> My AI is a natural extension of me. It feels like a sixth sense and another limb. I wonder about a problem, feel as though I’m literally surfing the web, see glimpses of the websites, get flashes of intuition about the problem, and ultimately derive the answer.
We call this AI psychosis.
champagnepapi 7 minutes ago [-]
Agreed.
G3nD 23 minutes ago [-]
"I feel good about the vision, because it builds towards a more human future" I wonder if the author truly believes this. I could maybe buy some sort of inevitability argument, but this current framing is very hard to take seriously.
MeetingsBrowser 14 minutes ago [-]
This seems strictly worse than speech to text as input to AI?
I cannot comprehend the output from AI fast enough for the speed difference between a verbal and thought response to matter.
Not to mention the privacy nightmare of logging my raw thoughts in a corporate environment and potentially routing them to an LLM provider.
Dependance 39 minutes ago [-]
What is the benefit ?
Sharing thoughts to the external world would be like going to a bakery and walking out with flour and eggs.
Isn't the act of talking/writing part of the thinking ? Am I just going to share intrusive thoughts and half-baked ideas to my CIA agent now ?
adityashankar 18 minutes ago [-]
This might be naive, but I think the idea is to replace your keyboard
tylerrobinson 11 minutes ago [-]
> I want to feel what my Codex feels.
Yeesh. I guess that makes one of us. Truly one of the more horrifying short stories I’ve read.
nullorempty 2 hours ago [-]
From the article.
>Thought-to-text, aka telepathy
No, that's not telepathy. I'd leave the term alone. Consider it to be reserved for... well... telepathy!
moritzwarhier 39 minutes ago [-]
Well, the text-to-thought direction feels less sci-fi, and combining both would amount to kind of telepathy.
But sure, you're right. Reading is not a deterministic/injective mapping of text to thoughts.
Apart from the trouble of defining what a thought is, independent from the person who thinks it.
Me thinking of grabbing a mug of coffee is a different thought from you doing the same... defining "thought" pulls in a whole jungle of epistemology (maybe I should say philosophy, more broadly, I'm not in the field).
Is there an abstract concept of "the thought of raising your left index finger"? Or "the thought of remembering severe pain"? Etc etc
rebolek 31 minutes ago [-]
Next you'll want the term "Artificial Intelligence" reserved for actual artificial intelligence.
ge96 19 minutes ago [-]
Neuralink to Neuralink users
tessierashpool 22 minutes ago [-]
next they're going to set up thought-triggered Amazon purchases and say that moving the object from the warehouse to your home constitutes telekinesis.
ever since Elon did his "promise full self-driving every year" thing, entrepreneurs been on a weird sort of fiction escalator.
thought-to-text is incredible. imagine doing something that remarkable with your life and feeling the need to exaggerate.
cdrnsf 2 hours ago [-]
I thought this was a parody when I opened it.
icedchai 9 minutes ago [-]
Same. I'm still not sure it isn't.
swader999 33 minutes ago [-]
I think I think I think it will be eventually.
ews 6 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
onemoresoop 36 minutes ago [-]
Id be curios to see attempts of my nonverbal thoughts in writing. It doesn’t seem possible imo.
axus 1 hours ago [-]
2040 : I earnestly believe that presidential term limits should be abolished, and also that federal control of elections is incredibly important. Not sure where that thought came from, but I'm certain!
pstuart 38 minutes ago [-]
What's a president? King Trump II has been our leader as long as I can remember!
mvanbaak 30 minutes ago [-]
> My GPT-7 agent has been chugging away at the new encoder I’ve been exploring for over a day now.
How much are those people making to be able to afford things like this?
hgoel 22 minutes ago [-]
As employees they have unlimited usage IIRC, and also these kinds of tasks can be surprisingly token efficient because a very large chunk of time is spent waiting for the calculation to finish, and AI agents love to run calculations excessively.
mvanbaak 19 minutes ago [-]
If the employer is giving this to the employee, it will be income. somewhere this will have to be defended.
nyxtom 2 hours ago [-]
As though we haven't done enough already to manipulate the mind, now we can have a neural model dictate our thoughts for us.
cormorant 1 hours ago [-]
nice double entendre on "dictate", there.
goatlover 1 hours ago [-]
We can finally have ads in our dreams like Futurama.
Animats 1 hours ago [-]
Probably more useful for interrogation than coding.
Under current US law, can people entering the US be subjected to mind-reading?
LPisGood 33 minutes ago [-]
No. This is the philosophical basis of the fifth amendment.
voiper1 1 hours ago [-]
> My GPT-7 agent... I become .... annoyed at the AI-speak in its first paragraph
When we have GPT-7 it will still do AI-speak?!
lantry 1 hours ago [-]
- telepathic communication with your computer
- still annoyed by AI-speak
What a bold vision!
andrethegiant 2 hours ago [-]
Visit from CIA in 3, 2, 1...
The only thing I would actually want this for would be a dream logger. Extremely invasive and quite dangerous otherwise.
mosura 1 hours ago [-]
There is probably good money in upgrading the polygraph security clearance ritual for the 21st century.
It doesn’t even really need to work of course.
bilbo0s 5 minutes ago [-]
Not sure how valuable it would be for interrogations of state level actors? Ironically, I'd think it might even be better for your adversary if the technology does work?
We know that we can use classical techniques, (non-AI), to psychologically condition humans. In the lightest case, we do it with advertising and social media. I'm absolutely certain that state-level adversaries use even more effective techniques to train and condition agents for fieldwork.
If your adversary knows you are more likely to rely on intelligence gathered in this fashion due to its reliability, they can definitely game that. Or rather, I guess, I would definitely game it if I knew the Russians had this kind of technology. So I don't know why they wouldn't be thinking along the same lines.
Basically, make them think their new technology is working.. until it counts. If it consistently works 99 out of 99 times. They'll have no reason to believe it's not working the 100th time.
But I guess if you were interrogating, maybe a pot dealer or spouse muderer or cheating husband or something, it might be valuable.
sam-cop-vimes 2 hours ago [-]
Hmm...how do you stop private thoughts from reaching the LLM? Suddenly you can be prosecuted for thinking the "wrong" thoughts?
pbjerkeseth 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this whole area of UX scares me. Silent speech techniques could strike a balance, but it seems obvious it wont stop there - consider what a state actor would do if they could skip interrogation altogether?
Unfortunately I think this is inevitable because as a species we perform a steady march toward collective desires for items of science fiction, so start your adversarial double-think practice now.
dudefeliciano 1 hours ago [-]
Is it really collective desire or are these products being pushed upon us? And why does it always have to be the dystopic "destroying human nature and society as we know it" science fiction and not the utopic "everyone lived happily ever after" science fiction? Or does it just feel that way to me?
dag100 1 hours ago [-]
For a utopia to exist, everything has to go right. Dystopias are almost all modelled on some existing facet of human behaviour. Naturally one state is unstable as it requires practically complete co-operation in most cases while the other one is stable as it usually exists as some sort of undesirable equilibrium between competing forces.
roguetoasterer 21 minutes ago [-]
As someone with OCD, this tech is pretty far up there in terms of potential nightmares.
podgietaru 2 hours ago [-]
"My AI just sent my boss a 12 paragraph screed because I thought about how much I hate him"
podgietaru 2 hours ago [-]
"In a couple years"
In a couple years?! Get over the technical hurdles, do you think PEOPLE will be ready to telepathically talk to a computer in A COUPLE OF YEARS?
secret counterexample. people have been failing to learn vim for literal decades
the_sleaze_ 2 hours ago [-]
Upon trying it for the first time more than 60% of people never exit - that's just great retention!
recursive 1 hours ago [-]
Every time I accidentally start vim, I just buy a new computer.
soco 1 hours ago [-]
You mean 60% have still not discovered :q!
mbgerring 2 hours ago [-]
So is it just that these are people who haven’t personally experienced well-intentioned technology turning into a living nightmare? Watching the optimism and then collapse of Web 2.0 was a formative experience for me. I’m 38. Is this just naivete? What is this?
AdamH12113 6 minutes ago [-]
According to her Wikipedia page, she's ~23 and went to Harvard, so A) her life experience is limited, B) most of the experience she does have involves being on a path to elitehood, and C) she probably sees a chance at a life-changing amount of money here.
People like this are the input side of the "oops we built the Torment Nexus" pipeline.
baron3dl 2 hours ago [-]
Inevitablism, a fundamentalist belief system that resolves every moral hazard with an appeal to the inevitable. "we can't let someone else do this first"
goatlover 1 hours ago [-]
Like Edward Teller wanting to develop hydrogen bombs while Oppenheimer was trying to prevent an arms race from starting.
soco 1 hours ago [-]
"I will kill you now since you're dying anyway so just hand me all your money"
codeduck 2 hours ago [-]
It's called being insulated from the immediate consequences of their actions and hubris.
rufasterisco 38 minutes ago [-]
I understand where you are coming from. Yet.
Neuralink exists since 10 years, is in clinical trial, has been implanted on a living human being in 2 years ago.
The lack of adults in the room to set rules around moral hazard is hardly her generation's fault.
Aurornis 1 hours ago [-]
> Watching the optimism and then collapse of Web 2.0
What collapse of web 2.0?
Technically the website we're on is web 2.0 because we're interacting as users.
I don't think it's naiveté on their part to want to build new things. I think you're just jaded and hyperfocusing on the negatives.
dag100 1 hours ago [-]
With some technologies, the negatives are so severe it is difficult to see how they outweigh the positives. Mind-control technology is quite frankly just asking to be abused. It's the ultimate relinquishment of power - you reveal your entire hand to someone else AND let them do what they want with it. I honestly don't understand how some people are so optimistic that they think this technology won't be misused in ways that massively overshadow the good that could be done with them.
kleiba2 1 hours ago [-]
To me, this reads as an attempt to raise easy investment money.
wuschel 1 hours ago [-]
"Die Gedanken sind frei..." - can someone guess them? A truly dystopian question.
It is been 10 years ago when I looked through some research in that area. Back then it was the problem to get enough good signal. Has the situation changed radically here for non-invasive electrodes or portable detectors?
I understand that the approach would be to turn weak signal, context, and LLM based signal processing into useful human computer interaction. For everything else, I have the feeling we are still in speculative territory.
dudefeliciano 2 hours ago [-]
well she is only 23 so naivete would make sense, although it looks like she held some AI safety roles so...
symfoniq 1 hours ago [-]
In the same way that “Anthropic” apparently means misanthropic, we can probably add “AI safety” to the list of newspeak.
mosura 1 hours ago [-]
I think this is actually marginally less evil than Meta Tribe. The whole neuro space is dangerous and while people go on about “AI safety” the world will trend towards this madness.
And this will provoke “well we need to regulate AI then”. No, you need to regulate poking around in people’s brains without asking them before that becomes normal.
pstuart 34 minutes ago [-]
TIL -- dear god that's terrifying. I get that there's likely a lot of valuable and legitimate work that could come out of it, but I wouldn't trust Zuck as far as I could throw him out a window.
nee1r 4 hours ago [-]
are you specifically focused on non-invasive methods/why? seems like you reach a noise barrier which limits things like this
foolswisdom 2 hours ago [-]
From the article
> It’s hard to collect enough data using invasive methods. Few people want a chip in their brain! But non-invasive methods are getting much better. The hardware is improving and getting cheaper, though I apologize for being vague about the particularities of our hardware.
RobertDeNiro 2 hours ago [-]
This is doomed to fail. Dry EEG electrodes basically only capture noise.
drivebyhooting 2 hours ago [-]
You know how a microphone can also serve as a speaker?
Can this technology also do text to thought?
chasd00 2 hours ago [-]
sure would be cool to transfer memories. Then we'd be able to download how to fly a helicopter.pdf right to our brains like in the matrix.
goatlover 1 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure that also involves tuning your motor control in your hand and arm. It's like thinking a download into your brain would make you a successful athlete.
amoe_ 2 hours ago [-]
I'd like to think that actually-existing-telepathy would be a more transformative technology than something that simply allows people to do their existing work more conveniently.
foobarian 2 hours ago [-]
If it doesn't work try thinking in Russian
baron3dl 2 hours ago [-]
who holds the copyright on the transcriptions of my thoughts read by this hardware? what license to those do you impose through EULA? what privacy controls need to be invented to prevent literal thought police?
dudefeliciano 1 hours ago [-]
if you get an earworm you will have to pay royalties
yunnpp 2 hours ago [-]
> In a couple years, the main way we'll talk with our AIs is with our thoughts. They will not be a super-smart automated intern or coworker that you desperately try to keep up with. They will be a natural, joyful extension of you.
Ah, yes, very joyful indeed.
Also, fuck those interns! They're just too smart to keep up with.
zorked 19 minutes ago [-]
I hope you are unsuccessful in your authoritarian, dystopian enterprise.
cormorant 2 hours ago [-]
Never mind "how could this go wrong". How could this go right?
Up and to the right, to be more specific. Transcend your one-dimensional thinking, Razengan.
platevoltage 2 hours ago [-]
I can't wait for this tech to be incorporated into corporate productivity trackers that seem to be getting more popular.
gverrilla 2 hours ago [-]
> My AI is a natural extension of me. It feels like a sixth sense and another limb. I wonder about a problem, feel as though I’m literally surfing the web, see glimpses of the websites, get flashes of intuition about the problem, and ultimately derive the answer. It feels fun! My brain is like the Flash. Because of write tech, my thinking is the fastest it's ever been even when I turn my AI off.
I read "race conditions" all over this vision.
mcfdoesdev 2 hours ago [-]
My thoughts being beamed to a frontier model where they are monetizable (and used for training) is terrifying.
gorgolo 1 hours ago [-]
They will also want to beam back the response straight back into your brain one day.
dudefeliciano 1 hours ago [-]
it's in the article, around 2030 the device should be able to write and "make changes to the brain: hear audio, or tell the brain to use more calories" ...and later she envisions chatGPT becoming an extension of the brain like a sixth sense.
prerok 1 hours ago [-]
The future is Borg.
mcfdoesdev 52 minutes ago [-]
I am locutus.
goatlover 1 hours ago [-]
No worries, I'm sure there won't be Flock cameras reading your thought crimes as you drive/walk by.
rvz 2 hours ago [-]
Translation:
"I am a former-OpenAI employee and looking for investors to fund my AI startup."
ACCount37 2 hours ago [-]
> non-invasive
Dead in the water.
It's like an omlette. Can't make a neural interface worth a damn without cracking open a few skulls.
jjtheblunt 1 hours ago [-]
> Can't make a neural interface worth a damn without cracking open a few skulls.
I immediately thought, ironically, your neurology wrote that with a computer and HN humans' neurologies read it with computers.
m4ck_ 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe I’m just demented but i feel like the first time I interface with chatgpt via telepathy it’s going to see my thoughts when the guy in the cube behind me farts or chews loudly, and send the FBI.
What a terrible idea.
agajews 3 hours ago [-]
exciting! you could imagine brain transcriptions being very high signal RLHF data that could help align models more deeply to human preference.
baal80spam 27 minutes ago [-]
If this dystopian future is ever to come, I think those dates need a +100.
slumpt_ 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think I've ever been so viscerally revolted by the vision of a company.
2 hours ago [-]
morkalork 2 hours ago [-]
Why I'm Leaving OpenAI to build the Torment Nexus
elephantstripes 1 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I hate this.
MagicMoonlight 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 20:29:42 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
> My AI is a natural extension of me. It feels like a sixth sense and another limb. I wonder about a problem, feel as though I’m literally surfing the web, see glimpses of the websites, get flashes of intuition about the problem, and ultimately derive the answer.
We call this AI psychosis.
I cannot comprehend the output from AI fast enough for the speed difference between a verbal and thought response to matter.
Not to mention the privacy nightmare of logging my raw thoughts in a corporate environment and potentially routing them to an LLM provider.
Yeesh. I guess that makes one of us. Truly one of the more horrifying short stories I’ve read.
>Thought-to-text, aka telepathy
No, that's not telepathy. I'd leave the term alone. Consider it to be reserved for... well... telepathy!
But sure, you're right. Reading is not a deterministic/injective mapping of text to thoughts.
Apart from the trouble of defining what a thought is, independent from the person who thinks it.
Me thinking of grabbing a mug of coffee is a different thought from you doing the same... defining "thought" pulls in a whole jungle of epistemology (maybe I should say philosophy, more broadly, I'm not in the field).
Is there an abstract concept of "the thought of raising your left index finger"? Or "the thought of remembering severe pain"? Etc etc
ever since Elon did his "promise full self-driving every year" thing, entrepreneurs been on a weird sort of fiction escalator.
thought-to-text is incredible. imagine doing something that remarkable with your life and feeling the need to exaggerate.
How much are those people making to be able to afford things like this?
Under current US law, can people entering the US be subjected to mind-reading?
When we have GPT-7 it will still do AI-speak?!
- still annoyed by AI-speak
What a bold vision!
The only thing I would actually want this for would be a dream logger. Extremely invasive and quite dangerous otherwise.
It doesn’t even really need to work of course.
We know that we can use classical techniques, (non-AI), to psychologically condition humans. In the lightest case, we do it with advertising and social media. I'm absolutely certain that state-level adversaries use even more effective techniques to train and condition agents for fieldwork.
If your adversary knows you are more likely to rely on intelligence gathered in this fashion due to its reliability, they can definitely game that. Or rather, I guess, I would definitely game it if I knew the Russians had this kind of technology. So I don't know why they wouldn't be thinking along the same lines.
Basically, make them think their new technology is working.. until it counts. If it consistently works 99 out of 99 times. They'll have no reason to believe it's not working the 100th time.
But I guess if you were interrogating, maybe a pot dealer or spouse muderer or cheating husband or something, it might be valuable.
Unfortunately I think this is inevitable because as a species we perform a steady march toward collective desires for items of science fiction, so start your adversarial double-think practice now.
In a couple years?! Get over the technical hurdles, do you think PEOPLE will be ready to telepathically talk to a computer in A COUPLE OF YEARS?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jroQCyWwEgE
People like this are the input side of the "oops we built the Torment Nexus" pipeline.
Neuralink exists since 10 years, is in clinical trial, has been implanted on a living human being in 2 years ago.
The lack of adults in the room to set rules around moral hazard is hardly her generation's fault.
What collapse of web 2.0?
Technically the website we're on is web 2.0 because we're interacting as users.
I don't think it's naiveté on their part to want to build new things. I think you're just jaded and hyperfocusing on the negatives.
It is been 10 years ago when I looked through some research in that area. Back then it was the problem to get enough good signal. Has the situation changed radically here for non-invasive electrodes or portable detectors?
I understand that the approach would be to turn weak signal, context, and LLM based signal processing into useful human computer interaction. For everything else, I have the feeling we are still in speculative territory.
And this will provoke “well we need to regulate AI then”. No, you need to regulate poking around in people’s brains without asking them before that becomes normal.
> It’s hard to collect enough data using invasive methods. Few people want a chip in their brain! But non-invasive methods are getting much better. The hardware is improving and getting cheaper, though I apologize for being vague about the particularities of our hardware.
Can this technology also do text to thought?
Ah, yes, very joyful indeed.
Also, fuck those interns! They're just too smart to keep up with.
I read "race conditions" all over this vision.
"I am a former-OpenAI employee and looking for investors to fund my AI startup."
Dead in the water.
It's like an omlette. Can't make a neural interface worth a damn without cracking open a few skulls.
I immediately thought, ironically, your neurology wrote that with a computer and HN humans' neurologies read it with computers.
What a terrible idea.