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dustfinger 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Shouldn't this already be covered by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments?
oofdere 8 hours ago [-]
many things should be covered by other things but that's never a valid reason not to cover them explicitly
DoctorOetker 6 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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 8 hours ago [-]
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.
PMunch 11 hours ago [-]
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 11 hours ago [-]
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 5 hours ago [-]
Am I reading it right that they are claiming about ~%15 word prediction accuracy?
tbenst 2 hours ago [-]
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.
doodlebugging 11 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
Id love to whisper vibe code in public. Oh well.
doodlebugging 3 hours ago [-]
Perhaps you're already artificially intelligent.
butvacuum 10 hours ago [-]
unfortunately we already know about subvocalization.
ungreased0675 11 hours ago [-]
I agree. Not all topics are worth exploring. We don’t have to develop every dystopian-enabling technology. Build something else please.
WalterGR 6 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
There are facial and throat sensors that detect subvocalization, which only work if those muscles are still firing. What else is being developed?
doodlebugging 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bbor 9 hours ago [-]
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.
8 hours ago [-]
b00ty4breakfast 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Deemphasizing the humanities in STEM education is turning into a disaster.
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.