The year is 2100. The brain of the Eurasian president got hacked by the Antartic Federation. While humans have hard coded a moral code since birth, there are illegally born babies that do not undergo brain modification treatment. Moreover, the South Pacific Whale Society has no moral code. We should’ve never implanted this stuff into whales. The world will never be the same again.
Ghost in the Shellfish.
I'll see myself out.
Ooooh! You're on to something. They are part of the evil villain tag team group that's secretly behind all this! They call themselves Eel-on Mollusk.
Like in the book "Accelerando (Singularity)", the lobsters that get a protected sentience status
>The year is 2100. The brain of the Eurasian president got hacked by the Antartic Federation.
They'd stil have a president? They would probably already have a dictator that controls everybody through a mind-reading police state...
Or they are a hive mind, like Alastair Reynolds' Conjoiners.
Lots of dictatorships use democratic language. See Putin, the President of the Russian Federation. Or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
No, that's the Republic of Murica, where Trump The Third is a BDFL.
The war with Eastasia and Oceania took a toll...
I think it would be deserved if whales started bombing our streets.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Krill
I think (futurology / science fiction) that they will make some kind of brain link, but there won't be any translations happening in between, just raw brain signals from one to the other, like an extra sensory input; there won't be any encoding or data that can be translated to speech or images, but the connected brains will be able to learn to comprehend and send the signals to / from each other and learn to communicate that way.
I still fail to see how that's possible since it is assumed every brain "encodes" data uniquely. Communication between computers is possible because we have agreed upon standards. If every computer encoded characters differently, no communication would be possible. Without agreed upon ports or agreed upon mechanism to agree upon ports one computer could not communicate with another. So how can brain-to-brain communication work given that encoding/communication "standards" are impossible since each brain is different?
For example, I see a tree and my brain generates a unique signal/encoding/storage representing the tree. Another person sees the tree and generates a unique signal/encoding/storage representing the tree. How would my brain communicate "tree" to his brain since both our "trees" are unique to our brains?
My brain device reads my brain signal "1010101" for tree. My friend's device reads brain signal "1011101" for tree. How could we possibly map 1010101 to 1011101. Or is the assumption that human brains have identical signals/encoding for each thought.
I already learned to interpret touch, taste, smision etc. when I was just a baby. How hard can a new one be?
Did you even read my comment? I'm not talking about your brain's ability. I'm talking about how a device can interpret your brain signals and transfer it to another brain to have actual communication when both brains essentially have their own internal "language". How your brain "stores" the idea of tree is entirely different from how I "store" the idea of a tree. Different neurons, different location in the brain and different signals. Do you know computers, networks and communications work? It's all bound by artificial standards we agreed upon a priori.
The only way I see is by textual or auditory mechanism between people who speak the same language ( standards agreed upon a priori ). But that wouldn't be brain to brain. It would be brain to text/speech to eyes/ears to brain.
I'm saying it's clearly possible to develop from scratch the framework with which to learn to interpret each individual remote machine's raw data stream.
Your intermediate protocol woes are a red herring.
That sort of connection would be very susceptible to psychic attacks - I'm thinking of the telepaths in Babylon 5, being trained for offensive capabilities, as well as just plain old spam advertising. So while "defaulting to trust" is often considered societally useful, I believe that it would be better for everyone if cross-brain messages are sent in a format that can be analyzed (and entirely blocked) by a filter on the receiving side.
There would probably be a Universal Common Embedding used as an intermediate representation between people's individual private neural representations. Likely the distant descendant of our open-source neural models.
And machines would of course also use the Universal Common Embedding to communicate, as man and machine meld into a seamless distributed whole.
It all seems a little bit too inevitable for my liking at this point.
We are so different, but I guess with a lot of training we could interpret each others thoughts. A first step would be to record your own thoughts and then replay them in order to see if you experience the same thing you did when the thoughts where recorded. It's possible that our brain is constantly re-configuring so that even your own recorded thoughts would make no sense.
This is sort of explored in the film Strange Days, which is probably not very well known generally but perhaps would have a large fan base on HN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)
Had no idea til I looked it up just now that James Cameron did the story, of Avatar, which shares a lot of tech influences with Strange Days. They could even be in the same cinematic universe, though many years apart.
I think the main problem with that is that different people thing in different ways. I think in full sentences and 3D images, whereas other people might think without images at all. How do you translate that?
It is very likely that this device works by perceiving and interpreting brain waves. Actually, from the article:
> “We recorded neural activities from single neurons, which is the highest resolution of information we can get from our brain,” Wairagkar says. The signal registered by the electrodes was then sent to an AI algorithm called a neural decoder that deciphered those signals and extracted speech features such as pitch or voicing.
If statements
for how the brain chip chooses to function
Next step: techno-slavery
Don't forget the injection of ads for the basic subscription plan, Black Mirror S7/E1 vibes.
Telepathy, or maybe memory and experience sharing media machine, or maybe humanity id unification device, or maybe flesh robot actualizer, or maybe a looping torture horror show mask. The possibilities are endless!
I look forward to learning that your favourite fruit is AAAARRGGHHHH
Not without ads being injected. But it's a small price to pay for such amazing capabilities
would you need an antenna for your brain implant to tx/rx those signals? what shape would that antenna need to be? would it need to be a rigid antenna that would have to stick up out of one's head? would it be a curly pigtail style or straight semi-rigid yet flexible so it could bend when passing through doors like the CB antennas of yesteryear? Could it be very flexible like a cable so you could run it down your back and under your clothing?
would your antenna be susceptible to crosstalk, and would that interference come across as new voices in your head? in fact, i wonder what the signalling protocol would be so that the message is only be received by the intended recipient, something like wifi? to that, would someone be able to tune into the spectrum around them and see the metadata of these telepathic signals to see who was talking to whom, when, and for how long. obviously, i'm assuming the actual signals will be encrypted so that these conversations will be private. will the NSA be able to pick up these signals from their satellites and be able to listen in? or will the gov't force backdoors into these communications?
i know this might sound conspiratorial, but all of these are valid concerns being dealt with now, and only sound conspiratorial if you've have your head in the sand. these are also questions that startups tend to ignore. look at the IoT market that never considered any potential security issues, and now we have massive bot farms. i know i wouldn't want to be used as a bot because my neural implant manufacture never considered what a hacker might do once they gained access
I think you might find that the Teletubbies have already solved this problem, in a variety of different configurations, including the rigid and curly antenna you mention above. The benefits of the circular and triangular configurations are as yet unclear to me, but I'm sure the Voice Trumpets and Sun Baby know what they're doing.
the scary thing isn't the sci-fi in this stuff, it's that the tech already exists to do the polygraph scam again
You could skip a lot of stuff by training a transformer on some kind of neural embeddings. You probably get effective FTL communication and limited immortality that way.
How did you arrive at FTL? At best we'll have comms at radio transmission speed, right?
It's faster than light because your model is already there so no information has to be exchanged.
But isn't it the same sort of FTL and "immortality" that a creator gets from us listening to a downloaded podcast that they prerecorded?
To quote Woody Allen:
> “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”
Seems like a technicality tbh.
very cool concept - kind of like an offline inference model of your conscious. You could have periodic (over the wire) sync updates to your real self