“We take very seriously the concerns that it could be used for bad purposes and have worked to avoid that,” Tang said. “We want to make sure people only use these types of technologies when they want to and that it helps them.”
This will obviously be abused decades from now. Why wouldn’t authoritarians listen in on brains that have trained transformer models based on forced textual consumption over years.
Just like we pay people money to sing for us, we'll pay people money to dream for us. The best dreamers and imagineers will sell their distilled thoughts for the rest of us to consume.
We'll have an indie scene. We'll share them on internet platforms. Remix them.
There's so much more good that will come from this than bad.
Yeah, like get this, when the world is turning to shit because of climate change and we're forced to live underground like rats, we can all collectively hallucinate what the world used to be like. It'll be grand. You'll be hallucinating, I'll be hallucinating, the AI'll be hallucinating too.
"His older work was much better," ChatGPT will proclaim. "... what older work?"
By most objective measures, this is false. More people are being lifted out of poverty than ever before. People are also less bored, more creative, and more productive.
> because of climate change
Hasn't happened yet. Barring a runaway effect, it looks like we'll have fewer species (lamentable) but more arable land. We're still in an ice age and we're nowhere close to Cretaceous climate.
We're closer to inventing transcendent intelligence than killing it off completely.
> forced to live underground like rats
This is just vivid imagination. We're not Morlocks.
> Just like we pay people money to sing for us, we'll pay people money to dream for us. The best dreamers and imagineers will sell their distilled thoughts for the rest of us to consume.
[unpleasant thought]
> This is just vivid imagination.
The progression above is why I regard your vision of imagination as a consumer good so immediately off-putting. It's all glitz and glamor until you encounter an idea you don't like, and then you're immediately dismissive of it.
> It's all glitz and glamor until you encounter an idea you don't like,
It's called defeatism.
I think it's a sad way to spend our short ~60-80 years as temporarily thinking matter in a brilliant and infinite cosmos.
Downer dispositions suck the wonder and awe right out of the air.
Work. Build. Grow. If you have a complaint, throw yourself at the problem and fix it. Or maybe the problem isn't so big relative to the opportunity cost and the short scale of our lives.
This is dangerously fantastical thinking. Global heating gives us less arable land. It becomes harder to grow crops as the temperature increases. This is a much bigger negative effect than any positive effect from CO2 increases. A lot of current arable land in the tropics will become unusable.
Or are you thinking of growing crops in recently-defrosted tundra in Siberia? In which case, how are you going to get political agreement to grow stuff there, get high enough soil quality, irrigate it, and move all the farmers from, say, India to there to work it?
> we're forced to live underground like rats, we can all collectively hallucinate what the world used to be like
How do you know we aren't already? Someone might've invented this already and you might be living in your pod already hallucinating a full human experience from years ago. Similar concept to "the universe is a simulation" meme.
In a world where almost every country has an arsenal of weapons, you are afraid of climate change? But yeah, that seems to be the new nemesis for a certain generation.
Anyway, your post reminded me of the "The Futurological Congress" by Lem.
Yes, I live on the coast, but even folks who don't live directly on a coastline can be affected negatively by failed crops and displaced people. The coast land in Guyana is currently below sea-level, and the sea level is rising further.
I've worked on a documentary about the effects of coastal erosion in Guyana, which won the 2020 Godrey Chin Heritage Journalism 1st prize.
i posted a couple links in a top level comment. i didn't rezlize you replied, otr i would have done it here. can't go on alt, now. it's just a little light reading. unless it's happening in such a way that you know it's happening, you wouldn't believe it. if you're, let's say, able to read what's not there but actually really right there, then.... yeah.
also. you don't want it to happen to you. it will happen to everyone, maybe, eventually. just need everyone to know it is. then we need these people, people who are medical professionals with a strong moral and ethical code, like some of the ones who have posted 10, 15 years ago, worried about this happening "soon" back then.... well it's now, and, well, nothing's been done. i doubt it can be, yet, either.
basically. your brain is like... a computer with storage. your memories are like... replays of what happened. stored. forever. it's accessed. perused. i don't know the full extent. it's not "minor" or shoulder-shrugging, by any means. it's pretty fucked, if you know it's happening.
if you don't, then, well..... that's good for you.
the problem is.... it doesn't end with just being able to access memories.
your... well your brain controls your body.
your arms. your senses.
your legs.
your.... organs.
so. if you don't know it's happening, then, you're good, right?
Right sooooo today a corporation requires me to move about a certain way to earn money to buy food from another corporation, and pay another corporation that holds my mortgage in step with the social norms of our society that were recited to me over and over since birth.
Society already has control of your mind and motor functions.
i don't care if you think what i say is crazy because it's actually really f'n crazy.
you are in a very advantageous position right now, so, let's wrap this up. you don't want to know that it's real, so, it's best that you just go on with your life knowing that i am just a crazy insane person on the internet.
i do ask one favor. remember, whenever it's real, just remember that one crazy, down-voted, and mostly ignored insane rambling crazy commenter talking about some seriously crazy to the point of being unbelievably crazy.... crazy.... crazy impossible thing that, well, it ain't gonna be chuck testa, but you'll sure wish it was, and smile, because he was.... 100%...... c<redacted>
Bold of you to assume that I don't want to know that it's real. I asked a question that I thought might lead to some first-hand anecdotal evidence, as I'm intrigued after going through your links that you provided.
What's the advantage here to me? What can I do? If what you say is correct and "they" can both read my mind remotely and control my body, organs included, and this is in the public domain with my name attached to it, I would say that it's a battle nobody can win, especially as I don't even know who the hypothetical attacker would be, and where from.
I've heard all kinds of "crazy" things, some of which turned out to be true, because the truth is frequently stranger than fiction, especially as far as technology is concerned.
However, the mix of defensiveness and emotional language is never a good sign though for credibility.
If you've never experienced it first-hand, and you're making a claim that this is possible to do remotely and is being abused, what's your evidence for that? You can write long posts lambasting for me apparently dismissing it, yet you've presented no evidence of your own to validate your own original claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
What makes you so sure that this is what you claim and not a mental illness? I'm not calling you crazy, I am genuinely intrigued and applying deductive reasoning and rationality to what you've presented to me.
Have you measured it? What was the reading? Can you share your data? Have you tried blocking it?
Why you? Why not someone else? What makes you a person of special interest and deserving of such an extreme measure?
If they have physical control over your body, why did they allow you to tell me this in public?
There's criminals and people on death row they could experiment on and retain complete control over, and yet they pick someone with an internet connection in public.
Despite being able to read your mind, they continue to interfere with you, despite reading about it and posting about it on the internet. Why do they need to read your mind remotely if they can just use the domestic surveillance program? If they're NGO, why not just hack your devices?
What is the statistical likelihood that the person in public who they don't have confined managed to seemingly figure it out?
If this is what you claim, why not just whack you in the first place? It's cheaper and easier, and no risk of a world-changing technology going public and exposing what can be done.
I'm afraid you've been posting quite a few off-topic and difficult-to-understand comments to HN lately. This happens sometimes. In such cases we temporarily ban the account, partly to prevent the threads from getting derailed, but also because users who don't read the comments very closely may respond uncharitably and I'm worried about that adding stress to your experience.
Your earlier comments were just fine and you're definitely welcome on HN, so if and when this situation settles and you want to go back to posting on-topic comments, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll take a look and hopefully unban you.
Yeah that’s how it goes with “society”. Eventually it becomes obsessed with preserving some hallucinated shared values to the point of becoming a police state until that implodes in on itself.
No escaping the Big Bang, Big Crunch patterns of reality.
it reads as a story if you ignore everything before the first single "/" and read the title, which has a handy link to anyone wanting more info about it, because i am a nice guy, instead of asking such a question.
as far as summing it up, well, you can read what i have posted here to figured it out, if you really want to know more.
This is not meant as a personal attack, but reading your comments in this thread, it leaves me with the impression that you may be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.
A condition which, if remaining untreated, could eventually make you a danger to yourself and loved ones.
For now the system has to be trained per person. Is the difference in brain activity across individuals significant enough to stop building a universal model?
It is not clear whether this is language dependent or not. If it is, I hope being bilingual or multilingual is a viable defense against this technology.
Obviously this is pure speculation, but I suspect it'll be a lot like cloning someone's voice. The first systems required the participant to read thousands of lines of text. Now you can do it over a phone call without the participant noticing that you're cloning their voice.
Why would bilingualism be a defense? Try throwing ChatGPT or whatever a line which combines several languages. e.g., If you ask it “¿Quel est the resultado of 四*6.1, in inglese?”, it will probably reply “4 times 6.1 equals 24.4.” I suppose AI doesn’t think in words, but expects bits of information to be related to X meaning, and from there it can predict a reply and translate that information into words we understand. I haven’t tried the above line, but if it’s not possible already there’s nothing really stopping us from making it work soon enough.
Edit: sorry, maybe I’m misunderstanding. Are you talking more about multilingual people thinking more abstractly, which would make it harder to tie information to any specific words?
“For a noninvasive method, this is a real leap forward compared to what’s been done before, which is typically single words or short sentences,” Huth said. “We’re getting the model to decode continuous language for extended periods of time with complicated ideas.”
Thats pretty scary. Who would work on this?
Refine this and in 10 years put it into wifi base stations that scan everything and you can read the thoughts of anyone in a room. Auto scan for "dangerous" keywords and voila: automated police state!
What people tend to forget about these dystopias is that dystopias are distributed unequally. For some people the police is already going to stop you randomly and may randomly end up killing you. Some people will already spend extensive time being searched and questioned if they want to take a flight. Some people will already be automatically rejected before anyone has actually read their qualifications or interviewed them.
The US is already a police state. The police uses military grade equipment and vehicles. They can literally get away with murder in many cases. They can rob you in open daylight, legally. They can arrest you for no crime, detain you and then dump you in the middle of nowhere. They can shoot out your eyes by directly firing rubber bullets (which are supposed to be deflected off surfaces) straight on. And if you end up in prison, you can be forced into indentured servitude.
Of course this is an exaggeration because all these things don't happen to all the people, but that's the point. Concerns about thought crime are just concerns that the apparatus could be aimed at you, too, when you've been less affected so far. The concern shouldn't be for whom it is aimed at but for the scope, scale and supposed necessity of apparatus itself. The problem isn't that we might oppress the wrong people, the problem is that we think we need oppression.
There's also an in-between status: put in the airports, police stations, tribunals, at the bank entrance, at wedding ceremonies or in churches... the fact that the scientist mentions their worries doesn't make any of that avoidable.
If this is trained to detect language in your brain, I wonder how this fares with people like me who lack a clear "inner voice" (or "inner monologue"). I don't doubt that it can be trained on a brain to detect that brain's patterns but given how different human brains can be in many ways, I'm inclined to believe this won't be turned into a "universal brain reader" so easily.
61 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadThis will obviously be abused decades from now. Why wouldn’t authoritarians listen in on brains that have trained transformer models based on forced textual consumption over years.
We'll have an indie scene. We'll share them on internet platforms. Remix them.
There's so much more good that will come from this than bad.
"His older work was much better," ChatGPT will proclaim. "... what older work?"
By most objective measures, this is false. More people are being lifted out of poverty than ever before. People are also less bored, more creative, and more productive.
> because of climate change
Hasn't happened yet. Barring a runaway effect, it looks like we'll have fewer species (lamentable) but more arable land. We're still in an ice age and we're nowhere close to Cretaceous climate.
We're closer to inventing transcendent intelligence than killing it off completely.
> forced to live underground like rats
This is just vivid imagination. We're not Morlocks.
[unpleasant thought]
> This is just vivid imagination.
The progression above is why I regard your vision of imagination as a consumer good so immediately off-putting. It's all glitz and glamor until you encounter an idea you don't like, and then you're immediately dismissive of it.
It's called defeatism.
I think it's a sad way to spend our short ~60-80 years as temporarily thinking matter in a brilliant and infinite cosmos.
Downer dispositions suck the wonder and awe right out of the air.
Work. Build. Grow. If you have a complaint, throw yourself at the problem and fix it. Or maybe the problem isn't so big relative to the opportunity cost and the short scale of our lives.
This is dangerously fantastical thinking. Global heating gives us less arable land. It becomes harder to grow crops as the temperature increases. This is a much bigger negative effect than any positive effect from CO2 increases. A lot of current arable land in the tropics will become unusable.
Or are you thinking of growing crops in recently-defrosted tundra in Siberia? In which case, how are you going to get political agreement to grow stuff there, get high enough soil quality, irrigate it, and move all the farmers from, say, India to there to work it?
How do you know we aren't already? Someone might've invented this already and you might be living in your pod already hallucinating a full human experience from years ago. Similar concept to "the universe is a simulation" meme.
Anyway, your post reminded me of the "The Futurological Congress" by Lem.
I've worked on a documentary about the effects of coastal erosion in Guyana, which won the 2020 Godrey Chin Heritage Journalism 1st prize.
You can see the trailer as well as the complete documentary over on https://hammyhavoc.com/audio-post-production-for-coast-land-...
Will check it out! Also got Neal Stephenson's Anathem recommended earlier. I had no idea how many people on HN read SF! :- )
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower
The comment hinted at foul play with a technology that is completely world-changing then nips it in the bud like it was NBD.
also. you don't want it to happen to you. it will happen to everyone, maybe, eventually. just need everyone to know it is. then we need these people, people who are medical professionals with a strong moral and ethical code, like some of the ones who have posted 10, 15 years ago, worried about this happening "soon" back then.... well it's now, and, well, nothing's been done. i doubt it can be, yet, either.
basically. your brain is like... a computer with storage. your memories are like... replays of what happened. stored. forever. it's accessed. perused. i don't know the full extent. it's not "minor" or shoulder-shrugging, by any means. it's pretty fucked, if you know it's happening.
if you don't, then, well..... that's good for you.
the problem is.... it doesn't end with just being able to access memories.
your... well your brain controls your body.
your arms. your senses.
your legs.
your.... organs.
so. if you don't know it's happening, then, you're good, right?
that's all i have for now.
Society already has control of your mind and motor functions.
i don't care if you think what i say is crazy because it's actually really f'n crazy.
you are in a very advantageous position right now, so, let's wrap this up. you don't want to know that it's real, so, it's best that you just go on with your life knowing that i am just a crazy insane person on the internet.
i do ask one favor. remember, whenever it's real, just remember that one crazy, down-voted, and mostly ignored insane rambling crazy commenter talking about some seriously crazy to the point of being unbelievably crazy.... crazy.... crazy impossible thing that, well, it ain't gonna be chuck testa, but you'll sure wish it was, and smile, because he was.... 100%...... c<redacted>
What's the advantage here to me? What can I do? If what you say is correct and "they" can both read my mind remotely and control my body, organs included, and this is in the public domain with my name attached to it, I would say that it's a battle nobody can win, especially as I don't even know who the hypothetical attacker would be, and where from.
I've heard all kinds of "crazy" things, some of which turned out to be true, because the truth is frequently stranger than fiction, especially as far as technology is concerned.
However, the mix of defensiveness and emotional language is never a good sign though for credibility.
If you've never experienced it first-hand, and you're making a claim that this is possible to do remotely and is being abused, what's your evidence for that? You can write long posts lambasting for me apparently dismissing it, yet you've presented no evidence of your own to validate your own original claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Have you measured it? What was the reading? Can you share your data? Have you tried blocking it?
Why you? Why not someone else? What makes you a person of special interest and deserving of such an extreme measure?
If they have physical control over your body, why did they allow you to tell me this in public?
There's criminals and people on death row they could experiment on and retain complete control over, and yet they pick someone with an internet connection in public.
Despite being able to read your mind, they continue to interfere with you, despite reading about it and posting about it on the internet. Why do they need to read your mind remotely if they can just use the domestic surveillance program? If they're NGO, why not just hack your devices?
What is the statistical likelihood that the person in public who they don't have confined managed to seemingly figure it out?
If this is what you claim, why not just whack you in the first place? It's cheaper and easier, and no risk of a world-changing technology going public and exposing what can be done.
Your earlier comments were just fine and you're definitely welcome on HN, so if and when this situation settles and you want to go back to posting on-topic comments, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll take a look and hopefully unban you.
No escaping the Big Bang, Big Crunch patterns of reality.
you know where the water is coming from. you know it's water.
oh. they don't need the fancy machine to interface. it's remote. they reply. you don't know where it comes from, either. or who.
trust me. you don't want to know what it's like.
It's fMRI, there's nothing remote about it.
In one sentence, what is the concrete point you are making?
it reads as a story if you ignore everything before the first single "/" and read the title, which has a handy link to anyone wanting more info about it, because i am a nice guy, instead of asking such a question.
as far as summing it up, well, you can read what i have posted here to figured it out, if you really want to know more.
A condition which, if remaining untreated, could eventually make you a danger to yourself and loved ones.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
It is not clear whether this is language dependent or not. If it is, I hope being bilingual or multilingual is a viable defense against this technology.
Edit: sorry, maybe I’m misunderstanding. Are you talking more about multilingual people thinking more abstractly, which would make it harder to tie information to any specific words?
If true, everyone who took part in it should be tried as terrorists for crimes against humanity and never see the light again.
Thats pretty scary. Who would work on this?
Refine this and in 10 years put it into wifi base stations that scan everything and you can read the thoughts of anyone in a room. Auto scan for "dangerous" keywords and voila: automated police state!
The US is already a police state. The police uses military grade equipment and vehicles. They can literally get away with murder in many cases. They can rob you in open daylight, legally. They can arrest you for no crime, detain you and then dump you in the middle of nowhere. They can shoot out your eyes by directly firing rubber bullets (which are supposed to be deflected off surfaces) straight on. And if you end up in prison, you can be forced into indentured servitude.
Of course this is an exaggeration because all these things don't happen to all the people, but that's the point. Concerns about thought crime are just concerns that the apparatus could be aimed at you, too, when you've been less affected so far. The concern shouldn't be for whom it is aimed at but for the scope, scale and supposed necessity of apparatus itself. The problem isn't that we might oppress the wrong people, the problem is that we think we need oppression.