Living in the future has tradeoffs. This will be “interesting”:
In an unprecedented scientific achievement, experts have developed a system that is capable of reading human thoughts and converting them into text.
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The core of this technology lies in its ability to record and decode brain activity through an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap. Participants in the study silently read texts while the cap captured their brain’s electrical activity.
This EEG data is then processed by an AI model named DeWave, a creation of the UTS team. DeWave distinguishes itself by translating EEG signals into coherent words and sentences, learning from extensive EEG datasets.
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The current translation accuracy is around 40 percent on the BLEU-1 scale, with aspirations to reach the efficacy of traditional language translation or speech recognition systems, which hover around 90 percent.
The implications in multiple dimensions are staggering.
If someone were to read my thoughts they may not like what they read.
Just waiting for Big Brother to try to use this to control dissent before any action is taken. Minority Report anyone? I am not really sure if there is any positive aspect to the development of such technology. I don’t know about others, but there are so many different thoughts moving in my head over the course of a day that are totally unrelated to anything else. Who thinks they can put context to such a mishmash and find anything of verifiable value? Sounds more like a fool’s errand and a good way to suck up government grant money.
“I am not really sure if there is any positive aspect to the development of such technology.”
See also: The Diving Bell and The Butterfly
http://tinyurl.com/2y7dmhjr
Don’t get me wrong, my aluminum haberdashery is as shiny and well fitted as anyone else’s, but I can still admit the possibility of innocuously benevolent applications.
This in my opinion falls into “just because you can, does not mean that you should” territory.
Er, I mean, I LOVE BIG BROTHER! I LOVE BIG BROTHER!
Snerk. Back when I was running a 32-person/4000 user IT shop 12-16 hours/day I GFT (guaran-fucking-tee) any gizmo that attempted to read my thoughts would have immolated itself trying to keep up. Most days I damn near did that to myself.
I pity the fool reading my thoughts. He/she/it will never be the same.
What was that meme. Freddy Kruger looking pensively. And the caption; Freddy, after entering my dreams. And seeing things he wasn’t mentally prepared to handle.
It’s hilarious, just as the idea from reading people’s thoughts is. Dangerous, but funny as hell nonetheless. As I can think of no single thing that would make AI want to kill us faster. (The irony being Gates, Schwab, and Harari would probably be the first to go.)
On a side note, that might be why we haven’t found life on other planets. As God already is doing that. And he’s deciding if he wants to take the human experiment any farther. I can see where it could get pretty noisy already. Where were at now were pretty easy to asteroid out of being a bother.
Think about what “40% accurate” means. 60% gibberish is just gibberish. It has to do much, much better than this to be worth even looking at the output. And this isn’t reading at a distance or discreetly – it’s with a cap full of wires on your head. Probably also with your head shaved and covered in conductive goo.
Or perhaps it finds understandable sentences that match 40% of your thoughts, by making up the rest. That’s the part I’d worry about, because our police forces, DA offices, and the rest of the government is full of people so STUPID they’d take that partly made-up stuff as the truth. Just like they trust field drug tests that say on the label that they’re too inaccurate to be useful as evidence, and trust “drug-sniffing” dogs that can either work very hard trying to sort out many overlaid odors, or watch their handler’s body language and point when he wants them to point. Most handlers aren’t doing that consciously, but they are doing it.