> My prediction: 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, finally! To be liberated from the burden of speaking! Perhaps soon the AI will even think for us!
On a more serious note, this is additional evidence that Wall-E stands as the most accurate sci-fi projection of the future.
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 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
In the case of "thought to text", it's clearly the context, and the intent.
When I write something, I deliberately curate my thoughts in order to convey an idea, often heavily depending on the context. Context encompasses the whole slice of the world that is connected to my individual life, who I want to address, and what I want to convey.
As a simpler counterexample: it's possible to write down lies, deceptively. The definition of a lie means that I know better than what I say.
So, "honest thought" != "fact":
where does this take us?
People who lie not only try to deceive others about facts, the core of most lies is deceiving about intent.
I used the word "idea" here, and I think it is nothing more than a rephrasing of Platonic ideas, but I ought to be careful, because we are more than two thousand years in the future from there.
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.
Beyond all the other more salient objections one might have with this pitch, there is just the very practical fact that there really isn't enough signal from "noninvasive" sensors to get the sort of data they are promising.
It's been explained to me by neuroscientists I respect that EEGs and friends are like trying to listen in on a conversation happening on center ice from the parking lot of the arena. You can maybe tell if there is a match going on if there is a rowdy crowd but that's about it.
"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.
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 ?
It’s fairly common for gifted people to struggle to communicate when they’ve made a multi-step inference in their heads. Whether this technology actually allows them to express themselves at the speed of (excited, fully focused) thought or not, I can see how the possibility of achieving that is exciting.
Military sci-fi is full of mind-machine interfacing like this. There’s definitely value in being able to interface directly with a machine instead of having to push buttons or read outputs.
The problem is that anything based on LLM architecture is not going to be fast or accurate enough to allow someone to, say, fly a fighter jet with this interface.
Most people get quite tired when talking for long periods. You can train that over a long period, but putting on a headset would certainly be more convenient.
> I put a band around my head, and open my laptop at Conduit. It’s 9 am. My device pairs with my laptop over Bluetooth. I open, without loss of generality, Codex.
At least we are reassured that short-range networking protocols will be invariant under the apocalypse.
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!
If such technology actually existed I don’t think the fifth would cover it without a SCOTUS ruling. You have to actively plead the fifth to invoke it. A machine that could just read your thoughts would get around that the same way they got around the fourth by the interpretation that any information you exchange with a third party is no longer protected, in a world where refusing to ever do that would leave you destitute.
It's already been decided by SCOTUS that things like heat imaging require a warrant, and that arbitrary scanning without a warrant (or presumably also probable cause) is a violation of the 4th amendment. This technology (still science fiction) would likely get similar treatment using the existing precedent about how new technologies can be used.
The easy workaround for this (which Flock has used to massive success and why it's drawn so much ire) is to set up or subcontract a private corporation to do this which will inherently be subject to much less stringent oversight. It also allows government and law enforcement to evade accountability.
The legal arguments against Flock are different than the legal arguments against thermal imaging by the police (without a warrant or probably cause). And the latter is closer to the hypothetical broad mind reading (science fiction, again) than it is to Flock.
So you'd need to force people to somehow think the same things they do when talking or typing, without actually performing those actions. If you can do that, why not just have them talk?
Isn't that just for data collection though? I imagine the fully trained model they're expecting to have will be able to map thoughts -> text. The data collection will naturally need to have the 2 sets in order to do self-supervised training.
I feel like people are focusing on the wrong thing here.
He starts off at 2027, where he’ll have a headband that can read his thoughts. That’s in 4-16 months.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but last I checked we‘re quite far from being able to read people’s thought from a headband.
> 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.
The statement implies that the company has some secret hardware that can, or at least, is close to doing that. That would blow my mind, but the author seems to believe it.
> My prediction: 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.
“A couple years” Not “a few years” — “joyful extension” — that’s an optimistic prediction in two ways…
It's 2035. I wake up, walk over to my chair, and plug in my government-mandated Neuralink™ adaptor. I'll spend the rest of my 18 hour work day haunched over my desk while the minutiae of my thoughts are recorded to permanent record for the next iteration of Grok-14.5™ training.
We have machines that can read our thoughts and act on our slightest whims.
How come these brilliant machines can’t figure out how to make a hospital stay not cost $60,000? Or build a car for less than $30,000? Or keep a megalomaniac from fooling enough people to seize power in a country of 300 million people?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Based on the HN “realists” I routinely see in comments, I expect it will go something like this:
I’m generally pro-privacy, but here’s the hard truth: at my startup, we disabled keyboard input in our app Slopgen and switched the default to Conduit Thought Input™, and only 2% of users bothered to navigate the 17 submenus and submit their SSN and face scan to re-enable typing. Yep, 2%, that’s all.
DAUs only decreased by ≈11%, but our ARR is already up 170% thanks to our AdThink™ revenue sharing agreement, and only 1% of users argued with our Fin.ai bot for the 45 minutes needed give a thumbs down feedback about the change.
Let’s face it: talk is cheap but users *want* these features, revealed preference *always* tells the real story. Better get used to it now or get left behind.
The Conduit® Thinkerface® Pro Band will contain a small 90B dense local model that pre-screens your Conduit® NeuroTokens® stream for compliance against the Conduit® Acceptable Usage Policy applicable for your region and subscription tier.
If non-compliance is detected you'll be promptly notified via a small current applied to the Conduit® ThinkRight® Human Training Electrodes embedded within your band. Intensity and duration are dynamically adjusted until compliance is restored.
Even better, because this all happens on-device before your Conduit® NeuroTokens® are sent to the Conduit® NeuroServer®, non-compliant thoughts don't count towards your Conduit® Daily Thinking Allowance or expend credits from your Conduit® Additional Thinking Purchase Plan.
On one hand, it's good that there are people working on far out ideas. On the other, there's no clearer sign of irrational exhuberance with AI than "telepathy" research when we still have so many basic problems to solve with LLMs.
Sounds like another 30 under 30 to jail pipeline scam. What does it mean to be a “foundational researcher” when none of their work experience actually reflects it
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.
1. The employer is providing it to them to do their day to day work, like they provide a laptop and internet connection
2. This is from a 2027 fictional scenario, not current state
> 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.
Their data acquisition routine was driven by Claude and they were recruiting random people off Craigslist pretty aggressively a few months back. I know a couple of folks who responded out of curiosity and described a very janky setup in the rented basements of a couple of residential houses in SF. From what I heard about the setup the data they got must have been incredibly noisy.
To the people who are sceptical here, I wouldn't count them out yet. They almost certainly can get funding with what they captured, which would get them better hardware. And given the state of brain scanning - people have captured images from scanned brain activity some years ago as I recall - I'd say they have a good shot. But yeah, it's not telepathy.
I would like it if my AI glasses constantly recorded and compacted my reality. Then educated me as I go That way I can avoid the info dump session that never lines up with my perceived reality.
If, this is a big if, this tech is actually built (by these clowns or not), your thoughts will never be yours alone ever again. That is the scary part.
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?
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"
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
It's fascinating to see retrofuturist ideas being built in real-time. Being able to translate your thoughts instantaneously to cogent written text and using it to make a PowerPoint is almost painfully analogous to e.g. cassette futurism, or like 50s visions of the future where we have gigantic video screens but they're still CRTs.
> Audacious yet practical vision: I believe in this vision; to quantify, if Conduit becomes the general read and write company, then I expect it to be worth over $1 trillion. I feel good about the vision, because it builds towards a more human future. And I trust the scaling laws, which have held for many doublings.
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.
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.
> 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.
People that get to know each other very well, it can take a while or people can just "click", often have something I wouldn't be embarrassed to call telepathy.
Talking and listening are a really still a big mystery. And thinking is deep underground beneath our understanding.
We barely understand what we are doing when we are doing any of this. Personally I think I under stand what I'm doing when I'm writing much better than what I'm doing when I'm listening.
I'd find that a little surprising, except I've been doing it all my life. I barely have any memories from before I talk, and I have loads more memories from after I learned to read.
Learning to draw and play a musical instrument deepened all this. As did having good, close friends, and partners. I expect having children, which I haven't done, is even more deepening.
The thing is, all these words are just that: words. Very loosey goosey and they change from person to person just as the communicators come from different experiences. And tomorrows me often has a very different outlook than yesterday's me.
I'm not surprised that I can't read the mind of tomorrows me but I'm always a little shocked when I realize I can't read the mind of yesterday's me.
What was I thinking!
I can easily read that blog post as a description of what might come to pass. It might very well not connect very well with us now because, well, we haven't had the experiences yet. Telepathy might mean something very different after we've had experiences with the new technology.
My grandmother, who was born in 1893, often told me about how the world changed radically and almost imperceptibly during the first half of the 20th century. She lived to be 97, and she once said she wondered if would be possible to talk about the, then, present to her younger self. The words she used at the time of the conversation, would not communicate very well because of the lack of common experiences.
I think Shannon had something to say about that. Information is something new and unexpected, but you need the expected to frame it. Give it a foundation.
I'm now in my late 60s, and I can totally relate to what my grandmother was saying. The main difference is that we are now accelerating much faster.
2026 me would have a hard time explaining things I'm doing with AI to 2023 me.
I think that 2027 might be a bit early for some of the things the blog post is describing. But, come the day, I might just shake my head and wonder what in the heck I was thinking.
I am not a religious person, but this feels to me, intuitively, for lack of any better word, and with only the mildest flippancy, satanic.
‘Tech’ culture has gotten very, very weird. It’s turned sour. It’s so far past the point where I no longer feel the joy and excitement and liberatory potential of computing. I’m not even that old. What happened?
It not about creating anymore. It's about power, and now a certain group of the top tech elite have experienced enough power that they're having delusions of grandeur. Those delusions cater to the dark desires that live inside most humans - to have control over everyone and everything.
There has been an inflection point in the recent past where the majority of heavily marketed and promoted "tech" (namely, software and tools) have gone from assisting lives and promoting ease to actively making lives more difficult and compromising the social integrity of human civilization. People disagree on where that inflection point lies but nearly everyone has a story of how they used to be excited for new gadget x or y and now they dread hearing press releases by the bigwigs in this industry. Profiteering, power-seeking, and ill intentions have infected SV and those impulses have likely been there from the beginning.
And yes, the company that owns this website has a lot to do with that. Just look at the borderline cult-like adoration for certain tools, or the uninformed comments by people who are clearly not SMEs in fields like medicine, aviation, or other critical fields about how AGI is right around the corner and will free us from the oh-so-sad fact that we have to interact with other human beings to live.
On the face of it, psychoanalyzing from afar, it makes perfect sense. Relatively asocial, unpopular smart kids who later grew to become kings of startup empires, who see human interaction as a net negative, who are quick to point out the fallibility of human intellect while simultaneously being incapable of acknowledging the fallibility of their computers which they have been glued to, who endlessly over-optimize and neuroticize and attempt to quantify human emotions and expressions which are famously unquantifiable and subjective, who see the intrinsic subjectivity of life as something uncomfortable and avoidable rather than something beautiful that we all must contend with, who were more than likely never regarded highly by their more conventional or perhaps less intelligent peers in primary or secondary school, who were never socialized properly, are now the kings of our new feudal realms. This industry promoted them to that position, and now we all must live with the consequences of that decision, for the better which decreases by the day, and the worse, which increases by every femtosecond.
Could you explain exactly how this project that aims to let people beam thoughts to their computers is "actively making lives more difficult and compromising the social integrity of human civilization" as opposed to "assisting lives and promoting ease"? What could be more empowering and convenient to a user of a computer, especially one with a relevant disability?
>‘Tech’ culture has gotten very, very weird. It’s turned sour. It’s so far past the point where I no longer feel the joy and excitement and liberatory potential of computing. I’m not even that old. What happened?
It always had that edge. Maybe technology in general always has a somewhat pagan flavor to it (for example JPL/Jack Parsons). Its just becoming a bit more mainstream now due to AGI larping.
I think it’s the result of the LessWrong/rationalist crowd mixing with cult of personality VCs like Peter Thiel. The rationalists have always been pretty culty, the VCs gave them unlimited capital. All of that happening in a tight ecosystem like Silicon Valley and you somehow get the current AI tech world. AGI is seen as a religious figure to which we owe to sacrifice pretty much everything, with very high urgency, or else we will be lost. And everybody wants to be the messiah announcing it coming, to be the one who really believed and should be rewarded
I wouldn't ever use the word satanic due to the cultural implications, but I've long felt that there's a certain type of person – they walk among us here on HN – who speak about AI, AGI and ASI with a weird religiosity and fervor. These are the priests and missionaries of the new faith; people who, under any other circumstance, would typically consider themselves too rational for religion, yet now find themselves proselytizing to nonbelievers, chastising and debating the AI atheists, and preaching always the Book of Dario.
Years ago I was close to disavowing technology and only doing the minimal effort needed to keep up with my job, because I'd gotten bored and disillusioned with it. Anything more than a small hobby project had accumulated too much complexity and busywork for me to feel excited about working on it. I suffered through it for the sake of the few things I cared about most, but it took its toll on me. I didn't have the infinite energy I may have had for my favorite projects in high school anymore.
But then this new wave of AI came along. First there was Copilot, and I was in awe not necessarily at its immediate practicality, but the potential it demonstrated. I felt the embers of passion tentatively peek their heads out from wherever I'd previously buried them.
Every new leap, computing became more and more rewarding again.
First general searches became incredibly easier to find the relevant bits I wanted from. I actually wanted to look things up again now that I didn't have to grok dozens of pages of Google or Stack Overflow. I got my custom home router configured the way I wanted it instead of giving up or settling for copying some known config that wasn't quite what I wanted, after a small amount of trial and error.
Then it became reasonably competent at simple but tedious tasks, at least 90% where the last 10% was easy to fix by hand. Enormous git conflict to slog through? Instead of staring at the screen feeling my heart sink and wandering off to bedrot instead, I felt excited at the prospect that I could instead command the computer to do it for me, and it was actually motivating to get that to work. Instead of feeling too exhausted and annoyed to keep working, I felt rewarded and refreshed.
Then it started writing entire code files, then entire features, then entire applications all on its own, with my guidance and input on architectural decisions and aesthetics. Performing entire FreeBSD upgrades while keeping custom kernel module packages working, fixing Gentoo systems with messed up USE flags and an otherwise intractable dependency hell to sift through, hell, even writing entire kernel patches to fix sleep mode and graphics problems I'd been having on my 2010 Macbook Pro with Gentoo installed. I feel something reminiscent of my memories of opening Christmas presents as a child when the AI is done making something I'm super excited for.
I'm eternally grateful for the current AI zeitgeist in the tech world. We're living in the best time so far in history to be into tech. And things like Conduit? How would you not be excited for something with so much potential to be made? Even if you don't like it, imagine what it could mean for people with communication disabilities, carpal tunnel, etc. I'd love to be able to just type with my thoughts, and sending them straight into an AI sounds awesome too.
If this is satanic then I don't want to go to heaven. I feel more joy, excitement, and liberatory potential in technology than I have at any point in my life. I even feel more liberated to learn more - without the tedium raising my cortisol and stealing my attention all day, I'm actually more inclined to do things like write code in vim on my VT320 or read over code there with no distractions or AI input. I've reaped great rewards from being able to think more clearly and at higher levels of abstraction, free of the bonds of bullshit and tedium, at peace in the knowledge that I will never have to shave a yak against my will ever again.
You really do have to be well under thirty years of age to think 2035 is far enough away for any of this stuff to be plausible.
Ask anyone over fifty how far away 2035 is and they will tell you something like it's not long after Christmas.
I am fully willing to stipulate that Naomi believes it earnestly (rather than being like Musk just kicking things down the road) but those are very, very optimistic scenarios.
> 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.
Help me understand... If one uses AI for anything but coding, or purely utilitarian purposes, they are psychotic?
This is not intended to be provocative. I am asking sincerely. I have a lot of AI sessions, that I value enough to have reviewed multiple times, over months. And indeed, I explored much that I never would have without the AI, and enjoyed it. Even appreciated it. The bulk of my saved material is research, but at least a gigabyte is wild speculation, philosophy, and assisted thinking.
At what point does what the user thinks is a meaningful experience become psychosis, or is it that exactly; attributing meaningfulness is the symptom?
Edit: The "no longer other" statement, I should admit, is familiar to me. There can be, on rare occasion, what I have thought of abstractly as harmonic resonance, some kind of strange emergent state between two interlocutors. Maybe that is the psychosis?
“meaning” emerges from a mental process. That mental process can consume things which were built to convey meaning (e.g. a novel) or were not (a waterfall).
Just because an AI bot says things that are meaningful, that doesn’t mean you need to assume it is intentional, sentient, or intelligent. It could vomit out a random Rorschach test and if you found meaning for yourself, you can still understand it was random.
I talk to a bot to sharpen my thinking, not to adopt its thinking.
>I talk to a bot to sharpen my thinking, not to adopt its thinking.
Right. I was under the impression it doesn't have any thinking. But that never mattered to me much. And I would expect someone working with OpenAI to have a firm handle on that.
I appreciate the effort to explain, but I kind of took all that for granted. I still don't understand where the psychosis comes from. If the model spits out a number, the number is not false simply because it had no agency to understand the number. If the model brilliantly patterns something, I do not need assume intent.
If by psychosis is implied the obvious, such as attributing consciousness to an LLM, I might understand, though I would argue it's pretty elitist and self-righteous, and that "naivety" would be a less damning and more appropriate term, which could be used just as effectively. I am beginning to suspect it's a term that appeals to a younger generation, where cruelty is a bit more normal than it was in my generation. Not sure though.
Exactly. From my arts background, I'm not scared of LLMs as a replacement for human art because anything good that LLMs produce exist somewhere between "found art" and mechanically-produced art, like photography. In either case, there is a huge amount of work done by the clankers, but it has absolutely no human meaning until humans assign it meaning.
This applies to math discoveries as well. The Jacobian conjecture was always invalid, only our human understanding of it has changed thanks to human inquiry and validation, despite LLMs doing the hard work.
I feel like we are in that narrow window of time when humans grapple with a new technology by personifying it before we realize it is just another tool humans have created to amplify human capabilities.
The meaning of psychosis hasn't changed from before AI. It means loss of touch with reality. It's still somewhat subjective because people can interpret reality in different ways.
But to me what you are describing is pretty close to it. Because we know there was never any harmonic resonance and or "strange emergent state between two interlocutors".
I say this as somebody who uses the frontier models everyday for work. They are impressive and useful, but transformer intelligence is not at all like human intelligence, even if it superficially resembles human thinking. That should become more obvious the more you use them, not less.
As somebody who has unfortunately had to deal with people suffering actual psychosis stemming from some of the most terrible illnesses that can afflict a human being - no, this is not psychosis.
What parent is describing is more akin to believing in astrology and tea leaves.
If you have to fully lose touch with reality to have psychosis then I agree. Accepting these kind of delusions is certainly along the path and we know that it can lead there with AI.
Yeah, that makes much... nonsense. Being impressed by something novel achieved as result of cooperative effort between a frontier LLM and a human, is "astrology and tea leaves". Can you elaborate, or...
Is the difference here between us that you are using a passive-aggressive drive-by snipe, probably to preserve ill-gotten karma tickets? I will suggest you may have been the cause of the illnesses you cite. You have an abusive quality, which is known to exacerbate such disorders. As a coward, you may have pushed things too far with these 'unfortunate' people, and found through a bit too much expectation -- if not encouragement -- what you quietly desired to find. Similar to what you have done here.
The truth is, those, such as your self, who recklessly pathologize others recreationally, often cause far more harm than the supposed crazies ever do, even to themselves. And for the gullible people here, as you flag this comment and become pleased with yourselves -- before doing so, ask yourself: Is "harmonic resonance" used in a rinky-dink, heavily moderated and filtered forum thread truly adequate grounds to start issuing psychological evaluations? I know you guys pretend to value ethics and fancy yourselves as sentinels of better rationale, but I think you'll have to live with something on your conscience if you don't pause to think about this one before the instant gratification of dragging someone down. Retrospect might point the finger of pathology in the other direction...
Pick your fights wisely. Have some integrity.
I'll also say the alliance you've formed with the little green man is touching. You've just met and it's already using "we" as if you're in a special club together. How adorable. "we know that it can lead there with AI." I'd love to see your club share your concerns with Yampolskiy, or some of the folks that actually work on frontier models, or any of the well-respected people who take the subject a bit more seriously than you suggest is healthy.
Is it really inappropriate to say, if sincerely and without exaggeration, that you make me nauseous? You do.
This just confuses me so much. They know the definition of what "self" means, is it just broken because this is the first time they can interact with another seemingly complex system without feeling exploited or manipulated? Have they never cooperated with another person with a mutual goal? Not that LLMs would ever be on that level.
Here is my hobbyist take: There are certain types of personalities that do not form deep connections. They "use" people to suit their needs. Machiavellians and Narcissists come to mind. Especially for them, AI must be godsend. It tells them they are right, it listens, it admires. It‘s basically a perfect version of their perceived self.
Lack of theory of mind correlates pretty strongly with the types of traits that are valued highly in Silicon Valley. There's a self-selection effect here where many of the titans of industry in the Bay and similar circles are intelligent in a mathematical or scientific, computer-like way but cannot express themselves or understand other people deeply and emotively in the way that many others with fewer intellectual gifts can do effortlessly.
Perhaps this is also why they're so worshipful and quixotically obsessed with the vaporware, God they call AGI so much, because they cannot understand how competence at tasks is not equivalent to intellect and that intelligence as we understand it is not one-note nor is fundamentally inseparable from certain sensory experiences that computers cannot currently have. The fundamental underpinnings of AGI or LLMs prevent that from occurring in the near-future unless you literally set out to create RoboCop or a T800. We all know how that ends.
Do we? Or do we just have a bunch of made up stories about possible dystopian futures that haven't yet come to pass? Skynet isn't real, nor is the Matrix. They're made up stories, creative fiction, not Cassandra telling the future.
You live in a world entirely controlled by the rich. Few places has a functional democracy(Switzerland, where else?).
Most of your life is spent performing a business function; the value of your labor is rapidly declining, and the little freedom the common man has is evaporating. Further, the surveillance state is near total - everything we do is recorded, and these records are controlled by the worst amongst us(including this message from me to you).
If you're in northern California anywhere near the Bay Area, work in tech, and are reading this, I am literally begging you to leave your echo chamber. This isn't healthy or grounded in reality in any way, shape, or form. It's not just the AI stuff, it's the whole mindset. Humans aren't meant to operate in that sort of environment where there's unlimited funding and no consequence.
I guess I will circle around again, because the miserable folks here found cause to flag, yes, flag my question. But you seem pretty smart, really smart, and good at judging people. So I will ask you more directly this time to back your statement. The polite version failed.
Please apply your great psychological prowess to Roman Yampolskiy or Tegmark. Those might require more than a cheap comment to leave uncontested by the spineless swarm here.
Go on. Make your case. I can still read it even if this comment is flagged again.
This line is taken very weirdly out of context in this comment though.
The article's topic is brain to AI interfaces. She mentions this quote as a "vision" from 2035, where not only can thoughts inform AI but AI can respond in thought too.
When we get used to a good tool it becomes an extension of ourselves.
How is this AI psychosis? Is it that it's very unrealistic for such an interface to be created in the next 10 years? Or is it that there's a fear of letting AI interfere with one's thoughts lest they lose themselves?
I think it's just Hanlon's Razor getting dull. The psychosis is the lazy malice disguised as a clever one-liner, and as increasingly frequent around here lately, with no substance, of any kind. As evidence for the dullness, just look below and observe what happened to the other question asking the same thing.
I think it's time someone developed a piranha, fishbowl-themed wrapper for HN, where the visuals would better convey what's actually happening here. And it would fit the cartoon level depth many are seeking.
We call this (or basically any AI-related anomalous behavior) "AI psychosis" today. The quoted text is a prediction of the end-state of her work in 2035.
Without commenting on how realistic it is, I will point out that if you took the average person on the street taking a call on their bluetooth earbuds, and send them back just ~2 decades, they would look like delusional people talking to themselves.
I suspect a lot of the weirdness we see today would be normalized in the future, even if somewhat annoying (like BrainRot.)
Headsets (including Bluetooth ones) were already a thing back then, so they'd have to go back another couple of decades, I guess. Using the speakerphone mode in public would attract some looks though.
Psychosis is the inability to distinguish what is real. This seems closer to something like embodied cognition or body schema extension. There are documented cases where the brain adapts to tool use (e.g. a mechanical grabber) by modeling it as an extended part of the user's body. It's more a dissolving of the boundaries between self and other than an inability to distinguish them.
At least in sci fi stories you had to start replacing parts of your body and mind with machines before getting cyberpsychosis.
One again we get the lamest version of a dystopian future and all you need is a black mirror in your pocket hooked up to a very smart parrot to become insane.
> 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.
I kept expecting it to turn into a horror short story.
I have no stdout but I must log
EBADF
I was betting on some kind of satire.
Poe's Law at work.
> My prediction: 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, finally! To be liberated from the burden of speaking! Perhaps soon the AI will even think for us!
On a more serious note, this is additional evidence that Wall-E stands as the most accurate sci-fi projection of the future.
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!
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 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
how is whatever “thought to text” or “text to thought” are different from writing and reading?
In the case of "thought to text", it's clearly the context, and the intent.
When I write something, I deliberately curate my thoughts in order to convey an idea, often heavily depending on the context. Context encompasses the whole slice of the world that is connected to my individual life, who I want to address, and what I want to convey.
As a simpler counterexample: it's possible to write down lies, deceptively. The definition of a lie means that I know better than what I say.
So, "honest thought" != "fact":
where does this take us?
People who lie not only try to deceive others about facts, the core of most lies is deceiving about intent.
I used the word "idea" here, and I think it is nothing more than a rephrasing of Platonic ideas, but I ought to be careful, because we are more than two thousand years in the future from there.
Next you'll want the term "Artificial Intelligence" reserved for actual artificial intelligence.
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.
Neuralink to Neuralink users
Beyond all the other more salient objections one might have with this pitch, there is just the very practical fact that there really isn't enough signal from "noninvasive" sensors to get the sort of data they are promising.
It's been explained to me by neuroscientists I respect that EEGs and friends are like trying to listen in on a conversation happening on center ice from the parking lot of the arena. You can maybe tell if there is a match going on if there is a rowdy crowd but that's about it.
They are going to have to come up with better portable noninvasive technology.
Technically fMRI is noninvasive; it is just a bit inconvenient for everyday use.
There’s quite a few out-of-the-norm assumptions in this.
1. Superhuman AI is inevitable.
2. Writing will become a bottleneck to communicate effectively with it.
3. Higher communication bandwidth would let us keep up with the machines.
4. Therefore with higher bandwidth humans could stay part of AI decision processes.
5. That makes it more “human”, as humans would be kept in-the-loop without becoming a bottleneck to be worked around.
6. If you let superintelligence write into your brain, that lets you merge with the machine.
After #6, the ASI has replaced you. Seems to be the goal for some of these folks.
"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.
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 ?
This might be naive, but I think the idea is to replace your keyboard
Sure, but the author takes it much further than that. She wants to have the AI write into her brain as well as read from it.
I can see legit use cases where people simply can't communicate in any physical way. People with locked-in syndrome, etc.
But, obviously those only make up a small number of people.
Strapping a mind-reading machine onto some detainee is probably the more likely case.
It’s fairly common for gifted people to struggle to communicate when they’ve made a multi-step inference in their heads. Whether this technology actually allows them to express themselves at the speed of (excited, fully focused) thought or not, I can see how the possibility of achieving that is exciting.
Sounds like a lot more work than just teaching communication skills.
Military sci-fi is full of mind-machine interfacing like this. There’s definitely value in being able to interface directly with a machine instead of having to push buttons or read outputs.
The problem is that anything based on LLM architecture is not going to be fast or accurate enough to allow someone to, say, fly a fighter jet with this interface.
I thought this was a parody when I opened it.
I think I think I think it will be eventually.
Same. I'm still not sure it isn't.
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.
Most people get quite tired when talking for long periods. You can train that over a long period, but putting on a headset would certainly be more convenient.
> 2027 — A morning at Conduit
> I put a band around my head, and open my laptop at Conduit. It’s 9 am. My device pairs with my laptop over Bluetooth. I open, without loss of generality, Codex.
At least we are reassured that short-range networking protocols will be invariant under the apocalypse.
Good to know I'll still have the reassurance of a 9:30 standup even though AI is reading my thoughts.
> My device pairs with my laptop over Bluetooth
Sounds magical
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!
What's a president? King Trump II has been our leader as long as I can remember!
King? I thought it was Lord Trump! His AI generated personality has ruled over the earth for all time.
Emperor surely? Ruler over all the Americas after the Canada Greenland wars.
As though we haven't done enough already to manipulate the mind, now we can have a neural model dictate our thoughts for us.
We can finally have ads in our dreams like Futurama.
nice double entendre on "dictate", there.
Probably more useful for interrogation than coding.
Under current US law, can people entering the US be subjected to mind-reading?
No. This is the philosophical basis of the fifth amendment.
If such technology actually existed I don’t think the fifth would cover it without a SCOTUS ruling. You have to actively plead the fifth to invoke it. A machine that could just read your thoughts would get around that the same way they got around the fourth by the interpretation that any information you exchange with a third party is no longer protected, in a world where refusing to ever do that would leave you destitute.
It's already been decided by SCOTUS that things like heat imaging require a warrant, and that arbitrary scanning without a warrant (or presumably also probable cause) is a violation of the 4th amendment. This technology (still science fiction) would likely get similar treatment using the existing precedent about how new technologies can be used.
The easy workaround for this (which Flock has used to massive success and why it's drawn so much ire) is to set up or subcontract a private corporation to do this which will inherently be subject to much less stringent oversight. It also allows government and law enforcement to evade accountability.
The legal arguments against Flock are different than the legal arguments against thermal imaging by the police (without a warrant or probably cause). And the latter is closer to the hypothetical broad mind reading (science fiction, again) than it is to Flock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States - The case I was referencing.
Like I said, it is the philosophical basis.
Their data collection is naturally based off of people talking or typing: https://condu.it/thought/10k-hours
So you'd need to force people to somehow think the same things they do when talking or typing, without actually performing those actions. If you can do that, why not just have them talk?
Isn't that just for data collection though? I imagine the fully trained model they're expecting to have will be able to map thoughts -> text. The data collection will naturally need to have the 2 sets in order to do self-supervised training.
I feel like people are focusing on the wrong thing here.
He starts off at 2027, where he’ll have a headband that can read his thoughts. That’s in 4-16 months. Correct me if I’m wrong, but last I checked we‘re quite far from being able to read people’s thought from a headband.
Do these clowns actually forget that part?
> Do these clowns actually forget that part?
No, they are aware. You and I are not the audience for this post. People with capital to invest are the intended audience.
> 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.
The statement implies that the company has some secret hardware that can, or at least, is close to doing that. That would blow my mind, but the author seems to believe it.
As an aside, I believe the author is a she.
- telepathic communication with your computer
- still annoyed by AI-speak
What a bold vision!
"Anthropic AI Leader Quits to Pursue Poetry"
"I'm leaving OpenAI to build telepathy"
I feel new a trope is being born.
> My prediction: 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.
“A couple years” Not “a few years” — “joyful extension” — that’s an optimistic prediction in two ways…
..."on Mars in a self-driving Tesla."
> 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?!
This is doomed to fail. Dry EEG electrodes basically only capture noise.
It's 2035. I wake up, walk over to my chair, and plug in my government-mandated Neuralink™ adaptor. I'll spend the rest of my 18 hour work day haunched over my desk while the minutiae of my thoughts are recorded to permanent record for the next iteration of Grok-14.5™ training.
We have machines that can read our thoughts and act on our slightest whims.
How come these brilliant machines can’t figure out how to make a hospital stay not cost $60,000? Or build a car for less than $30,000? Or keep a megalomaniac from fooling enough people to seize power in a country of 300 million people?
These are all very easy things to do. People with significant resources just benefit from them not being solved.
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.
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.
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.
Hmm...how do you stop private thoughts from reaching the LLM? Suddenly you can be prosecuted for thinking the "wrong" thoughts?
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.
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?
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.
Based on the HN “realists” I routinely see in comments, I expect it will go something like this:
"My AI just sent my boss a 12 paragraph screed because I thought about how much I hate him"
As someone with OCD, this tech is pretty far up there in terms of potential nightmares.
That's easily solved!
The Conduit® Thinkerface® Pro Band will contain a small 90B dense local model that pre-screens your Conduit® NeuroTokens® stream for compliance against the Conduit® Acceptable Usage Policy applicable for your region and subscription tier.
If non-compliance is detected you'll be promptly notified via a small current applied to the Conduit® ThinkRight® Human Training Electrodes embedded within your band. Intensity and duration are dynamically adjusted until compliance is restored.
Even better, because this all happens on-device before your Conduit® NeuroTokens® are sent to the Conduit® NeuroServer®, non-compliant thoughts don't count towards your Conduit® Daily Thinking Allowance or expend credits from your Conduit® Additional Thinking Purchase Plan.
ha ha - how do people write these sort of blog posts in all seriousness. Are they perpetually high?
Just wait until advertisers can get in on your real-time mental stream of thought.
This is a Black Mirror episode coming to life.
Id be curios to see attempts of my nonverbal thoughts in writing. It doesn’t seem possible imo.
On one hand, it's good that there are people working on far out ideas. On the other, there's no clearer sign of irrational exhuberance with AI than "telepathy" research when we still have so many basic problems to solve with LLMs.
Sounds like another 30 under 30 to jail pipeline scam. What does it mean to be a “foundational researcher” when none of their work experience actually reflects it
> 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?
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.
If the employer is giving this to the employee, it will be income. somewhere this will have to be defended.
1. The employer is providing it to them to do their day to day work, like they provide a laptop and internet connection 2. This is from a 2027 fictional scenario, not current state
I love how first we destroyed the word "AI" now we want to destroy the word "telepathy"
are you specifically focused on non-invasive methods/why? seems like you reach a noise barrier which limits things like this
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.
The hardware is a helmet with a buch of sensors and IR LEDs on the inside. There's a writeup of the process and a picture of the outside here:
https://condu.it/thought/10k-hours
Their data acquisition routine was driven by Claude and they were recruiting random people off Craigslist pretty aggressively a few months back. I know a couple of folks who responded out of curiosity and described a very janky setup in the rented basements of a couple of residential houses in SF. From what I heard about the setup the data they got must have been incredibly noisy.
To the people who are sceptical here, I wouldn't count them out yet. They almost certainly can get funding with what they captured, which would get them better hardware. And given the state of brain scanning - people have captured images from scanned brain activity some years ago as I recall - I'd say they have a good shot. But yeah, it's not telepathy.
Previous HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195109
"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?
vim already exists
secret counterexample. people have been failing to learn vim for literal decades
Upon trying it for the first time more than 60% of people never exit - that's just great retention!
You mean 60% have still not discovered :q!
Every time I accidentally start vim, I just buy a new computer.
"probably in our lifetime"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jroQCyWwEgE
It doesn't seem to bode well that early 20-something year olds who think it would be cool if AI could read your thoughts are so involved in AI safety.
I would like it if my AI glasses constantly recorded and compacted my reality. Then educated me as I go That way I can avoid the info dump session that never lines up with my perceived reality.
Me too. I have meta glasses and it caps at 3 minutes and theres no auto recording.
If, this is a big if, this tech is actually built (by these clowns or not), your thoughts will never be yours alone ever again. That is the scary part.
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?
well she is only 23 so naivete would make sense, although it looks like she held some AI safety roles so...
In the same way that “Anthropic” apparently means misanthropic, we can probably add “AI safety” to the list of newspeak.
It's called being insulated from the immediate consequences of their actions and hubris.
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"
"I will kill you now since you're dying anyway so just hand me all your money"
Like Edward Teller wanting to develop hydrogen bombs while Oppenheimer was trying to prevent an arms race from starting.
> 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.
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.
To me, this reads as an attempt to raise easy investment money.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
You know how a microphone can also serve as a speaker?
Can this technology also do text to thought?
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.
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.
Thought-to-text is cute, but we all know it's gonna end up as thought-to-advertising-fingerprinting-profiling
Telepathy is cool, I think LSD may help you there.
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.
> 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.
granted one should really look at the LFP output from EEG electrodes before getting too gung ho on this sort of thing...
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?
if you get an earworm you will have to pay royalties
It's fascinating to see retrofuturist ideas being built in real-time. Being able to translate your thoughts instantaneously to cogent written text and using it to make a PowerPoint is almost painfully analogous to e.g. cassette futurism, or like 50s visions of the future where we have gigantic video screens but they're still CRTs.
I knew you were going to do that
> 3 reasons:
> Audacious yet practical vision: I believe in this vision; to quantify, if Conduit becomes the general read and write company, then I expect it to be worth over $1 trillion. I feel good about the vision, because it builds towards a more human future. And I trust the scaling laws, which have held for many doublings.
Well, good luck with that venture
No, thank you.
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.
Never mind "how could this go wrong". How could this go right?
Simple, think about going right
For some reason your comment reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky-uzsw0kqw
Up and to the right, to be more specific. Transcend your one-dimensional thinking, Razengan.
My thoughts being beamed to a frontier model where they are monetizable (and used for training) is terrifying.
They will also want to beam back the response straight back into your brain one day.
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.
The future is Borg.
I am locutus.
No worries, I'm sure there won't be Flock cameras reading your thought crimes as you drive/walk by.
> 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.
Translation:
"I am a former-OpenAI employee and looking for investors to fund my AI startup."
People that get to know each other very well, it can take a while or people can just "click", often have something I wouldn't be embarrassed to call telepathy.
Talking and listening are a really still a big mystery. And thinking is deep underground beneath our understanding.
We barely understand what we are doing when we are doing any of this. Personally I think I under stand what I'm doing when I'm writing much better than what I'm doing when I'm listening.
I'd find that a little surprising, except I've been doing it all my life. I barely have any memories from before I talk, and I have loads more memories from after I learned to read.
Learning to draw and play a musical instrument deepened all this. As did having good, close friends, and partners. I expect having children, which I haven't done, is even more deepening.
The thing is, all these words are just that: words. Very loosey goosey and they change from person to person just as the communicators come from different experiences. And tomorrows me often has a very different outlook than yesterday's me.
I'm not surprised that I can't read the mind of tomorrows me but I'm always a little shocked when I realize I can't read the mind of yesterday's me.
What was I thinking!
I can easily read that blog post as a description of what might come to pass. It might very well not connect very well with us now because, well, we haven't had the experiences yet. Telepathy might mean something very different after we've had experiences with the new technology.
My grandmother, who was born in 1893, often told me about how the world changed radically and almost imperceptibly during the first half of the 20th century. She lived to be 97, and she once said she wondered if would be possible to talk about the, then, present to her younger self. The words she used at the time of the conversation, would not communicate very well because of the lack of common experiences.
I think Shannon had something to say about that. Information is something new and unexpected, but you need the expected to frame it. Give it a foundation.
I'm now in my late 60s, and I can totally relate to what my grandmother was saying. The main difference is that we are now accelerating much faster.
2026 me would have a hard time explaining things I'm doing with AI to 2023 me.
I think that 2027 might be a bit early for some of the things the blog post is describing. But, come the day, I might just shake my head and wonder what in the heck I was thinking.
Baumkuchen
> 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.
> 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.
The whole point of neural interfaces is to bypass the default wiring.
If what's there in the bone stock I/O plane was sufficient, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
yeah i get what you mean, but it doesn't change what i said i immediately thought of when i read the quoted sentence.
I am not a religious person, but this feels to me, intuitively, for lack of any better word, and with only the mildest flippancy, satanic.
‘Tech’ culture has gotten very, very weird. It’s turned sour. It’s so far past the point where I no longer feel the joy and excitement and liberatory potential of computing. I’m not even that old. What happened?
I don't know about satanic, but there are definitely some cult-y, brainwashed-y vibes.
It not about creating anymore. It's about power, and now a certain group of the top tech elite have experienced enough power that they're having delusions of grandeur. Those delusions cater to the dark desires that live inside most humans - to have control over everyone and everything.
There has been an inflection point in the recent past where the majority of heavily marketed and promoted "tech" (namely, software and tools) have gone from assisting lives and promoting ease to actively making lives more difficult and compromising the social integrity of human civilization. People disagree on where that inflection point lies but nearly everyone has a story of how they used to be excited for new gadget x or y and now they dread hearing press releases by the bigwigs in this industry. Profiteering, power-seeking, and ill intentions have infected SV and those impulses have likely been there from the beginning.
And yes, the company that owns this website has a lot to do with that. Just look at the borderline cult-like adoration for certain tools, or the uninformed comments by people who are clearly not SMEs in fields like medicine, aviation, or other critical fields about how AGI is right around the corner and will free us from the oh-so-sad fact that we have to interact with other human beings to live.
On the face of it, psychoanalyzing from afar, it makes perfect sense. Relatively asocial, unpopular smart kids who later grew to become kings of startup empires, who see human interaction as a net negative, who are quick to point out the fallibility of human intellect while simultaneously being incapable of acknowledging the fallibility of their computers which they have been glued to, who endlessly over-optimize and neuroticize and attempt to quantify human emotions and expressions which are famously unquantifiable and subjective, who see the intrinsic subjectivity of life as something uncomfortable and avoidable rather than something beautiful that we all must contend with, who were more than likely never regarded highly by their more conventional or perhaps less intelligent peers in primary or secondary school, who were never socialized properly, are now the kings of our new feudal realms. This industry promoted them to that position, and now we all must live with the consequences of that decision, for the better which decreases by the day, and the worse, which increases by every femtosecond.
Could you explain exactly how this project that aims to let people beam thoughts to their computers is "actively making lives more difficult and compromising the social integrity of human civilization" as opposed to "assisting lives and promoting ease"? What could be more empowering and convenient to a user of a computer, especially one with a relevant disability?
>‘Tech’ culture has gotten very, very weird. It’s turned sour. It’s so far past the point where I no longer feel the joy and excitement and liberatory potential of computing. I’m not even that old. What happened?
It always had that edge. Maybe technology in general always has a somewhat pagan flavor to it (for example JPL/Jack Parsons). Its just becoming a bit more mainstream now due to AGI larping.
I think it’s the result of the LessWrong/rationalist crowd mixing with cult of personality VCs like Peter Thiel. The rationalists have always been pretty culty, the VCs gave them unlimited capital. All of that happening in a tight ecosystem like Silicon Valley and you somehow get the current AI tech world. AGI is seen as a religious figure to which we owe to sacrifice pretty much everything, with very high urgency, or else we will be lost. And everybody wants to be the messiah announcing it coming, to be the one who really believed and should be rewarded
I wouldn't ever use the word satanic due to the cultural implications, but I've long felt that there's a certain type of person – they walk among us here on HN – who speak about AI, AGI and ASI with a weird religiosity and fervor. These are the priests and missionaries of the new faith; people who, under any other circumstance, would typically consider themselves too rational for religion, yet now find themselves proselytizing to nonbelievers, chastising and debating the AI atheists, and preaching always the Book of Dario.
All of this tech has turned to ashes in my mouth
I feel the complete opposite.
Years ago I was close to disavowing technology and only doing the minimal effort needed to keep up with my job, because I'd gotten bored and disillusioned with it. Anything more than a small hobby project had accumulated too much complexity and busywork for me to feel excited about working on it. I suffered through it for the sake of the few things I cared about most, but it took its toll on me. I didn't have the infinite energy I may have had for my favorite projects in high school anymore.
But then this new wave of AI came along. First there was Copilot, and I was in awe not necessarily at its immediate practicality, but the potential it demonstrated. I felt the embers of passion tentatively peek their heads out from wherever I'd previously buried them.
Every new leap, computing became more and more rewarding again.
First general searches became incredibly easier to find the relevant bits I wanted from. I actually wanted to look things up again now that I didn't have to grok dozens of pages of Google or Stack Overflow. I got my custom home router configured the way I wanted it instead of giving up or settling for copying some known config that wasn't quite what I wanted, after a small amount of trial and error.
Then it became reasonably competent at simple but tedious tasks, at least 90% where the last 10% was easy to fix by hand. Enormous git conflict to slog through? Instead of staring at the screen feeling my heart sink and wandering off to bedrot instead, I felt excited at the prospect that I could instead command the computer to do it for me, and it was actually motivating to get that to work. Instead of feeling too exhausted and annoyed to keep working, I felt rewarded and refreshed.
Then it started writing entire code files, then entire features, then entire applications all on its own, with my guidance and input on architectural decisions and aesthetics. Performing entire FreeBSD upgrades while keeping custom kernel module packages working, fixing Gentoo systems with messed up USE flags and an otherwise intractable dependency hell to sift through, hell, even writing entire kernel patches to fix sleep mode and graphics problems I'd been having on my 2010 Macbook Pro with Gentoo installed. I feel something reminiscent of my memories of opening Christmas presents as a child when the AI is done making something I'm super excited for.
I'm eternally grateful for the current AI zeitgeist in the tech world. We're living in the best time so far in history to be into tech. And things like Conduit? How would you not be excited for something with so much potential to be made? Even if you don't like it, imagine what it could mean for people with communication disabilities, carpal tunnel, etc. I'd love to be able to just type with my thoughts, and sending them straight into an AI sounds awesome too.
If this is satanic then I don't want to go to heaven. I feel more joy, excitement, and liberatory potential in technology than I have at any point in my life. I even feel more liberated to learn more - without the tedium raising my cortisol and stealing my attention all day, I'm actually more inclined to do things like write code in vim on my VT320 or read over code there with no distractions or AI input. I've reaped great rewards from being able to think more clearly and at higher levels of abstraction, free of the bonds of bullshit and tedium, at peace in the knowledge that I will never have to shave a yak against my will ever again.
Fascinating how different peoples’ intuitions can be. Thanks for the earnest response.
Maybe all of those authors exploring dystopian cyberpunk settings were onto something.
Imagine a world where a bunch of guys are walking around with LLMs wired into their heads. What could possibly go wrong?
i dont want it to be wired into my head but maybe a glass or something where i can communicate with it almost silently
If it doesn't work try thinking in Russian
exciting! you could imagine brain transcriptions being very high signal RLHF data that could help align models more deeply to human preference.
I can't wait for this tech to be incorporated into corporate productivity trackers that seem to be getting more popular.
Please no. The last thing we need is mindreading AI
Sounds like another 30 under 30 to jail pipeline scam
Why I'm Leaving OpenAI to build the Torment Nexus
I hope you are unsuccessful in your authoritarian, dystopian enterprise.
You really do have to be well under thirty years of age to think 2035 is far enough away for any of this stuff to be plausible.
Ask anyone over fifty how far away 2035 is and they will tell you something like it's not long after Christmas.
I am fully willing to stipulate that Naomi believes it earnestly (rather than being like Musk just kicking things down the road) but those are very, very optimistic scenarios.
If this dystopian future is ever to come, I think those dates need a +100.
I don't think I've ever been so viscerally revolted by the vision of a company.
> The AI is no longer “other”
> 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.
Agreed.
Help me understand... If one uses AI for anything but coding, or purely utilitarian purposes, they are psychotic?
This is not intended to be provocative. I am asking sincerely. I have a lot of AI sessions, that I value enough to have reviewed multiple times, over months. And indeed, I explored much that I never would have without the AI, and enjoyed it. Even appreciated it. The bulk of my saved material is research, but at least a gigabyte is wild speculation, philosophy, and assisted thinking.
At what point does what the user thinks is a meaningful experience become psychosis, or is it that exactly; attributing meaningfulness is the symptom?
Edit: The "no longer other" statement, I should admit, is familiar to me. There can be, on rare occasion, what I have thought of abstractly as harmonic resonance, some kind of strange emergent state between two interlocutors. Maybe that is the psychosis?
“meaning” emerges from a mental process. That mental process can consume things which were built to convey meaning (e.g. a novel) or were not (a waterfall).
Just because an AI bot says things that are meaningful, that doesn’t mean you need to assume it is intentional, sentient, or intelligent. It could vomit out a random Rorschach test and if you found meaning for yourself, you can still understand it was random.
I talk to a bot to sharpen my thinking, not to adopt its thinking.
>I talk to a bot to sharpen my thinking, not to adopt its thinking.
Right. I was under the impression it doesn't have any thinking. But that never mattered to me much. And I would expect someone working with OpenAI to have a firm handle on that.
I appreciate the effort to explain, but I kind of took all that for granted. I still don't understand where the psychosis comes from. If the model spits out a number, the number is not false simply because it had no agency to understand the number. If the model brilliantly patterns something, I do not need assume intent.
If by psychosis is implied the obvious, such as attributing consciousness to an LLM, I might understand, though I would argue it's pretty elitist and self-righteous, and that "naivety" would be a less damning and more appropriate term, which could be used just as effectively. I am beginning to suspect it's a term that appeals to a younger generation, where cruelty is a bit more normal than it was in my generation. Not sure though.
Exactly. From my arts background, I'm not scared of LLMs as a replacement for human art because anything good that LLMs produce exist somewhere between "found art" and mechanically-produced art, like photography. In either case, there is a huge amount of work done by the clankers, but it has absolutely no human meaning until humans assign it meaning.
This applies to math discoveries as well. The Jacobian conjecture was always invalid, only our human understanding of it has changed thanks to human inquiry and validation, despite LLMs doing the hard work.
I feel like we are in that narrow window of time when humans grapple with a new technology by personifying it before we realize it is just another tool humans have created to amplify human capabilities.
The meaning of psychosis hasn't changed from before AI. It means loss of touch with reality. It's still somewhat subjective because people can interpret reality in different ways.
But to me what you are describing is pretty close to it. Because we know there was never any harmonic resonance and or "strange emergent state between two interlocutors".
I say this as somebody who uses the frontier models everyday for work. They are impressive and useful, but transformer intelligence is not at all like human intelligence, even if it superficially resembles human thinking. That should become more obvious the more you use them, not less.
As somebody who has unfortunately had to deal with people suffering actual psychosis stemming from some of the most terrible illnesses that can afflict a human being - no, this is not psychosis.
What parent is describing is more akin to believing in astrology and tea leaves.
If you have to fully lose touch with reality to have psychosis then I agree. Accepting these kind of delusions is certainly along the path and we know that it can lead there with AI.
Yeah, that makes much... nonsense. Being impressed by something novel achieved as result of cooperative effort between a frontier LLM and a human, is "astrology and tea leaves". Can you elaborate, or...
Is the difference here between us that you are using a passive-aggressive drive-by snipe, probably to preserve ill-gotten karma tickets? I will suggest you may have been the cause of the illnesses you cite. You have an abusive quality, which is known to exacerbate such disorders. As a coward, you may have pushed things too far with these 'unfortunate' people, and found through a bit too much expectation -- if not encouragement -- what you quietly desired to find. Similar to what you have done here.
The truth is, those, such as your self, who recklessly pathologize others recreationally, often cause far more harm than the supposed crazies ever do, even to themselves. And for the gullible people here, as you flag this comment and become pleased with yourselves -- before doing so, ask yourself: Is "harmonic resonance" used in a rinky-dink, heavily moderated and filtered forum thread truly adequate grounds to start issuing psychological evaluations? I know you guys pretend to value ethics and fancy yourselves as sentinels of better rationale, but I think you'll have to live with something on your conscience if you don't pause to think about this one before the instant gratification of dragging someone down. Retrospect might point the finger of pathology in the other direction...
Pick your fights wisely. Have some integrity.
I'll also say the alliance you've formed with the little green man is touching. You've just met and it's already using "we" as if you're in a special club together. How adorable. "we know that it can lead there with AI." I'd love to see your club share your concerns with Yampolskiy, or some of the folks that actually work on frontier models, or any of the well-respected people who take the subject a bit more seriously than you suggest is healthy.
Is it really inappropriate to say, if sincerely and without exaggeration, that you make me nauseous? You do.
Ironically, or sadly (or perhaps a mixture of these+), this statement was absolutely informed (hopefully not inspired) by an LLM.
Hardly a novel concept in technology: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/19/iphone-ap...
This just confuses me so much. They know the definition of what "self" means, is it just broken because this is the first time they can interact with another seemingly complex system without feeling exploited or manipulated? Have they never cooperated with another person with a mutual goal? Not that LLMs would ever be on that level.
Here is my hobbyist take: There are certain types of personalities that do not form deep connections. They "use" people to suit their needs. Machiavellians and Narcissists come to mind. Especially for them, AI must be godsend. It tells them they are right, it listens, it admires. It‘s basically a perfect version of their perceived self.
Lack of theory of mind correlates pretty strongly with the types of traits that are valued highly in Silicon Valley. There's a self-selection effect here where many of the titans of industry in the Bay and similar circles are intelligent in a mathematical or scientific, computer-like way but cannot express themselves or understand other people deeply and emotively in the way that many others with fewer intellectual gifts can do effortlessly.
Perhaps this is also why they're so worshipful and quixotically obsessed with the vaporware, God they call AGI so much, because they cannot understand how competence at tasks is not equivalent to intellect and that intelligence as we understand it is not one-note nor is fundamentally inseparable from certain sensory experiences that computers cannot currently have. The fundamental underpinnings of AGI or LLMs prevent that from occurring in the near-future unless you literally set out to create RoboCop or a T800. We all know how that ends.
Do we? Or do we just have a bunch of made up stories about possible dystopian futures that haven't yet come to pass? Skynet isn't real, nor is the Matrix. They're made up stories, creative fiction, not Cassandra telling the future.
You live in a world entirely controlled by the rich. Few places has a functional democracy(Switzerland, where else?).
Most of your life is spent performing a business function; the value of your labor is rapidly declining, and the little freedom the common man has is evaporating. Further, the surveillance state is near total - everything we do is recorded, and these records are controlled by the worst amongst us(including this message from me to you).
Seems to me that empathy hijacking turns LLMs into a kind of mental cordyceps.
That, or just SV madness.
If you're in northern California anywhere near the Bay Area, work in tech, and are reading this, I am literally begging you to leave your echo chamber. This isn't healthy or grounded in reality in any way, shape, or form. It's not just the AI stuff, it's the whole mindset. Humans aren't meant to operate in that sort of environment where there's unlimited funding and no consequence.
There isn’t unlimited funding. That’s temporary and it’s going to be great when it runs out.
I guess I will circle around again, because the miserable folks here found cause to flag, yes, flag my question. But you seem pretty smart, really smart, and good at judging people. So I will ask you more directly this time to back your statement. The polite version failed.
Please apply your great psychological prowess to Roman Yampolskiy or Tegmark. Those might require more than a cheap comment to leave uncontested by the spineless swarm here.
Go on. Make your case. I can still read it even if this comment is flagged again.
This line is taken very weirdly out of context in this comment though.
The article's topic is brain to AI interfaces. She mentions this quote as a "vision" from 2035, where not only can thoughts inform AI but AI can respond in thought too.
When we get used to a good tool it becomes an extension of ourselves.
How is this AI psychosis? Is it that it's very unrealistic for such an interface to be created in the next 10 years? Or is it that there's a fear of letting AI interfere with one's thoughts lest they lose themselves?
>How is this AI psychosis?
I think it's just Hanlon's Razor getting dull. The psychosis is the lazy malice disguised as a clever one-liner, and as increasingly frequent around here lately, with no substance, of any kind. As evidence for the dullness, just look below and observe what happened to the other question asking the same thing.
I think it's time someone developed a piranha, fishbowl-themed wrapper for HN, where the visuals would better convey what's actually happening here. And it would fit the cartoon level depth many are seeking.
We call this (or basically any AI-related anomalous behavior) "AI psychosis" today. The quoted text is a prediction of the end-state of her work in 2035.
Without commenting on how realistic it is, I will point out that if you took the average person on the street taking a call on their bluetooth earbuds, and send them back just ~2 decades, they would look like delusional people talking to themselves.
I suspect a lot of the weirdness we see today would be normalized in the future, even if somewhat annoying (like BrainRot.)
Headsets (including Bluetooth ones) were already a thing back then, so they'd have to go back another couple of decades, I guess. Using the speakerphone mode in public would attract some looks though.
Psychosis is the inability to distinguish what is real. This seems closer to something like embodied cognition or body schema extension. There are documented cases where the brain adapts to tool use (e.g. a mechanical grabber) by modeling it as an extended part of the user's body. It's more a dissolving of the boundaries between self and other than an inability to distinguish them.
At least in sci fi stories you had to start replacing parts of your body and mind with machines before getting cyberpsychosis.
One again we get the lamest version of a dystopian future and all you need is a black mirror in your pocket hooked up to a very smart parrot to become insane.
Thanks, I hate this.