Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Develop Device That Can 'Hear' Your Internal Voice (theguardian.com)
Researchers have created a wearable device that can read people's minds when they use an internal voice, allowing them to control devices and ask queries without speaking. From a report: The device, called AlterEgo, can transcribe words that wearers verbalise internally but do not say out loud, using electrodes attached to the skin. "Our idea was: could we have a computing platform that's more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like an internal extension of our own cognition?" said Arnav Kapur, who led the development of the system at MIT's Media Lab.
Kapur describes the headset as an "intelligence-augmentation" or IA device, and was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Intelligent User Interface conference in Tokyo. It is worn around the jaw and chin, clipped over the top of the ear to hold it in place. Four electrodes under the white plastic device make contact with the skin and pick up the subtle neuromuscular signals that are triggered when a person verbalises internally. When someone says words inside their head, artificial intelligence within the device can match particular signals to particular words, feeding them into a computer.
Kapur describes the headset as an "intelligence-augmentation" or IA device, and was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Intelligent User Interface conference in Tokyo. It is worn around the jaw and chin, clipped over the top of the ear to hold it in place. Four electrodes under the white plastic device make contact with the skin and pick up the subtle neuromuscular signals that are triggered when a person verbalises internally. When someone says words inside their head, artificial intelligence within the device can match particular signals to particular words, feeding them into a computer.
"Don't think of the pink elephant. Don't think of the pink elephant."
Damn. Thought of the pink elephant. Now they know.
"Oh no... he found the
..you must think in Russian.
Think Russian.
*whooooosh*
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
... headset ... is worn around the jaw and chin, clipped over the top of the ear to hold it in place. ...
Four electrodes under the white plastic device make contact with the skin
Try getting through airport security wearing that and after it verbalizes your thoughts to the TSA agents.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
'Bullshit' - that is exactly what I thought, with my inner voice! But you transcribed it, so you must be able to read my mind... so this invention must really work! Even when I wasn't wearing it... ;)
William George
The science fiction book "Earth" by David Brin predicted exactly this back in 1990. Brin imagined a clip-on device that would interpret subvocalised words by measuring muscle movements in the chin and throat, exactly like this. He called it the "subvocal". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Robert J. Sawyer in his book Quantum Night mentioned this sort of idea.
He suggested that Philosophical Zombies would not have an inner voice, they in reality go through the motions of every day life without actually carrying on an inner monologue and they just fake it to fit in. He gives a lot of examples of strange human behaviour that are explained by the idea. For example mob mentality if many people are running a simple "just fit in" script in their brains instead of a real train of sapient thought.
No matter what, if this device really works, we are going to learn a lot more about human consciousness from it over the next decade.
That's the thing. You don't *HAVE* to say it.