The quest to build a general-purpose thought decoder(newyorker.com) |
The quest to build a general-purpose thought decoder(newyorker.com) |
That made it pretty tough to write: how do you explain dimensionality reduction, PCA, word2vec, etc., and the wonders of high-dimensional "embeddings" (of the sort you find in deep neural nets) when a lot—or all—of these ideas might be new to the reader? I'm not sure—but this was my attempt!
Thought you might like this one: A Geometric Analysis of Five Moral Principles (OUP 2017)
Ethics using vectors or from a description of the technique: The geometric approach derives its normative force from the Aristotelian dictum that we should “treat like cases alike.” The more similar a pair of cases are, the more reason do we have to treat the cases alike. These similarity relations can be analyzed and represented geometrically. In such a geometric representation, the distance in moral space between cases reflects their degree of similarity. The more similar a pair of cases are from a moral point of view, the shorter is the distance between them.
Future applications can be good or bad, but of course that makes it even more important to record the early history of the field and these kind of articles will also help in start the ethics discussion at an earlier stage.
PCA (KLT) can be introduced as a generalization of the Fourier Transform. This can follow from using a cocktail mix analogy to Fourier Series. When I was a TA this was the approach I took with students, which seemed to make things easier for them.
An introductory post on PCA vs FA is here: https://towardsdatascience.com/what-is-the-difference-betwee...
Personal note: Susan Dumais, mentioned in the article also did great early work in text summarization, just after she joined Microsoft. I tried using some of her approached in video summarization in my PHDin early 2000s. How time flies.
Very minor point: the King - male + female = Queen is a good example, but widely decried as not true by specialists. I don’t have much better examples (I haven’t been able to tell if Paris - France + England = London, for instance) but if you reuse that story, it makes sense to investigate that myth. There’s a lot there too.
If we do anything less than criminalizing it outright, it will turn into something “voluntary”, but opting out will exclude you from certain events, or you’ll have to pay some sort of premium to maintain your privacy. This will have the side effect of making you seem suspicious.
I simply don’t want any entity, public or private, knowing my thoughts, at all, for any reason whatsoever.
Sure, we can _imagine_ issues, but long before we can get to anything ominous, there are countless applications to give back to people with major health issues their mobility, their ability to communicate. For that, they would need to focus voluntarily, intensely on one specific activity for seconds — a miracle today, but a frustrating practice when it takes 30 seconds trying to tell your nurse that you need the pan. I feel like there’s a couple of years between that and anything Orwellian.
We’ll worry about AI being super-intelligent _after_ Amazon recommendation engine is still stuck on assuming that I’ve started a vacuum cleaner collection.
There's a reason some people don't tell you what they're thinking even if you connect them to a car battery until they talk.
I don't see how fMRI or any external device can approach the sensitivity, specificity, or resolution to "read" thoughts beyond the level of gross guesstimates, i.e., deception, sexual attraction, arousal, etc.
Furthermore, it seems necessary to understand peculiarities of a particular individual's brain would be a prerequisite to mapping functional observations into approximate thoughts.
Now all I can think about is putting a "thinking hat" on my dog and recording everything he does, and then playing the process in reverse when he's dreaming!
Look, all I want to say is: you confidence and enthusiasm for technology and innovation is remarkable. Please, write science fiction. Sincerely.
"Ok, I'll agree to using the mind-reader, but only if I can use the mind-reader on you as well..."
Daniel Suarez touched on a proto-society developing with fMRI mind-reading in his Daemon series of books. Higher levels of authority required more frequent rounds of time in the mind-reader taking loyalty/polygraph tests.
I can think of lots of nefarious uses for this sort of thing, and I'm just some asshole who's read some science fiction. The real nefarious uses will be architected by people much smarter than me, whose moral difficulties will be dismissed by The Profit Motive, psychopathy, or both.
For all the bad you've listed, there's a reason people voluntarily choose to carry those surveillance devices in their pockets: the boons outweigh the ills by an order of magnitude. They're rarely dwelt upon because they're ubiquitous... much like nobody bothers to extol the virtues of fire.
We talk here about what's wrong because there is room for improvement, not because we should halt progress.