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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 01 2020, @12:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-what-I-thought dept.

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


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by ikanreed on Wednesday April 01 2020, @01:46PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 01 2020, @01:46PM (#978018) Journal

    A whole bunch of devils hiding in there.

    1. Electrocorticograms are super invasive. You have to embed electrodes directly on the surface of the brain. And this technique requires several distinct arrays of them.
    2. Unsurprisingly with that level of surgery required, they only got 4 participants, one of whom dropped out after just 2 training sessions.
    3. Those that stuck around seemed to have an accuracy limit of 90% for individual words.

    None of that says "unimpressive" or anything. It's much better than status quo techniques for locked in patients. But man those are some harsh numbers.

  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:11PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:11PM (#978027) Journal

    Neural brain implants from the RIAA and MPAA!

    These will be able to detect when you hear any copyrighted music or see any copyrighted movie frames. Your credit card can be automatically charged. Think of the poor starving RIAA and MPAA!

    Despite the automatic charging of credit cards for hearing / seeing, there will still be collection rackets "societies" that go after, for example, auto mechanic garages that play the radio loudly enough that a customer might unintentionally over hear copyrighted music.

    Facebook will want to get in on the brain implant action in order to access more of your personal information. Google will then demand equal access. Lawsuits will follow. Legislators will eventually resolve this by requiring government access to mandatory neural brain implants. Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and others can then use their regular lobbyist channels to purchase access to the information. Higher prices just be paid for control over individuals.

    The future's so bright, 'gotta have neural brain implants.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:30PM (#978038)

    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.

  • (Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:57PM

    by inertnet (4071) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:57PM (#978042) Journal

    But no thanks. I'll go and live the rest of my life on a small island far away if this becomes a requirement.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @03:09PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @03:09PM (#978046)

    Especially if EF is at the microphone.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @06:32PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @06:32PM (#978116)

      i was thinking about how awesome it would be if you could do the revers and learn by downloading text straight into your brain without having to read it. Then maybe you could build a memorizing scrript which firmly planted it into your long term memory. Become and expert in all the relevant programming languages in a few days (sponsored by Scroogle of course).

      • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday April 01 2020, @06:57PM

        by acid andy (1683) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @06:57PM (#978126) Homepage Journal

        It would have been more awesome before we had the web. Now there's almost no point in ever memorizing anything because you can just search online in seconds. My brain's become so lazy at this that sometimes I feel almost like so long as I bookmark a web page, I don't even need to read it, because the information's already been absorbed into my extended memory that is my computer.

        --
        If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
      • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday April 03 2020, @02:39PM

        by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 03 2020, @02:39PM (#978714) Homepage Journal

        There's a big difference between memorizing and understanding.

        -- hendrik

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @02:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @02:45AM (#978215)

    you will have your asses mated.

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