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Former Oculus Exec Predicts Telepathy Within 10 Years (cnet.com)
Mary Lou Jepsen is a former MIT professor with 100 patents and a former engineering executive at Facebook, Oculus, Intel, and Google[x] (now called X) -- and "she hopes to make communicating telepathically happen relatively soon." An anonymous reader quotes CNET:
Last year Jepsen left her job heading up display technology for the Oculus virtual reality arm of Facebook to develop new imaging technologies to help cure diseases. Shortly thereafter she founded Openwater, which is developing a device that puts the capabilities of a huge MRI machine into a lightweight wearable form. According to the startup's website, "Openwater is creating a device that can enable us to see inside our brains or bodies in great detail. With this comes the promise of new abilities to diagnose and treat disease and well beyond -- communicating with thought alone."
This week Jepsen went further and suggested a timeframe for such capabilities becoming reality. "I don't think this is going to take decades," she told CNBC. "I think we're talking about less than a decade, probably eight years until telepathy"... Jepsen, who has also spent time at Google X, MIT and Intel, says the basic idea is to shrink down the huge MRI machines found in medical hospitals into flexible LCDs that can be embedded in a ski hat and use infrared light to see what's going on in your brain. "Literally a thinking cap," Jepsen explains... The idea is that communicating by thought alone could be much faster and even allow us to become more competitive with the artificial intelligence that is supposedly coming for everyone's jobs very soon.
Jepsen tells CNBC, "If I threw [you] into an M.R.I. machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say, what images are in your head. I can tell you what music you're thinking of. That's today, and I'm talking about just shrinking that down."
This week Jepsen went further and suggested a timeframe for such capabilities becoming reality. "I don't think this is going to take decades," she told CNBC. "I think we're talking about less than a decade, probably eight years until telepathy"... Jepsen, who has also spent time at Google X, MIT and Intel, says the basic idea is to shrink down the huge MRI machines found in medical hospitals into flexible LCDs that can be embedded in a ski hat and use infrared light to see what's going on in your brain. "Literally a thinking cap," Jepsen explains... The idea is that communicating by thought alone could be much faster and even allow us to become more competitive with the artificial intelligence that is supposedly coming for everyone's jobs very soon.
Jepsen tells CNBC, "If I threw [you] into an M.R.I. machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say, what images are in your head. I can tell you what music you're thinking of. That's today, and I'm talking about just shrinking that down."
Telepathy will, after all, require thoughts.
Sounds great until you realise what a device like this could do in the wrong hands.
Theranos, unfortunately.
Won't be difficult to deduce what's on my mind[NSFW]
Have gnu, will travel.
If I threw [you] into an M.R.I. machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say, what images are in your head. I can tell you what music you're thinking of. That's today, and I'm talking about just shrinking that down
So, it currently takes a huge freakin' MRI to just be able to read the brain's thoughts*. And to the best of my knowledge, no one has figured out a way of inputting a thought into the brain electronically. And she thinks she can accomplish both with a device the size of a cap in eight years? Good luck with that.
* Even "Reading the brain's thoughts" is quite a stretch from what an MRI actually does. We just see on a screen what parts of the brain light up like a Christmas tree, then interpret what the brain is doing based on our current mapping of brain-functions. But, if you were to "think" the message, "Please buy diapers on your way home from work today," an MRI today at best will show that your prefrontal cortex lights up, indicating you are task-managing, as well as your amygdala, indicating a sense of emotional frustration. Other areas will light up as well, but whether these areas mean diapers, work, cheese, rutabagas, or who knows what is still anybody's guess.
Given the state of the art in this field: the current state of neuroscience and related advances in neurosurgery (fields I work in), I'd say there is zero chance of this happening in 8 years. Scalp electrodes give messy and very coarse signals. You get good signals from electrodes embedded in brains, but they're very localised and electrodes degrade fairly quickly and need to be removed.
soylentnews.org
... transferred by radio it's not telepathy.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
the basic idea is to shrink down the huge MRI machines found in medical hospitals into flexible LCDs that can be embedded in a ski hat and use infrared light to see what's going on in your brain.
MRI is an acronym for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. How is that the same as IR? Most MRI's are 1.5 Tesla. and the preferred MRI scanners for neuro are 3 T. If that could be shrunken down to something that could be put in a ski cap, it would be truly impressive. But you really don't want to be walking around with a 3T magnetic field around your head. Not unless you want to have your skull bashed in by any ferrous objects you may encounter.
Ignoring the feasibility of this, if this were to happen mental clarity and focus training will be in high demand. Learning to focus ones thoughts, purify them for a machine to read. Makes me think of Vulcan society.
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
My thoughts. ;D
My precious thoughts.
Did I say precious? I meant vengeful!
From the "That's today" we can read your mind link ...
Here's the actual study, "Predicting the Brain Activation Pattern Associated With the Propositional Content of a Sentence: Modeling Neural Representations of Events and States"
http://www.ccbi.cmu.edu/reprin...
I've only skimmed it. This would take me quite a while to decode. But you should have a look at it; this is way cool. But it isn't what Dr Jepson is claiming. not at all.
What they're seeing is the patterns generated in the brain when reading sentences. Not thinking about things, but reading.
They record all the parts of the brain that light up during the reading given to the people in the fMRI. They discovered that these patterns are nearly the same for the people who participated. So, knowing these patterns, they can tell what sentence you had just read.
But where it gets interesting is that it's not just the sentence decode part of the brain, they're seeing the other parts where the concept representations are. I think.
From the article:
The main contribution of this article is the integrated, computational account of the relation between the semantic content of a sentence and the brain activation pattern evoked by the reading of the sentence.
The initial success of the modeling using neurally plausible features suggests that the building blocks for constructing complex thoughts are shaped by neural systems rather than by lexicographic considerations. This approach predicts that the neural dimensions of concept representation might be universal across languages, as studies are beginning to suggest [Yang et al., 2017]. In this perspective, the concepts in each language would be underpinned by some subset of a universal set of NPSFs
NPSF is neurally plausible semantic features. Hope that helps.
and in the limitations section,
"The study was also limited to the processing of visually presented sentences, and the neural signature at the end of the reading of a sentence contained the representations of all of the component concepts in the sentence. If the sentences were presented in the auditory modality, it is possible the neural signature at the end of the listening to a sentence might not be the optimal decoding window for all of the component concepts in the sentence. "
Developing the technologies enabling telepathy will take precisely eight years.
Developing accurate project scheduling techniques will take at least another two thousand years.
Evolving the capability of honest disclosure of accurate project schedules to a pressing venture capitalist will take... Huh, well, that will happen shortly after the second coming, I promise!
If you've worked for enough groovy tech outfits you can say anything that pops into you head and will get a of exposure if it sounds futuristic enough. Ten years after we experience the Jetson future their will be bowling leagues in the Andromeda Galaxy and talking robot dogs will be taking people for a walk. Count on it.
Why is Snark Required?
Functional MRI is able to indirectly measure brain activity via the blood oxygenation level dependent signal, so no, she's talking about MRI, specifically fMRI. Except what she's really talking about sounds like fNIRS, which is functional near infrared spectroscopy, which measures the BOLD signal using infrared diodes on the scalp. But honestly I just have to laugh at the claims. fMRI is nowhere near being able to reliably read minds and fNIRS is even more limited in terms of spatial resolution. And that's totally ignoring that you can't input anything with fMRI or fNIRS, so you need some other technology to be able to stimulate the brain to actually have telepathy and that technology is even farther away than read-only.
She's really smart. I've seen her speak a few times at a conference we're not supposed to talk about. But she might be over-reaching this time.
Bruce Perens.
I suspect that within 50 years they will have something relatively portable you can put on someone's head and read the words they are about to say with reasonable accuracy.
But in the next hundred years they will not:
1) Have something that is accurate enough for court.
2) Have something that does not have to touch your head.
3) Have anything that works without a substantial "Learning" time on each individual person before being able to work properly
As for (3) well, the interesting thing from the paper is that after they was recorded the patterns from a group of people reading their sample set of sentences they had a naive subject read the sentences. The new person's fMRI scan could be decoded to tell what sentence had just been read, although only about .77 accuracy.
The paper isn't about mind reading, it is about brain mapping complex (yet fundamental) units of thought. They're testing their model of neural representation of the brain function: "We present a predictive computational theory of the neural representations of individual events and states". The fMRI experiment bears out that their model is largely correct. And it appears that different people store things in the same places in the same way.
Also, the paper mentions another study in which the mapping seems to be the same even for people who speak different languages.
If the MRI can read your brain why don't we use them for police investigations and national security stuff? It seems like someone is grossly overselling what you can do with an MRI.
I read the internet for the articles.
Who says we WANT Telepathy?
I do not; my mind is private property.
No, I'm fairly certain she's talking fMRI - I remember watching a TED talk she gave several years ago, before Pixel Qi fell stagnant (this is the same woman that designed the low-power sunlight-readable LCD screens for the OLPC - which could be manufactured on a standard LCD assembly line)
She was talking about the extremely crude state of current MRI technologies, and her belief (as I recall) that she could miniaturize the basic technique to produce radically more affordable handheld medical imaging devices, and eventually non-invasive head-worn "mind-reading" machines.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Not NIRS or fmri... Too slow (blood flow) and poorly resolved. She just mentions fmri because people know what it is from movies and the papers she references used fmri to "reconstruct" visual "thoughts". But she actually wants to access action potential information, which is 100-1000x faster than fmri and much better resolved in space (cellular resolution). It is "possible" because light is scattered and polarized by neuronal membranes when action potentials are conducted.
BUT it's never been done outside of a dish, never resolved in 3D thickness of live brain tissue because there is too much light scattering in 3D tissue and you really must use trans illumination (past light from one side, pick it up the other, to preserve polarization). Definitely will not work through skull, for cm's and back. Not happening no matter how much light you inject (people already use IR lasers, she is talking about and LCD sheet, right...).