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Neurocomputing Makes Headway
SuperguyA1 writes "Salon is running this almost unbelievable story on "Thought Activated Computing". This was the one thing I always wanted to see that I figured wouldn't be possible in my lifetime. " Really, really amazing work being done - makes me happy to be alive right now and able to see stuff like this. Currently the technology is being used to help paralyzed people now and the possibilites in the future are endless.
I figured someone on slashdot might know the answer to this.
How predetermined is out number of senses and limbs? If I was to implant some device like this into my brain would it always a) feel unnatural b) necesserily interfere with the movement of my arm or c) eventually behave entierly unconciously just like the movement of my arm does now.
Is the same true of senses? If I attached a little I/O port into my brain would it eventually be integrated as a 6th sense or are out brains to preprogramed for this to happen?
Would the answers be differnt is we implanted the devices in utero?
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
You do EVERYTHING through a feedback loop, you direct your body to do X, and your senses tell you that Y happened, and you adjust the directions you give. A million times a minute. The feedback loop is vital for you to learn how to do it, not for the machine on the other end.
....
And with implanted hardware, that's the same as saying "If someone figgures out how to control my heart, they control me", while technicaly true, I'm going to put up a hell of a fight trying to stop them from straping me down and hooking up the invasive electrodes.
SCENARIO:
Thug 1: Excuse me sir, whats that over there?
Me: What, Where?
Thug 2: Quick lets perform invasive brain surgery while he's not looking.
Thug 1: I'm done. Sir, would you like to buy our product?
Me: Yes, I want to buy
-Crutcher
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
As far as I can see this will be truly revolutionary for UI when it can be used for general computer use. Forget Voice. Voice is too clumsy to be used for general input/output. Its also annoying to your neighbor. But controlling a computer by thought is the way to go.
Of course as mentioned in the article there is ways to go before this will be feasible. Who would want surgery just to interface with your computer? Something that is non-invasive would be ideal.
I guess that finger doohickey that came out 1-2 years ago is a step (albeit a minor step) in the right direction. I forgot was it was called, but you basically place your finger on this sensor. And the sensor detects minute movements in your skin that is activated by thought or your eye to control a cursor. Forgot the exact details. It didn't really work too well. I remember it was demoed at COMPUSA. And I couldn't really use it that well. I guess you needed to train on it. The problem with this is that all it allowed you to do was move the cursor around (I think). Would would buy such a thing, when a mouse works better w/o training.
I would love some kind of a device that would pick out the correct thought patterns and translate it into commands. This means commands other than the moving of a cursor. When you can actually think an 'A' or an entire word and have it appear on the screen. This of course is difficult.
The Doctor asks why would we want to control computers with our brains rather than with our fingers or hands. Well for one thing it would it would help with carpal tunnel syndrome. Has anyone ever got injured just by thinking too hard? (Well there was those marketing majors in college:) And with the right technology, it would be more efficient.
Just my two cents.
Man
It seems that the development of such tools is more evolved than you'd expect. One of the research centers mentioned in the article is the MIT's Media Laboratory. You can find more information on the ML projects here. The lab is working also on some other futuristic projects: wearable computers, software algorythms for recognizing photographs and other.
Regards,
January
Let's say you have a complex job that needs doing. It has too many random elements to trust to a computer yet is too repetitive to interest people. So you build a machine that can interface with a brain to get the job done. Now all you need is a brain, sure some folks might want to donate theirs, but not likely, so you head (!) to the black market and buy a nice kid absconded from the streets in Iowa. Presto, a dedicated loyal worker for your mines, or your deep sea exploration, or your war.
It's scary because the unknown is scary. And even scarier is that unknown people will use the unknown to do unknown (until it's too late) things.
Maybe having a brain directly control a computer isn't too far from a computer directly controlling a brain.
+&x
What do you mean when you were a kid? I'm 26 and still trying to turn the channel with my psychic powers!:) I'll make a post when I figure it out.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
Thought activated computing? Let's hope they turn logging off...
wake up and find out that you are the eyes of the world.
Did anyone ever read the bogus article some Inquirer like news source (maybe some one can remember) on the web about an 8 year old boy Microsoft essentially purchased for the near amount of $10 million dollars. The kid was being kept on Redmond's campus and was working on "The Next Big Thing". According to the story, the kid developed a TV remote for his grandma (who was confined to a wheel chair) that relied on thought patterns.
The article was huge and the author included pictures as well as an interview with the boy (made to look like a spoiled brat). It was pretty funny... but even more humorous is a lot of people took it seriously and I had a number of friends forward me the address of the article (wish I remembered it).
Given everyone's preoccupation with Cryptonomicon, I would have thought that someone else would have brought up Interface, written under the pseudonym Stephen Bury by Neal Stephenson.
Basic synopsis is:
o Governor has stroke.
o Shady politicos give governor chip very much like in article.
o Fun and hilarity ensue as governor runs for presidency.
Oh yeah?
Well, I'm running on an NT box right now, so all of my bits are having to go uphill BOTH WAYS!
-LjM
I know that the human brain needs an input throttle, and that our sensory organs are specifically built to provide that throttle. Indeed, I have a broken throttle: I lack the ability to separate signal from noise audibly, and as a result background noise makes people talking to me sound like Teen Spirit.
Indeed, part of the beauty of an implant would be to provide a technological throttle to input from a technological device. We humans aren't built to read a dozen analog gauges or read text in a half dozen "floating windows", or for that matter to transfer scratches of graphite on paper into Really Deep Thoughts.
Regarding the invasiveness of the procedure, I can say little. "Getting a neural implant" sounds cool; "invasive neurosurgery" sounds less so.
There is one other problem with neural implants people rarely think of. Right when you decide to plunk down the money and let a neurosurgeon drill into your skull, Microsoft Implant 2.0 will come out.
If you think upgrading your computer's OS is nasty, consider upgrading your head. And if you don't, you won't be compatible with all those new devices you got an implant to connect to...
--The basis of all love is respect
I don't know about you, but I still like knowing where my brain ends and other sources of thought begin. What you describe above sounds a bit like the ultimate two-way subliminal.
--The basis of all love is respect
We're not talking Gibsonesque brain interfaces or direct thought output here - we're talking about the equivalent of doing Morse Code with some spare synapse or muscle controller.
Tracking electrical activity in the brain and triggering an action when a specific pattern happens isn't that hard - it doesn't require understanding how thought happens in the brain or translating that into words, it's just finding simple not-many-bit output spots and doing some biofeedback training so the user can figure out how to trigger them. If you pick good sensor spots, that's not fundamentally tougher than learning to wiggle your ears or raise only one eyebrow. The medical part of the job is developing electrodes that can interface safely without corrosion or similar problems.
Doing good input to the brain is a much tougher problem - either you piggyback on existing senses, or you need to know an immense amount of currently unknown stuff to get it right (though the brain is flexible enough to work around some of that.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In the US at least their is some sort of weird moral structure that says it is okay to "fix defects" but not to improve healthy people.
I'd love to ask these people why they think glasses are okay. Hell, I'd love to ask them why clothing is okay... I sure hope they don't answer with something as silly as "but that's OUTSIDE of the body!"
For all you people drooling about the possibilities of controlling machines (computers) purely by the mind, stop and thing for a second. If your thoughts are going to be controlling anything in any reasonable fashion, you'd better be concentrating real hard! It's perfectly possible to interface with a computer (keyboard/mouse/monitor) and think about a couple of different things at the same time. Well, it's not going to work any more. Imagine a worker controlling, say, a factory robot by his thoughts. If any time the worker thinks about beer or [insert your favorite porn star here] that robot will jerk, or stop, or drill the wrong thing, then the factory better start recruiting tibetian monks for its workers.
The point is that thought control of any sophistication requires not only the neural interface. It also requires a lot of concentration and mind discipline. Operating stuff by mind control is going to be hard.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Great. I can't wait until the TEMPEST guys start using this technology. Y'know, the nutballs in the tinfoil hats who think that aliens are reading their thoughts *might* not be as nutty as I thought...
Yeah, sure, everybody can "jack in" 50 years from now. But they misconfigure the firewall, some kiddie 0wns you, and the next thing you know, the local police are banging on your door for performing some crime you really had no control over...
"But I just had him moon the President to show how insecure his neural implant was!"
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
This could make programming a lot faster. No more need to rely on keyboards...the code could fly out at the speed of the neural link... I'm frist in line!
Could they perhaps also use this technology to link our minds cybernetically?
Just as a minor commentary on the appendix thread:
The real reason doctors don't ordinarily remove your appendix isn't to do with immune function (this was only recently discovered, btw; it was formerly thought to be entirely a vestigial organ from when primates evolved from insectivores--rabbits (lagomorphs, which likewise evolved from insectivores) have rather huge appendices compared to humans). It's not due to cost so much, either (most first-world and even a fair number of the second-world countries actually have free health care for citizens; the US is really freakish in that regard and is more like a third-world country in this regards).
Rather, it has to do with risks of abdominal surgery itself. The abdomen is, well, sort of a risky area to operate in to begin with; any jostling of organs risks adhesions that might end up blocking off your intestines, the appendix is attached to your colon which is chock full of bacteria that can cause some very nasty infections (and to try to sterilise the gut beforehand risks one getting superinfections of yeast or Clostridia (which can literally rot one's intestines; the bacteria are closely related to gas gangrene bacteria, and in fact in New Guinea a form of gas gangrene of the bowels known as pigbel is rather common due to people being infected with Clostridia from poorly cooked pork)...not fun), one has to be very careful in suturing the abdomen as abdominal sutures are among the most highly stressed of ANY surgical suture, etc. Even operations for appendicitis (in which the person is being operated on in hopes of removing the appendix before it bursts and causes peritonitis (basically infection of the entire abdominal wall lining; it can go into blood poisoning (septicemia) VERY quickly, can kill you, and at very best will make you desperately ill and cause you to have a hole in your abdomen for several weeks)) are risky; there have been cases where the appendix has literally exploded in the surgeon's hands, the tissues are inflamed, and often patients have to have drains placed and be put on a course of antibiotics to make sure they don't go into peritonitis anyways. Doctors don't like to muck about with abdominal surgery unless they have to, and even then as least as they can get away with (this is why hysterectomies, appendectomies, and even operations to remove cancerous sections of bowel have increasingly gone to laparoscopic surgery where they only have to make two incisions, one through the navel, instead of a large gash--it's far less stressful for patient AND doctor) and this is why appendectomy is an emergency procedure. :)
As a minor aside--it used to be fairly routine to remove adenoids and tonsils if a kid had even one bout of tonsillitis.What stopped that was the discovery that kids who had had both their adenoids and tonsils removed had higher chances of going into rheumatic fever from strep throat (rheumatic fever is fairly uncommon nowadays, but it can leave nervous system [St. Vitus' chorea] or cardivascular complications; in some cases it can even kill--Jim Henson died of essentially a very severe bout of rheumatic fever) and got more and worse respiratory infections than kids who had tonsils and/or adenoids. Now they only recommend removal if they've caused fairly severe problems with the kid to the point the child is almost always sick; it's been found it's better to leave them in than take them out.
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
1. the obligatory comment:
u zos.htm
This would be bitchin' in a Beowulf cluster.
2. Why you should not get an implant
for elective reasons:
http://www.techreview.com/articles/july99/derto
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When the mouse was introduced it brought with it a whole set of user interfaces that made sence for that device. Now what we need is a user interface that takes advantage of this input. In the article it talked about pushing an icon around. Great, I can do that with a mouse. What we need are new innovations that we cannot do with our current tools.
I think this story goes well with the recent Ask Slashdot about 3D environments. Out current tools aren't up to snuff as input, maybe this device will help.
Another use may be adjusting tool parameters in a paint program while you are brushing. Pen table give hardness of depression, but you could adjust the roughness of a texture, or the angle or size of the brush.
It would be great to hook up vim or emacs to this for macros while programming. Switching a hand to the mouse while typing is annoying, and switching edit modes/doing Ctrl commands can be almost as much of a pain. But you could do a thought pattern to engage a for loop macro, type in the various parts, and the end of each doing the thought pattern for next-part. Perhaps it would make sense to design a new programming language that it oriented toward this input (just as there should be a programming language desgined for PDAs input).
These are are some serious things to think about if this technology becomes accessible to the public. Just as modern user interfaces need mice (insert benefits of command lines flame war here), it may be that future ones need these as input.
-no broken link
I don't understand the problem people have with the idea of brain controlled machinery. Doesn't anyone remember being a kid and honestly trying out your *psychic* powers? Trying to make people here your thoughts, or change the channel, or drive an RC car? I mean, cummon! I want interfaces that let me have all the functionality of a digital phone, but without any handset. I want to just will the damn channel to change, I want my car to unlock and turn itself on because I wanted it to from halfway accross the parking lot. I want to never have to wonder about dates or appointments or where someone is (that is in mutal contact with me, and thus is letting me have such info) again. I dont want to drive my car, I want to *BE* my car, and my plane, and my boat, and the surgical impliments that I use to work on a patient (IANAD), I want to walk the web internaly, not muck arround with a damn mouse and keyboard. And every kid on the planet is born wanting that, but some forget it as the grow up. Some one needs to remind this uptight doctor that he's not to old to fly, give him some fairy dust, and lock him in a room with the Hawaiian Tropic Swimsuit Team until he can come up with some happy thoughts.
-Crutcher
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
I believe that the trophic factor (encourages nueral development around the implant) is what is proprietary. It was not at all clear from the article that the scientist involved held the patent to the trophic substance. The implant is an extremly simple broadcaster of nueral activity.
This kind of opposition to human improvments is as pervasive as it is strange. In the US at least their is some sort of weird moral structure that says it is okay to "fix defects" but not to improve healthy people. These sorts of attitudes seem to be holding back research a great deal. What if their were no quadrapalegics to benifit from this sort of technology then it might never have been developed. Perhaps without this strange restriction we would have drugs improving the memory and intelligence of the population as a whole.
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
A perspective from a grumpy old man...
In my day we didn't have any of these fancy "punch cards". We pulled giant levers and watched big iron gears grind tediously away. It took days to do a simple multipication and the answer was usually wrong. That's the way it was, and we liked it! We loved it!
Why I remember getting my arm stuck in an adding machine. Crushed every bone in my hand. That's how real men compute! You can have your advanced "vacuum tubes" and "elec-tricty".
Bah-humbug, I say! Any computer that doesn't need to be oiled is a devil-machine!
Now they tell me they've got fancy games you can play on these computers. When I was your age, the engineers played "touch the red-hot spinning metal disc". And we liked it! We loved it!
Bah.