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  • Hacker News
  • 2040 : I earnestly believe that presidential term limits should be abolished, and also that federal control of elections is incredibly important. Not sure where that thought came from, but I'm certain!
    by axus
  • What's a president? King Trump II has been our leader as long as I can remember!
  • As though we haven't done enough already to manipulate the mind, now we can have a neural model dictate our thoughts for us.
  • We can finally have ads in our dreams like Futurama.
  • nice double entendre on "dictate", there.
  • This seems strictly worse than speech to text as input to AI?

    I cannot comprehend the output from AI fast enough for the speed difference between a verbal and thought response to matter.

    Not to mention the privacy nightmare of logging my raw thoughts in a corporate environment and potentially routing them to an LLM provider.

  • Most people get quite tired when talking for long periods. You can train that over a long period, but putting on a headset would certainly be more convenient.
  • > My prediction: In a couple years, the main way we'll talk with our AIs is with our thoughts. They will not be a super-smart automated intern or coworker that you desperately try to keep up with. They will be a natural, joyful extension of you.

    Ah, finally! To be liberated from the burden of speaking! Perhaps soon the AI will even think for us!

    On a more serious note, this is additional evidence that Wall-E stands as the most accurate sci-fi projection of the future.

  • > 2027 — A morning at Conduit

    > I put a band around my head, and open my laptop at Conduit. It’s 9 am. My device pairs with my laptop over Bluetooth. I open, without loss of generality, Codex.

    At least we are reassured that short-range networking protocols will be invariant under the apocalypse.

  • The most incredible part of Star Trek to me is not the warp drive or transporter, it's that they open flawless video links with alien species of every description with 100% reliability.
  • > My device pairs with my laptop over Bluetooth

    Sounds magical

  • Good to know I'll still have the reassurance of a 9:30 standup even though AI is reading my thoughts.
  • I thought this was a parody when I opened it.
  • Same. I'm still not sure it isn't.
  • I think I think I think it will be eventually.
  • There’s quite a few out-of-the-norm assumptions in this.

    1. Superhuman AI is inevitable.

    2. Writing will become a bottleneck to communicate effectively with it.

    3. Higher communication bandwidth would let us keep up with the machines.

    4. Therefore with higher bandwidth humans could stay part of AI decision processes.

    5. That makes it more “human”, as humans would be kept in-the-loop without becoming a bottleneck to be worked around.

    6. If you let superintelligence write into your brain, that lets you merge with the machine.

  • After #6, the ASI has replaced you. Seems to be the goal for some of these folks.
  • What is the benefit ? Sharing thoughts to the external world would be like going to a bakery and walking out with flour and eggs. Isn't the act of talking/writing part of the thinking ? Am I just going to share intrusive thoughts and half-baked ideas to my CIA agent now ?
  • This might be naive, but I think the idea is to replace your keyboard
  • I can see legit use cases where people simply can't communicate in any physical way. People with locked-in syndrome, etc.

    But, obviously those only make up a small number of people.

    Strapping a mind-reading machine onto some detainee is probably the more likely case.

  • Beyond all the other more salient objections one might have with this pitch, there is just the very practical fact that there really isn't enough signal from "noninvasive" sensors to get the sort of data they are promising.

    It's been explained to me by neuroscientists I respect that EEGs and friends are like trying to listen in on a conversation happening on center ice from the parking lot of the arena. You can maybe tell if there is a match going on if there is a rowdy crowd but that's about it.

  • They are going to have to come up with better portable noninvasive technology.

    Technically fMRI is noninvasive; it is just a bit inconvenient for everyday use.

  • "I feel good about the vision, because it builds towards a more human future" I wonder if the author truly believes this. I could maybe buy some sort of inevitability argument, but this current framing is very hard to take seriously.
    by G3nD
  • From the article.

    >Thought-to-text, aka telepathy

    No, that's not telepathy. I'd leave the term alone. Consider it to be reserved for... well... telepathy!

  • Neuralink to Neuralink users
    by ge96
  • Next you'll want the term "Artificial Intelligence" reserved for actual artificial intelligence.
  • Well, the text-to-thought direction feels less sci-fi, and combining both would amount to kind of telepathy.

    But sure, you're right. Reading is not a deterministic mapping of text to thoughts.

    Apart from the trouble of defining what a thought is, independent from the person who thinks it.

    Me thinking of grabbing a mug of coffee is a different thought from you doing the same... defining "thought" pulls in a whole jungle of epistemology (maybe I should say philosophy, more broadly, I'm not in the field).

    Is there an abstract concept of "the thought of raising your left index finger"? Or "the thought of remembering severe pain"? Etc etc

  • next they're going to set up thought-triggered Amazon purchases and say that moving the object from the warehouse to your home constitutes telekinesis.

    ever since Elon did his "promise full self-driving every year" thing, entrepreneurs been on a weird sort of fiction escalator.

    thought-to-text is incredible. imagine doing something that remarkable with your life and feeling the need to exaggerate.

  • > I want to feel what my Codex feels.

    Yeesh. I guess that makes one of us. Truly one of the more horrifying short stories I’ve read.

  • I kept expecting it to turn into a horror short story.