from Hacker News

The quest to build a general-purpose thought decoder

by jsomers on 12/30/21, 4:24 AM with 35 comments

  • by jsomers on 12/30/21, 5:17 AM

    Hi, author here. This article was many years in the making. It's ostensibly a story about reading minds but really it's about the unreasonable power of high-dimensional vector spaces.

    That made it pretty tough to write: how do you explain dimensionality reduction, PCA, word2vec, etc., and the wonders of high-dimensional "embeddings" (of the sort you find in deep neural nets) when a lot—or all—of these ideas might be new to the reader? I'm not sure—but this was my attempt!

  • by booleandilemma on 12/30/21, 4:31 PM

    We should simply make mind reading technology illegal, full-stop.

    If we do anything less than criminalizing it outright, it will turn into something “voluntary”, but opting out will exclude you from certain events, or you’ll have to pay some sort of premium to maintain your privacy. This will have the side effect of making you seem suspicious.

    I simply don’t want any entity, public or private, knowing my thoughts, at all, for any reason whatsoever.

  • by errcorrectcode on 12/30/21, 2:07 PM

    I interviewed at a BCI startup that wants to implant on the order of 10k light sensors around the brain in order to directly gather data. "Reading" thoughts is just their first goal, eventually they want to communicate bidirectionally.

    I don't see how fMRI or any external device can approach the sensitivity, specificity, or resolution to "read" thoughts beyond the level of gross guesstimates, i.e., deception, sexual attraction, arousal, etc.

    Furthermore, it seems necessary to understand peculiarities of a particular individual's brain would be a prerequisite to mapping functional observations into approximate thoughts.

  • by jonahrd on 12/30/21, 7:54 AM

    Great article!

    Now all I can think about is putting a "thinking hat" on my dog and recording everything he does, and then playing the process in reverse when he's dreaming!

  • by MisterTea on 12/30/21, 2:59 PM

    "The quest to remove the final barrier of privacy"
  • by webinvest on 12/30/21, 2:44 PM

    If an Oculus or VR headset ever includes one of these, I want to be warned about it.