Mind Over Machine 331
broKenfoLd writes "Monkeys moving robotic arms by manipulating a cursor on a computer screen, simply by thinking about it? Mice who cause their water tube to dispense some refreshing H2O just by wishing it? Signal processing and decoding has long been a dream of Matrix fans and lazy system administrators for years, and science is amazingly keeping up! Popular Science's Carl Zimmer has written a fascinating piece documenting recent progress in decoding brain signals and interpreting commands issued from thoughts alone. If you heard a single violin playing Beethoven's 5th, you would be able to tell what piece of music was being played even though the rest of the orchestra was not heard. In the same way, by monitoring a relatively few neurons, computers can recognize patterns and allow programming based on these patterns to say, know if a mouse is thinking about pushing his water lever.
You can pass the time waiting for Matrix-style video games and motionless system adminstration/utilization by reading the full article."
This was on HDNet via DirectV (Score:4, Interesting)
I esp like the lady with the leads out of both sides of the back of her head....
She looked very Borg-Like.
Say it all with me now... (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I find it facinating that the brain can so readily adapt to adding and removing hardware ( limbs ), but reading about it is even cooler.
What other computer do you know can learn how to use foriegn devices without a driver disk?
umm.. not just yet. (Score:5, Interesting)
but over all its really cool that they are even able to do this at all.
Controlling sexual predators through technology (Score:-1, Interesting)
Thinking... (Score:2, Interesting)
Printing out poster-sized Pr0n just by visualizing it?
Everybody... The day is now!!!
Re:Channel surfing (Score:3, Interesting)
But what if I didn't like my neighbour? (Score:5, Interesting)
"I didn't run him over!"
"Did you THINK about running him over?"
*long pause*
I didn't run him over!
I don't think it will ever be like in the movies (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you ever thought about suicide? Now imagine if when you thought about it a machine would come and kill you. Also I don't know about you, but I can't control my mind completely, sometimes I have thoughts that are completely unrelated with what I am doing... I really don't think I could trust a machine to make my thoughts come true, I'm sure in the future machines will be able to interpret the signals in your brain with a 99% precision, I just can't trust my own mind.
oh no (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This could be bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
A step to the singularity (Score:2, Interesting)
What about the reverse...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
This is all cool, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not to say that it's not important -- all kinds of prosthetic devices can be made to help people with disabled limbs or other parts of the motor control system -- so it's a great benefit to those people. The important thing is that these devices are still controlled by the human brain, and nobody has a good idea how.
The fact is, you can probably hook up whatever device to whatever portion of the brain (e.g. an artificial arm to you toenail brain area) and after some practice the subject will learn now to move it. So when they say "we don't see the brain as a mysterious organ anymore" they are telling you a bold-face lie.
The mystery would be demonstrated to be solved when we can build a computer with massively parallel and slow (up to 1kHz) elements that can match human performance in tasks like tracking, reaching, as well as learning those tasks.
So far, all the beatiful performance of the cool gadgets is accomplished by super-fast feedback and super-fast computing elements. Our neurons are ways slower, but they do much better. Therefore, the whole essense and mystery of the brain is how to connect 10^10 shitty elements into a great learnable machine. Algorythms and parallelism are still the mystery of the brain, even if the popular science magazines claim otherwise
Thought Power (Score:2, Interesting)
Imagine the possibilities.
Controlling your computer by thought: could be bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Then, before you know it, you've thought, "\rm -r *"
Okay, I saw something like this (minus the thought part) happen in real life once upon a time. A friend and I were just talking about people accidentally typing "\rm -r *" in the lab when suddenly, someone using the Sun boxes yelled "oh shit!" because he absentmindedly typed what we said.
Re:Just don't forget one thing! (Score:2, Interesting)
Monsters, John! Monsters... from the id!
First you need [mistershortcut.us] something [chello.nl] else [ninemsn.com.au]!
Re:This could be bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
When you "think" about doing something, you are deciding via pros and cons, deciding outcome, looking at all options, recounting experience, true desire... on wether to do something or not. When you really decide to act, you act. That signal to act causes you to act. Thinking about acting is not acting. The final go ahead trigger to act is what matters. How else could you make a logical decision about anything? If you take out the thought process involved, we all would be living in a completely different world.
Consider the mouse and the bottle. If the mouse really wanted to get a drink, he would go over and get one. It's not like some force is holding him back and he keeps thinking about it but he just (slow superhero struggling voice) can't moooooooove.
Psionic Exercise Devices. (Score:2, Interesting)
We could use this to build psionic exercise devices which restore our latent mind-over-matter powers.
Oh no. Psionic Wars, here we come.
{Honestly, I'm beginning to see what all the fuss is all about over The American Beast, in those Middle East sects
Mana From Heaven. (Score:3, Interesting)
Coding dream (Score:5, Interesting)
Typos would be a thing of the past. Imagine scanning though some source and noticing that you assigned 100 to a var rather than 10, before you can even refocus your eye on the line the value has been changed.
Grep would be a thing of the past! Need to change all the instances of a function name? Think it and its done.
I want to be the lawnmower man!
i am a bipedal broadcast station (Score:3, Interesting)
Look developers, just get speech recognition running already, willya? If what your software does to my luminous eloquence is any example of the current state of interface tech, that thinking-cap UI is going to lead to some pretty psychedelic dyslexic synaesthesia in photoshop once it gets that olfactory plugin I've been waiting for...
long term failure should be expected ? (Score:3, Interesting)
what would happen to the mouse if, at long term, she knows that by thinking about pushing the lever she don't have to push that lever anymore, the computer can't find that previous pattern because the mice have forgotten the use of the lever. thus reprogramming is re-required. seems like an infinite loop
Re:Controlling sexual predators through technology (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Controlling your computer by thought: could be (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is all cool, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Theorists suggested that when you replicate the behavior of a neuron and let them talk with 9,999,999,999 copies of that virtual entity, then we'd instantly see a computer that can think and learn just like a human. Is a neuron that complex? What is the hold up? I always suspected that this idea was a massive oversimplication of the issue at hand.
The neuron is not that complex, it is believed to be mostly understood. The research is still being done on "how does this drug affects that channel in neuronal membrane" and stuff like this, but the basic functionality of the neuron has been known for some decades now.
What's complex is the 10^10 portion :-) As to what's the hold-up: try connecting that many pieces. So far, the number of people on earth is not that large. One can speculate that that we've already connected about 6^9 elements in the form of Earth's population. Just like the neurons, each is connected to as much as 200 of others (no neuron is directly connected to all of others in the brain :-)
If so, the "theorists" should see the human population of this planet as that very computer. It is way too dumb as a whole, if you ask me :-) It definitely exhibits no signs of thinking and learning.
Re:Controlling sexual predators through technology (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:This could be bad... (Score:2, Interesting)
Quite true. And it would only work with a consious effort I would think.
After all, when you lift your arm, the other arm does not also automatically lift. Your brain distinguishes between the right arm and the left arm.
I would think that this would work the same way. Just because you are thinking about "format c:" does not mean that you are acting on it.
The brain will learn new pathways, and you will have an extra "appendage" which you can control directly.
As an aside, you cannot move JUST the tip of a finger. Usually the whole finger (both joints) bend. Yet a friend of mine who has played a cello for many, many years CAN move just the tip of the left index finger. Not the right, just the left. That is one of the fingers used to select which notes you are playing. Over the years his brain learned the pathways to reach just the tip muscles.
Re:Say it all with me now... (Score:2, Interesting)
A squid stole my spaceship. (Score:4, Interesting)
What this really opens up is the possibility of training animals to operate machinery. Imagine taking an aquatic animal (such as a dolphin) and using it (or its brain) as the central component in a spaceship autopilot.
By stimulating various parts of the brain (including pleasure centres), one could train it to respond to your input in the way you want - it already has the hardware to deal with three dimensional maneuvering, timing and calculating trajectories and intercepts.
This was used in a novel called Space, in which GM Squid controlled a space probe. In the novel, the squid became smart enough to do a runner with it.I would look up the author's name for you all, but try typing "Science Fiction" and "Space" into Google and see what happens
Brain able to detect viruses early? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Useful... (Score:3, Interesting)
got the show for you... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cell Phone (Score:5, Interesting)
Every action being publicly known would cause you to think through everything you do. Every thought being public would cause you to fear thinking too much - about ideas that might be too controversial, sexual fantasies you might want to indulge in, feelings of hatred and hurt towards someone and so on. If your thoughts take you too far, perhaps you'll be an Enemy of the People(TM).
I don't think it'll be a better world. I think peer pressure and desire of conformity would mold people into the same shape, strangling creativity, initiative and independent thought. Not to mention what sects and such could do - brainwash initiates until they too are true believers.
The only way it would be a good idea is if you could directly point to an action it would cause, in order to prevent it from happening - much like Minority Report. But the film convieniently circumvents the issue since they see nothing but thoughts that do result in murder.
What if instead, they would have to monitor every thought, destroy all privacy, and couldn't tell if a perpetrator really would go through with it until the very last second? To intervene at the mere thought of committing a crime? That's the thing about thought crime - if you want it undone, it is undone. If you no longer want to kill the guy, well then it simply hasn't happened and won't happen. And the mere thought of it, I think everyone is guilty of - if even for just a flash.
Kjella
Online gaming! Just imagine! (Score:4, Interesting)
Cool, but a little scary, too.
Re:Cell Phone (Score:3, Interesting)
What the species as a whole does blindly may not be the right choice for an individual. For example, let's say that in Christmas 2012, the hot new gizmo is Microsoft Neural Implant 1.0. Huge numbers of people rush out and get one, and brain surgeons are swamped by the number of requests for implantation (a self-implantation feature is scheduled for version 2.0). Those in a real hurry fly to India and get the implant done cut rate, in Bangalore.
For a while, everything's cool and people walk around sending email and collaborating on projects in their heads. But then the great neural implant worm of 2013 hits, and billions of people are either lobotomized or killed.
At that point, the people who followed the OP's advice, "How about living in a way that our bodies were actually meant to. Exercising, working with our bodies, and communicating in person", are in pretty good shape. Evolutionarily speaking, they took a risk in not going along with what the rest of the species was doing - since they couldn't function effectively in corporations filled with wireheads, and this could have had a negative effect on their survival - but it worked out well for them in the end.
The point is, what's natural could perhaps be defined as whatever works over the long run. Cannibalism, for example, doesn't appear to be natural, since so few societies that try it seem to survive. There are many other "unnatural" behaviors which have similarly died out.
It's true that it's natural for us to try new things, but that doesn't mean that anything we can come up with is good/appropriate/natural, at least until those things have been proven to work to either enhance or at least not impede survival on a species-wide scale, in the long run.
Re:oh no (Score:1, Interesting)
"We see 1s and 0s popping out of the brain, and we're decoding it."
It's already been pointed out that they're not technically doing that, but if someone ever figures out how to actually do it, I'm coming out from my bunker and declaring war. >;)
This isn't the best analogy, but right now I have an app filtering http header traffic that goes in between my browser and the web in order to rearrange the page, block banners, etc. Essentially I rewrite the page on the fly as it comes in.
Once brain "traffic" is decoded, how long before output starts being filtered, edited, and--the biggie--reverse engineered?
If you can do that to a brain, how long before you can program it? According to the article, new clusters of neurons can be created for new tasks. As such, a clever d3wD could write a brain backdoor exploit (or just feed the brain code it accepts) and get busy.
If this technology becomes something that everyone's brain has hardwired in, how hard would it be to create a jamming device? It makes me picture something along the lines of an RTS fog of war jammer (vs the biological maphack everyone currently has on by default.) The kicker is, of course, the seriousness of the crash when somebody overloads the stack.
What happens if my brain gets jammed? Does it shut down? Die? Revert to "safe mode" (which is probably the old version of my brain: 1.0 from before I got said implants?)
What happens if someone reprograms my brain?
Like I said, http header filtering isn't the best example (because its client side), but I think it's applicable.
Apologies if this comes across as a troll, but, it looks to me like the human brain is going to go OPEN SOURCE!11!!! W00T! Somebody get Debian running on it, already.