TI and Total Information Awareness
Friday March 14, 2008
Categories: Science
Andrew Sullivan brings us a link to an amazing invention from Texas Instruments: a device that allows you to communicate wordlessly, via neurological impulses interpreted by a strap around your neck. Watch this: Voila, the voiceless wireless phone call. Pretty...
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Advertisement
Advertisement
Search This Blog
Recent Posts
About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
Subscribe
Archives
Blogs Worth Reading
- Front Porch Republic
- The American Conservative
- Patrick Deneen
- Conventional Folly
- The American Scene
- First Things
- Andrew Sullivan
- The Plank
- Eunomia
- Get Religion
- Postmodern Conservative
- Alex Massie
- The Corner
- Contentions
- Sharon Astyk
- Barry Ritholtz
- The Oil Drum
- Mere Comments
- First Principles (ISI)
- Brian Kaller
The British doctor/writer "Theodore Dalrymple" describes a conversation with an eminent professor on this topic as follows:
[He] was surprised when I said that in any case I looked forward to man’s complete self-understanding, in the sense of complete neuroscientific knowledge of mentation, with dread and trepidation rather than with eager anticipation: not that I thought that that day was coming any time soon (or ever, in fact).
He asked me the reasons for my dread. I said that the abuse of power that would almost certainly result; and I asked him to imagine an instrument so sensitive that it could ‘read’ human thoughts, and anticipate them. Would he want such an instrument applied to him? Would he wants others, or even a single other person, to know exactly what he was thinking all of the time? It would surely be hellish, and incompatible with normal human relations. This explains why life cannot and ought never to be lived in complete sincerity and honesty, as an open book; disguise, insincerity and hypocrisy are what make life bearable for self-conscious beings like humans. The art of living is in large part that of knowing when and when not to speak one’s mind. Voltaire said that the way to be a bore is to say everything; he might have added that it is also the sure way to be a monster.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/16790/sec_id/16790
The 21st century has finally arrived. Now where is my flying car?
Interesting; there's history of this sort of thing in the West, detailed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison: with the intention of being ever more humane, authorities actually shifted the locus of their concern with the prisoner from the torture of his body to the redemption of his soul (think "Department of Corrections" or "Penitentiary"), which, in Foucault's view, was ever the more terrifying.
Unless I mistake the technology, what the device is actually interpreting are those neurological impulses that precede speech. In other words, not random thought patterns, but the words you are actually forming.
So its use as an interrogation device would be limited. The person being interrogated could keep thinking "I have nothing to say," and those would be the only words that would register, at least at present.
A device that actually measured and analyzed thought patterns, on the other hand, could be used in a way that would abuse freedom and privacy, but thought patterns tend to much more abstract, which to me would make them harder to measure and interpret correctly.
Erin Manning is right, I think. It's not "mind-reading", just "intent-to-speak-reading". Still pretty cool, though.
There's a wider significance. Generically, this is an example biology/technology interface. Not long ago, there was publicity about a person being able to move the pointer on a computer screen by thought.
What happens when this technology matures enough for widespread application -- say in 10-15 years? (Vernor Vinge has written fiction about this.)
What happens when we understand enough about how the brain stores information that we can store and read that information to/from a technological source (like a very advanced internet)?
And what happens when this results in an ability to think in very advanced ways, such as submiting multiple queries (What did... Who said... Did anyone every...) that are executed a technological speeds -- which greatly exceed biological speeds?
Room for abuse? You bet. But it's gonna happen. Best thing is to deal with these technologies as they emerge.
Of course, our track record for this kind of planning is not at all good, is it!
Here's the article associated with this tech:
technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13449-nervetapping-neckband-allows-telepathic-chat.html
Choice quotes:
With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.
So it may not be terribly useful for interrogation. Not only does the subject have to be cooperative, he also has to be trained beforehand in the proper use of the device.
The Audeo has previously been used to let people control wheelchairs using their thoughts.
...but it's still a step towards artificial telepathy. Psi Corps anyone?
Besides true mind-reading, another revolutionary interrogation tool would be a 100% accurate lie-detector.
We might be jumping ahead with all these bad possibilities.
What I find myself thinking of is people with "locked in syndrome" or other disabilities that make them unable to communicate. I was in the hospital once and I had to communicate by some kind of blinking system. It was nightmarish in its tediousness. (Although for all I know I might have gotten used to it if I was like that guy in "Diving Bell and the Butterfly", a film I've not seen) Being able to "talk" to them more easily would be great.
What happens when this technology matures enough for widespread application -- say in 10-15 years?
Nothing if we don't have the energy for it.
This thing doesn't do anything even close to mind reading. It takes advantage of a phenomena known as subvocalization. When most people talk to themselves they actually move the same muscles in the neck and tongue that they use to speak with at normal vocal levels, just very very slightly.
This won't stop the marketing people from calling it mind reading technology though.
What I find myself thinking of is people with "locked in syndrome" or other disabilities that make them unable to communicate. [...] Being able to "talk" to them more easily would be great.
From that article I linked above:
"At the end of the year Ambient plans to release an improved version, without a vocabulary limit. Instead of recognising whole words or phrases, it should identify the individual phonemes that make up complete words.
"This version will be slower, because users will need to build up what they want to say one phoneme at a time, but it will let them say whatever they want. The phoneme-based system will be aimed at people who have lost the ability to speak due to neurological diseases like ALS – also known as motor neurone disease."
My first thought is "WOW is the divorce rate going to sky rocket..." Thank god we can't hear what others are thinking. But all joking aside, this could be an amazing boon to those who have lost the ability to speak.
MI - "The corps is Mother. The Corps is Father."
Get one for Stephen Hawking.
Are you commingling the name of John Pointexter's defunct terror market/wire-tap program with your post for Google rankings?
The phenomena of subvocalization has been known for many many years. I'm surprised that it took so long to make a gadget to exploit it.
I thought April Fool's day was a couple of weeks away.
Very cool. I believe it's reading the neurological impulses at the vocal cords. So you'd actually had to have decided to say something for the pulses to get there strongly. Although it is possible edited thoughts could give weak signals that might be detectable.
My first thought was like Rod, great fodder for a criminal investigation. But then the possibilities of advances for those disabled with Cerebral Palsy (or other conditions that require a computerized voice machine)jumped out at me. These will be amazing adaptive technologies.
In the end a tool is just a tool. Whether it's used for good or ill depends on the ethics of the person who uses it.
Wouldn't want any 'tools' in the hands of that creepy guy from No Country for Old Men. But a rehab pediatric physical therapist? That'd be great.
At least ten years ago, a company called The Other 90% came out with a thing called the MindDrive, which fits on the end of the finger and reads various electrical impulses to try to pick up certain thoughts. Apparently it really works; I've seen credible-looking reviews of it, but it seems to be fairly crude. It can pick up simple directional thoughts like left, right, up, and down, but nowhere near real mind reading.
I've wanted one ever since I first heard of it, but they were always too expensive. For some reason, the company has only released it to work with a bunch of games they sell, and it's never become more than a curiosity. (And their web site is one of the worst I've seen.) If they had any sense, they'd make a mouse driver for it (or open-source the specs so others could write drivers) and sell a million of the things. I so want to be able to move and click my mouse with my mind while I type!
Maybe, instead of reacting with "God, wouldn't it be horrible if everyone could see what I was thinking!" one could focus, instead, on becoming the kind of person who wouldn't mind being honest and transparent. Just a thought . . . .
Spider Robinson (award-winning SF writer) may not have invented, but popularized, the saying, "Tact is a mutual agreement to be full of shit." I pretend to tell the truth, and you pretend to believe me.
Concealing one's real thoughts, at all costs, is a big important feature of a shame-based culture, of course. What I find bemusing about this principle is that those who practice it actually think they're fooling anybody. Any serious student of human character can soon read minds pretty effectively without the use of a magic machine. It's not that hard to know when people are lying to me--or to themselves.
As others have pointed out, in any case, this machine isn't much of an advance in the mind-reading department. It requires conscious, focussed effort to produce its effect.
"Maybe, instead of reacting with "God, wouldn't it be horrible if everyone could see what I was thinking!" one could focus, instead, on becoming the kind of person who wouldn't mind being honest and transparent. Just a thought . . ."
Ah yeah, the perfectablity of Man.
Sig, did you use the same argument in support of the Patriot Act?
Gosh, Max, I'm reading your mind now . . . I'm sensing that I've really irritated you again. What a surprise! I never would have known that without my handy-dandy mind reading machine.
Check out the work of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who has studied how small movements of facial muscles create the expression of emotions. The New York Times interviewed him: "A Conversation with Paul Ekman: the 43 Facial Muscles that Reveal Even the Most Fleeting Emotions," by Judy Foreman, August 5, 2003. A couple of quotes:
Q: . . . a few people, less than 1 percent of the population, are exceptionally good at using facial expressions, voice cues, body language and speech to tell liars from truth tellers. How do they do it?
A. Most important, they are highly motivated, close observers who, without training, are able to spot subtle cues about concealed emotions that we call microexpressions. These are very fast intense expressions of concealed emotions that most people miss because they typically last less than a quarter of a second. . . . Many of the [Secret Service] agents we studied were accurate 80 percent of the time in distinguishing lying from truthfulness.
Q. Can regular people learn to get better at telling real expressions from fake ones?
A. Much to my surprise, people can learn to do this in under an hour. I have developed a CD which teaches people to do this quickly. I thought it would take a lot longer.
Get used to it, Max. There's really not much you can do about it except to clean out those closets. ; )
"Get used to it, Max. There's really not much you can do about it except to clean out those closets. ; )"
LOL! FTR, I cleaned out those closets a loooong time ago. And much to my pleasure found that my inner homosexual was also my inner woman.
YES! I'm a lesbian trapped in a man's body!
I can't wait to get one of those voiceless cell phone thingies from Texas Instruments for my pet dolphin.
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.