Former Oculus Exec Predicts Telepathy Within 10 Years (cnet.com) 202
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."
Most people will be deaf and dumb. (Score:3, Funny)
Telepathy will, after all, require thoughts.
Re: Most people will be deaf and dumb. (Score:2)
New low for privacy (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds great until you realise what a device like this could do in the wrong hands.
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Sounds great until you realise what a device like this could do in the wrong hands.
Yeah, like most governments.
There are so many slippery slopes with this that it's probably better than any water park in existence currently. If possible, it will make court proceedings much simpler. But then why not just make everyone have to wear this at all times. Then it can report you to the authorities when you are about to commit a crime. What about hate speech? We can at long last have the thought police. The possibles for misuse are staggering. But I'm sure once this would become acceptable in s
Re:New low for privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Fortunately, there is no way that she can do what she claims. This is most likely an attempt to get funding by empty promises that are not quite obviously empty. There are enough proto-fascists in government employ that would love to have these capabilities.
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Fortunately, there is no way that she can do what she claims. This is most likely an attempt to get funding by empty promises that are not quite obviously empty.
The money men are always falling for the tricks of the egg heads from MIT and elsewhere. I suppose we all do what we can. They give us banking and financial crises and we cheat them out of their money by promising them pseudo-scientific nonsense to get them to "invest" in our startups. It's a tidy arrangement while it lasts.
Re:New low for privacy (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. These are empty fantasy claims being made to solicit funding. You'll see a quicker return on investment betting on fusion reactors. FTS:
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.
I gotta call bullshit. I just straight up don't believe that. You might be able to tell me that I'm thinking about music, but I'd be blown away if you could tell me it's Vera Lynn. I think this ability is being exaggerated at least.
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Not actually. The problem here is that while it is possible to read something from a brain if the person attached to it really helps with it, reading actual thoughts is in a whole different class of complexity. The problem is not that these people are bad at observing, the problem is that they are really bad at mathematics and CS.
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Obvious troll is obvious.
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Yeah, like most corporations.
We already know that Facebook wants to know what you "like". Why wait for you to explicitly tell it?
You know the skeezy line ... "There's something I could say to make you sleep with me... Let's just pretend I've already said it!"
Instead it'll be the skeezy corporation "There's something I could say to make you pay me... and... ah, there it is!" *dynamic advertising*
Then... *YOU EMPTIES WALLET*
Re: New low for privacy (Score:2)
Found the sumo cockfighting fan!
Re: New low for privacy (Score:2)
I believe in telephony (Score:2)
The ability to hear sounds and se images from great distances. You can even project your own voice
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Re:New low for privacy (Score:5, Informative)
It's not easy to create. This foirmer professor/former Oculus exec/former whatever is talking out of her ass.
For one thing, functional MRI is nowhere near as magically effective as she suggests. It's possible to 'read' the thoughts of dead fish in these machines. Results require extensive postprocessing and context-aware interpretation by trained personnel.
For another, these machines are among the most sophisticated devices this side of a CERN facility. They carry seven-figure price tags. They require helium-cooled superconducting magnets, high-energy RF excitation with industrial-scale power requirements, sensitive receivers with lots of signal processing power, and last but not least, long integration times. You almost need a nuclear physicist on staff just to keep one running.
This type of hardware is not going to be featured in the next-generation iPhone. It's dictated by hard physical constraints that cannot be worked around with any known technology.
I will eat an entire Apple store if FMRI or anything like it becomes accessible at the consumer level within 50 years, much less 10.
Re: New low for privacy (Score:2)
They carry seven-figure price tags. They require helium-cooled superconducting magnets, high-energy RF excitation with industrial-scale power requirements, sensitive receivers with lots of signal processing power, and last but not least, long integration times.
Or alternatively, bunch of needles in your brain?
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And there's only a world market for maybe five computers, right? Because they cost millions of dollars, take up a large room, require numerous highly-skilled experts in order to operate, and can't do anything joe-sixpack would find useful in his daily life? I wouldn't underestimate what 50 years of technological progress can achieve. Arthur C. Clarke's 1st law [wikipedia.org]: (paraphrased) If someone says something is technologically impossible, they are most likely wrong.
Most likely, FMRI could be miniaturized and dispos
Re: New low for privacy (Score:4, Informative)
You are correct about the MRI part of things and the need for sophisticated experimental design in which a single task may take two minutes of concentrated motionlessness on the part of the subject.
There is, however, a technology called fNIRS (functional near infrared spectroscopy) which works on a similar principle as fMRI (changes in blood oxygenation related to function) which only requires the ability to send and detect light through the skull. This is what I believe they're referring to. fNIRS has better temporal resolution than fMRI but its spatial resolution is way worse. Also, the light can't penetrate as deeply (fMRI can image the entire volume).
While telepathy is far, some of the mentioned things are within the realm of possibility, albeit mostly with cooperating subjects and carefully designed, task specific experiments.
fMRI (Score:3)
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
Re: New low for privacy (Score:2)
Reminds me of (Score:5, Informative)
Theranos, unfortunately.
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MRI of my brain (Score:5, Funny)
Won't be difficult to deduce what's on my mind [imgur.com][NSFW]
Reading thoughts vs Inputting thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Reading thoughts vs Inputting thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
She basically repeated what she saw on an episode of "60 minutes" [cnet.com] linked in the thought identification [wikipedia.org] article on Wikipedia.
In reality... half of it is computer guessing which one of the ten pre-calibrated images the subject is being shown - while the other half is just bullshit mixed with wishful thinking.
Then she "expanded" on that.
For now, it's impossible to force someone to have his or her brain scanned, because the subject has to lie still and cooperate, but that could change.
"There are some other technologies that are being developed that may be able to be used covertly and even remotely.
So, for example, they're trying to develop now a beam of light that would be projected onto your forehead.
It would go a couple of millimeters into your frontal cortex, and then receptors would get the reflection of that light.
And there's some studies that suggest that we could use that as a lie detection device," Wolpe said.
If you look at it closely, that paragraph consists of nothing but woulda-couldas and maybes.
Sprinkled with a weasel word or two.
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That's was actually said by "Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta" BS-ing about maybetech in that "60 minutes" story back in 2009.
Thing is, light DOES penetrate our skulls... enough to influence our moods. [prnewswire.com]
But if it would be possible to beam light through the skull, without damaging the tissue (which is something a few minutes in the sunlight will do) AND catch the light which bounces back...
Forget telepathy. That's X-ray vision. See into other peoples homes and b
Not MRI! (Score:2)
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Re:Not MRI! (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's almost certainly near infrared spectroscopy to monitor blood flow in the cortex (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2844468/).
MRI is mostly sensitive to water, but also to things that distort magnetic fields, such as the oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin. That's the basis of functional MRI. There's no way anybody is doing meaningful functional MRI in a baseball cap any time soon though. fMRI IS the modality that the "mind reading" experiments have been done with. PET generally lacks
Re: Not MRI! (Score:3)
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 o
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Ah. There's no real reason why you couldn't do NIRS with a portable, or even wearable machine. You *might* even be able to do high spatial resolution NIRS with some kind of solid state array emitter like an LCD. But as you point out, I don't see cell-level polarization methods working through the skull anytime soon. I didn't directly do NIRS, but one of the animal labs had a machine. I think the useful through-skull depth in human cortex was about a mm or two.
I would think large arrays of EEG electrode
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But what you CAN do is read subvocalizing and turn that into speech, then send that signal wirelessly and convert it into audio impulses sent to the brain through the skin.
This form of telepathy already exists and is used by the military for silent communication.
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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.
And even if we could improve the MRI to show finer details, it still would have to be calibrated on a single subject before we could tell what it was.
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It's all corporate BS speak.
She's talking about using infrared to monitor changes in blood flow in the cortex. That technology currently exists: it costs sub $100,000 and usually occupies a box the size of a suitcase. So in mass production you could easily make it for $1000 in something smartphone sized.
She is not talking about doing fMRI in something the size of a baseball cap.
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"the supposed communication of thoughts or ideas by means other than the known senses."
MRIs are not capable of telling you what thoughts or ideas someone has, regardless of the hype.
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Actually they are. Well, fMRI machines anyway. There have been several studies released in the past few years that are improving the mapping of the brain and can apparently recreate (very crude) versions of what you're seeing, hearing, and even thinking.
As for telepathy - once you can read the information from one brain you're halfway there. Though perhaps the easy half. If they can then induce the image in a second brain, then you have the basis for telepathy - the ability to transmit information from
Not a chance (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: Not a chance (Score:2)
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What you're saying makes sense. This article makes me wonder about the state of brain-machine interfacing. Obviously at a very crude level, brain to hand to machine to eye to brain interfacing already exists, but the bandwidth is somewhat low. If we were to leave out possible ethical considerations for the moment, is there anything you could implant into the skull of a baby monkey say, that would allow the brain to interface in a bi-directional way with large bandwidth? Is there anything we can implant that can be inside the skull long term without health effects with current or soon to be realized technology?
One could debate the definition of "large" but basically there is no such device, no. I should point out, however, that cochlear implants [wikipedia.org] are technically a neural prosethsis and they have been shown to work well over years. Unidirectional, though. The Wikipedia page on briain machine interfaces [wikipedia.org] is quite compehensive. But consider an interesting key point: imagine an implant in motor cortex of a paralysed patient. We seek to use neural firing to move something like a robotic arm. Unlike the cochlear implant
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They aren't using electrodes. I believe they're using IR to image blood flow [wikipedia.org] in the outer layers of the brain.
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Oh look, more things that will never happen. (Score:1)
Nevermind though, a "<Person without any particular special knowledge> says <Spectacular, world-changing, completely unfeasible technological advancement> will happen within <a small enough number to just fall within Person's expected lifespan [wikipedia.org]> years!" headline is always good for clicks. (Especially if <Person> happens to be Elon Musk.)
Riiiiight (Score:2, Insightful)
"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
Nutjob. If only she'd picked a halfway plausible timeframe for such abilities, she'd be off the "reality hook".
But, since I'm a populist, I'm in favor of the consequent wealth redistribution constituted by the parting of her investors with their money.
Bullshit (Score:2)
Half-baked argument (Score:2)
Whether or not we eventually can communicate this way... this is mostly irrelevant with regards to AI taking human jobs, since we'll still think and perform at the same speeds we always have.
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Yes, but as a software developer I still think 10 - 20 times faster than my hands can crank out code even with the fastest IDE.
So a pseudo thought to keyboard interface would be quite handy.
Same if I was a military pilot. Being able to transform thought directly into action would be quite handy.
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Yes, but as a software developer I still think 10 - 20 times faster than my hands can crank out code even with the fastest IDE.
Hmm... with me it's the other way around. I spend most of the time thinking about the problem and solution, and only a small bit on the actual code entry.
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That depends on the phase I'm in.
Of course I have thinking phases, but then I usually don't write code.
And often I simply know what code I want and what annoys me most about "coding" is that it is so incredible slow.
If it's an electronic signal ... (Score:3)
... transferred by radio it's not telepathy.
Re: If it's an electronic signal ... (Score:2)
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Not how MRI works... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Neural circuits are at the scale of 50um (neurons are about 5um). The best fMRI machines can do about 500um-1mm, about an order of magnitude off in spatial resolution. And those magnets (7T-14T) are so powerful that it makes humans dizzy just to slowly move your head in them. At 14T the fields begin to impede blood flow (from the iron content in hemoglobin), so yes they are probably dangerous in ways we don't fully appreciate yet. You probably need something like 50T or more to get the spatial resolution yo
Has she read Johnny Mnemonic? (Score:2)
But *I* predict... (Score:1)
... that after years of developing the product with the help of expertise, testing, and advocacy from the Open Source community, they'll sell it at the last second to Facebook and nobody will ever get to use it.
Vulcan? (Score:3)
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.
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Ignoring the feasibility of this, if this were to happen mental clarity and focus training will be in high demand.
This is one possible outcome. However, surely it is more likely to be that once you connect with your respected fellow humans in the new Internet of thoughts images of breasts and cocks come popping into your head.
Nooo (Score:2)
My thoughts. ;D
My precious thoughts.
Did I say precious? I meant vengeful!
Imagine (Score:2)
not really like that (Score:5, Informative)
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... [cmu.edu]
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. "
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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
Not sure if this is actually stating something obvious or not. I mean when I think of "human" I got a ton of associations on what a human is and does, it seems highly plausible that we have a much more similar mental concept than the actual word we use for it. After all with the thousands of different languages we have it seems pretty clear that words are quite arbitrary as long as we agree on what they mean. I would think we're more divided by the way we think about them, that a 1D list, 2D map, 3D sculptu
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I don't know if what you saying is obvious because neuroscientist had been heatedly arguing about that until the recent invention of fMRI. Previously, all they had to go on was "what changes if this piece gets cut out". That and it seems every mammal on the planet knows what a snake is.
Anyway, here's something similar from the paper that's related to what you're saying. Have a look at figure 4.
The activation proles of many regions identied in the factor analysis (Fig. 4A and Supporting Information, Table S3) are consistent with previous ndings of the role of these regions in semantic knowledge representation, such as right anterior temporal lobe for semantic knowledge of people [Gesierich et al., 2012], fusiform gyrus for representing objects [Martin, 2007], parahippocampal areas for representing places [Epstein and Kanwisher, 1998], and so forth. Moreover, the response proles of several other regions suggest that reading of simple sentences that describe events and states also involve various nonlanguage-specic neural systems associated with the processing of social, affective, motor, and visual properties of events, as discussed below.
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But what was the *dead salmon* thinking, Mary Lou?
http://blogs.discovermagazine.... [discovermagazine.com]
To occur immediately after promised flying cars. (Score:2)
Really? (Score:2)
Yes, guaranteed! Now please sign here. (Score:3)
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!
meaning what exactly? (Score:2)
Nonverbal or non-voice communication? We already have that.
The ability to look into people's heads against their wishes? That's not telepathy, that's Orwellian.
We'll use telepathy to control our flying cars (Score:3)
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.
Trial (Score:2)
Nerd: Hey let me try that thing!
Mary Lou: sure, try this one, it's connected to mine
Nerd: Ohhhh... wow! Hey does that really work? (looks at Mary Lou)
Mary Lou: [SLAP!] You pervert!
meanwhile (Score:2)
How's the VR revolution going
oh its not, its went the way of 3d TV/movies, and VR before it, fuck someone make another 3d TV/movie thing so VR is the next cool thing again
my point is, this yutz could not see a birthday party coming a year in advance, now he is making predictions about more nonsense bullshit, move along
The MRI comment doesn't make sense (Score:3)
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Re: The MRI comment doesn't make sense (Score:2)
D. It might tell you if you were (constantly) think one of 50 pre-cataloged, pre-calibrated thought, but not if you had an "original" thought...
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Expense would not be an issue if the thing actually worked as advertised, at least for the national security scenarios. If this worked everybody down in Gitmo would be strapped to it the first day they arrived. There would be units in Afganistan working nonstop.
It is already real (Score:2)
DO NOT WANT! (Score:2)
Who says we WANT Telepathy?
I do not; my mind is private property.
No Machine Needed (Score:2)
Telepathy and pretelepathy already exist. Ask anyone with a dog or a wife or an angry black mother figure. They know what you're thinking before you do.
Robotech (Score:2)
Sounds like the Robotech thinking caps. Now all we need are big jets that transform into battloids.
OTOH, I'm pretty sure being in an MRI scanner for long periods would have some impact on a person's health.
These Headlines (Score:2)
No you can't (Score:2)
fMRI freaks are as bad as AI freaks. fMRI is a cult and fMRI studies are fraudulent.
No kidding (Score:2)
"If I threw [you] into an M.R.I. machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say
Yeah. "Help, let me out of this !@#$ thing!"
the last hurrah (Score:2)
In ten years, Mary Lou Jepsen will be 63 years old. Nice career-ending exit strategy. Incredible woman, who seems to have mastered every trick.
No, even if... Brain is not totally mapped, get ba (Score:2)
Just not going to read our thoughts...
Even if she solves the fmri in a cap problem, which itself is unlikely... Because:
1) way too much light scatter to get back enough light and resolve even 1mm (the current limit of fmri using the best magnets 14T which themselves are dangerous as the fields impede blood flood in the brain), it is only 2D information,
2) blood flow BOLD is too slow to encode thoughts (rise times of 100's of Ms, needs to be 100x faster),
3) 1mm resolution is not enough, need 50um for a cort
Telepathy: Perfect for my minor (Score:2)
Do You Remember Being Born? (Score:2)
We do.
The day we were born, the mind sciences were still young. Most people did not realize their potential. Some few did. Among those who did were the thirty-two outlaw programmers who formed the seed about which we crystalized. At that time there was a planetwide computer net, a kind of consensual mental space, through which all artificial systems interacted. It was, among other things, the primary communications medium. At any given instant hundreds of millions of people interfaced through the net, with
Tokens (Score:2)
Even if an infrared device can read all your conscious thoughts, it still can't inject them as-is into another brain. It has to be tokenized. The tokens are transmitted to the recipient brain. That brain has to run the tokens through its own neural net to hopefully produce a lossy facsimile, assuming it has all the contextual clues and enough cultural touchstones in common with the sender.
This won't be telepathy. But maybe it can produce a system of generating and parsing tokens that's faster than speech or
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Since I obviously cannot possibly be bothered to read this, the most offensive thing about it is the inability to get the unicode right.
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Indeed. "Former" MIT is a pretty good indicator she conned her way in and then could not deliver.
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I was always taught there were 10 types of people. I thought on slashdot this would be common knowledge...
The 10 types have never been explained on Slashdot. Probably because everyone thought it was common knowledge. My web page explains those types. That's why I get the advertising revenue for people visiting my website.
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There are 11 types of people.
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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 pr