SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Neural implants plus AI turns sentence-length thoughts to text:
For people with limited use of their limbs, speech recognition can be critical for their ability to operate a computer. But for many, the same problems that limit limb motion affect the muscles that allow speech. That had made any form of communication a challenge, as physicist Stephen Hawking famously demonstrated. Ideally, we'd like to find a way to get upstream of any physical activity and identify ways of translating nerve impulses to speech.
Brain-computer interfaces were making impressive advances even before Elon Musk decided to get involved, but the problem of brain-to-text wasn't one of its successes. We've been able to recognize speech in the brain for a decade, but the accuracy and speed of this process are quite low. Now, some researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, are suggesting that the problem might be that we weren't thinking about the challenge in terms of the big-picture process of speaking. And they have a brain-to-speech system to back them up.
Joseph G. Makin, David A. Moses & Edward F. Chang. Machine translation of cortical activity to text with an encoder–decoder framework. Nature Neuroscience, 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41593-020-0608-8
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:30PM
Seriously, this kind of technology is so begging to be abused by authoritarians that it ought to be completely banned before it destroys the world. The last thing we need is the ability of people to be strapped into a chair and have their minds read for the benefit of a corrupt state.
Even worse is them using this to read people's minds in order to figure out what they need to do to get the people to think correct thoughts and change their thought patterns to match up with what they want.