill you with my brain.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I think that pretty much sums up the technology. Is this going to be in a new episode of Silicon Valley? Will it fit in a cool rack mount appliance?
We'll make great pets
Yeah, I know there are all sorts of privacy implications... BUT, to someone whose best friend has ALS and is reduced to having to try to communicate through staring at various letters on a computer screen, it sounds pretty exciting.
TANSTAAFL
This is on the whole, dubious, because once we are past our first few minutes with a highly repetitive task, the needed computation progresses embeds into progressively lower levels of neural systems, until they are basically reflexes. Musicians don't thing "I am going to play an 'A', now I am going to play a 'B'. This is true for both sensory and motor tasks. Maybe when I first learn to read, I first 'see' individual letters, but in the end my eyes detect entire word phrases, essentially by their outlines. With practice, the sensory motor loop may actually embed as networks of axons within the muscle fibers themselves - no brain intermediary required. Seriously - real neurons in real neural nets.
Actually this system avoids all sorts of problems that speech recognition has. Your thought patterns are implicitly language and accent agnostic.
The big question is whether there can be sufficient pre-training of this software so that it could draw enough inference from some thoughts to determine the meaning of all thoughts. I mean, when I think of a cat does that look similar, from a brain activity point of view, to the way you think of a cat. If so this should work well. If not, it would require a huge amount of training. That said, training this thing would be pretty natural. It just has to monitor your brain activity while you type and eventually it should have a good map of thought patterns to words so even if it takes a while it wouldn't be tedious ( and it could pretty accurately determine accuracy so as to tell you when you no longer have to type and can just think the words ).
Personally I am really excited by the idea that I can communicate my thoughts to a machine. Never mind the Facebook implications. This would be a huge change in the man > machine interface.
Think of your PIN. Your phone PIN. Make the motion with your hands. You go to unlock your phone, you type your PIN. Think of your PIN. Think of your PIN. Think of your PIN. This doesn't violate any amendments because our judge sez so. Think of your PIN. Think of your PIN.
http://rs34.pbsrc.com/albums/d...
Table-ized A.I.
You can't get much simpler than the waveform of sound. Don't tell me there is some brain interface that is less complex.
love is just extroverted narcissism
All the research of this kind focuses on analysing the brain reactions to very specific actions, taking a big enough number of samples, generalising the conclusion to different people under different conditions, etc. According to the linked article, they are focusing on “decoding the words you’ve already decided to share by sending them to the speech center of your brain”.
No idea when a first reasonably accurate version will be ready, but I am sure about something: mind reading is completely out of question.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
No way in hell I'll ever let Facebook read my mind. When it comes to mind reading, I trust Zuckerberg and any other Corporate or Government entity about as far as I can throw them.
Of course, all they have to do is say "the new holographic emoji's are only for people that use our brain mouse!" and the unwashed masses will line up to be the first to buy one.
from the 2-way radio world (both Part 90 and 97), PTT is push-to-talk meaning think about what you are going to say before you hit the PTT button. Don't want, "uhmm, ah, yeah, ok, like we need another bulldozer to help with additional snow if there will be more as to not further exasperate the situation."
OK, now back on this FB typing with your brain article (no I did not read it, first comment like everyone else) I'm thinking I'd never use that function myself because I'm thinking all sorts of stuff (some which I don't want to post on FB or even here under AC).
mfwright@batnet.com
which thoughts to type
It doesn't deal with thoughts. We are still very far away from understanding how the brain works at different levels like how ideas or thinking process happen. All what we can do is to locate the parts of the brain which have activity under very specific conditions (e.g., performing certain movement) and, without understanding well how it exactly works, we might recognise that specific behaviour by looking at future brain activity. This particular research deals with words about to be said (the thought has already happened) and its exact reliability (better: applicability to any random person) is unclear.
be amazing for handicapped people
It is already possible to somehow account for this specific scenario. Note that one of the most difficult parts of these developments (like any other one dealing with not-properly-understood phenomena) is making it generally applicable. If you focused on just one person and accounted for just specific actions (e.g., using certain finger to press letter "a" in a keyword in certain location), it could already be done. On the other hand, it might be a bit too expensive to get a not-clearly-beneficial output.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
It's commands interpreted as motor-actions in my hands that punch the keys that contribute to the endless drivel that passes in front of other peoples eyes/brains.
My comments are completely on-topic, are you sure that you understood them?
Many posts in this thread are talking about thoughts and reading minds and this is very far away from this article (and from what science can deliver now and in the next quite a few years). This research is just about blindly mapping current brain activity with patterns assumed to be associated with very specific outputs. For example, it might be possible to know what happens in the brain when a person performs certain movement, but it is completely impossible to know what a person is thinking about. Clearer now?
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
FB has already proven they can get millions of people to type stuff without using their brains.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
After having read the title of the new Slashdot article (Physicists Observe 'Negative Mass'), I prefer to replace my aforementioned "what science can deliver" with "what the reproducible, experimentally-validated and somehow-compatible-with-all-our-remaining-knowledge-including-common-sense side of science can deliver".
(My apologies to the AC above for having used so many words which ideally shouldn't be required).
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.