Decoding silent reading from non-invasive EEG
Comments
dustfinger
conradev
The Neurorights Foundation works on this: https://www.neurorightsfoundation.org/advocacy/united-states
ronsor
Shouldn't this already be covered by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments?
oofdere
many things should be covered by other things but that's never a valid reason not to cover them explicitly
DoctorOetker
This is why I think we should treat or reframe laws as formal systems, akin to Lean / Metamath / etc... : treat it like a database of axioms / principles and theorems with proof.
As long as we don't we have to choose between explicit and repetitive or implicit but concise. The advantage of implicit but concise is that individual citizens can grasp larger sets of axioms & principles, but the we run the risk of having lawyers, judges etc. be confused, confusable, or feigning "innocent confusion" about the law and the spirit of the law. The advantage of explicit but repetitive is that its much harder to confuse if a party can point to a literal sentence stating exactly the situation in one place, but the law easily bulks up exponentially.
On the other hand using a formal system, you can clearly distinctly mark the axioms and normative postulates, and include example theorems ("yes a black citizen is also a citizen", "yes the gypsy is a human", etc...). Even when cases haven't been covered as explicit theorems, the formalized aspect means parties can derive unambiguously the sentences they need to shove in the face of a judge.
oofdere
I get the argument, but I feel like most issues arise from incentive structure rather than not being able to define things precisely enough.
Plus it's important that the law can be read by the average citizen as well. Not that current US laws are, but, it's an ideal to strive towards...
BurningFrog
Technology like that would be incredibly valuable, which means it will be developed if it can be.
You might possibly convince decent democratic countries to not do it, but if you think China, Russia, etc, would hesitate to get hold of this power we don't live in the same universe.
dustfinger
> Technology like that would be incredibly valuable, which means it will be developed if it can be.
I agree! The technology to read the thoughts and intentions of the human brain has some positive applications. I am sure Stephen Hawking would have appreciated significant improvements in this space when he was still alive. The right to private thought does not revoke the right to subject oneself to mind reading technology. Research could still proceed, and positive, lawful application of the technology could still benefit those in need.
> You might possibly convince decent democratic countries to not do it, but if you think China, Russia, etc, would hesitate to get hold of this power we don't live in the same universe.
I agree! The independent governance of countries has consequences, but I believe its advantages outweigh those of global governance. I would rather that there always be a tension between many democracies and dictatorships, than a single governing authority.
inigyou
Okay? In North Korea they're all malnourished and forced to work 20-hour days but how is that relevant to anything in the US?
wartywhoa23
Sure, the old trusty "if we don't do it, someone else will" rhetoric. And of course "think of the disabled"!
BurningFrog
That rhetoric is old and trusted because it's true.
wartywhoa23
Yep, true and helps immoral scumbags embrace their depravity and do what the others would otherwise do, and even bear some semblance of a moral ground in the eyes of the clueless.
wartywhoa23
Aha, yet another right that will be given exactly zero fucks by the corpocracy.
PMunch
Having proper sub-vocalization interfaces would be so cool! A 19-channel EEG does seem a bit invasive though (from a social aspect, I understand that it's used here in a medical context).
WalterGR
Subvocalization can be decoded from facial muscles.
MIT’s AlterEgo project does that. It’s been spun off into a private company (with no shipping product yet.) Discussed here, with 130 comments, 11 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45174125
SubiculumCode
Am I reading it right that they are claiming about ~%15 word prediction accuracy?
tbenst
Put another way, EEG moves top-10 retrieval out of 512 candidate words from 20.3% -> 27.7%. Hardly "open-vocabulary word decoding"
The paper is also missing a critical control of feeding Llama the preceding ground-truth text and asking how well it ranks the current word among the same candidate set.
BobbyTables2
Wait a minute, they can hear my internal monologue???
doodlebugging
I'm not interested in seeing this technology progress any further. The ability to read someone's inner, unspoken thoughts is too easy to weaponize against them.
I wonder whether a subject could poison the process by consciously thinking about something unrelated in the same way that public speakers used to get past stage-fright. As you look out across the audience picture something funny, like your boss in a pink tutu.
dr_dshiv
Id love to whisper vibe code in public. Oh well.
doodlebugging
Perhaps you're already artificially intelligent.
inigyou
Chorded keyboard gloves. Invent them.
butvacuum
unfortunately we already know about subvocalization.
ungreased0675
I agree. Not all topics are worth exploring. We don’t have to develop every dystopian-enabling technology. Build something else please.
WalterGR
People who are unable to communicate physically - and their loved ones - probably feel differently.
Can you imagine the sheer horror of being stuck in your body and unable to communicate? Being literally incapable of telling someone that you're in pain or where it hurts, for every waking second? Or, knowing that the end is near, not being able to tell your children that you love them? Or that you're sorry for not being a better parent?
May none of us ever need such technology.
goda90
People using a brain to computer interface to communicate to others isn't going to want all their thoughts exposed either. We already have a number of less mentally invasive technologies being developed for communication.
WalterGR
There are facial and throat sensors that detect subvocalization, which only work if those muscles are still firing. What else is being developed?
doodlebugging
I posted what I posted because, as I'm sure you are smart enough to understand, tools like this can be used for good purposes and for evil purposes. Going down this road only greases the skids for those who already have an evil use case in mind and zero moral qualms about employing it to serve their purposes no matter how much harm it causes.
We can all see how it can be used for good but we should never blind ourselves to the reality that it will also be used for evil without firm guardrails and tight controls.
It's probably best in the current environment if you refrain from making any more of the "think of the children" type of arguments. We all understand where that leads.
wartywhoa23
> It's probably best in the current environment if you refrain from making any more of the "think of the children" type of arguments. We all understand where that leads.
Alas, propaganda playbooks don't update that often.
applicative
This isn't a miraculous step toward mind reading, I think, since much could be deduced about silent reading from subvocalization before. My understanding is that it is a very distinctive process.
We laugh hearing that the library of Alexandria was noisy with people reading the texts out loud, thinking 'how dumb were they?' -- just as they considered it a miracle when they came upon one who read silently. But though there is training the difference is slight; the advance to keeping one's mouth shut pretty much boils down to keeping one's mouth shut and doing everything else the same.
bbor
Our world is literally about to burst at its seams, and no one believes it. People are very concerned that AI is using water or might be a hoax — meanwhile, we’ve been hoisted into a brand new BCI paradigm seemingly overnight. Ditto for bipedal robotics.
Like… how can you be planning a 401k at a time where humanoid robots and *mind reading* are suddenly possible? We’re going to have to redesign our whole society if we want to survive.
inigyou
The concept of a 401k is younger than most retirees. So we have no idea whether that works, either. Before that, we had no idea whether company pensions would work. Or whether we'd still be alive after the nuclear apocalypse of the 1990s.
wartywhoa23
One can't simply burst positivist bubbles in a Wellbutrin-lulled lair like HN and go away undownvoted.
b00ty4breakfast
The Torment-Nexus industrial complex continues to grow. Would really love to have a conversation with researchers who work on these kinds of things. I'm sure there are peripheral avenues that this research will open up, but how do you just ignore the very obvious dystopia that you are working to bring to fruition?
Deemphasizing the humanities in STEM education is turning into a disaster.
tgv
First, I agree that the researchers doing this are immoral. They're doing it for their careers, the world be damned.
Second, quite a few of the current tech moguls with STEM degrees had their education ages ago, when there was still some attention for the humanities in studies (at least at my school), and some of the worst people around have studied economics or law. Just teaching Philosophy 101 to CS students or getting neuroscientists to write an essay on Pride and Prejudice doesn't prevent this kind of thing.
It would be nice to add a "right to private thought" to the Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as something similar to other countries' rights and freedoms laws wherever possible.