I just saw a post about mindreading tech. Has there been/is there going to be any interest among the LW community to consider the likelihood of such technology being within reach or if it’s even already here and well-developped through Manhattan style projects?
It’s a very murky subject and I’m curious how LWers would approach it.
My intuition is that what’s holding us back from it is measurement, not analysis—ie if we could extract a sufficiently high quality signal of brain state/activity, the rest of the problem will fall quickly. The state of the art currently seems to be either noninvasive highly sensitive magnetic measurements, or Neuralink-style “stick a couple wires in them”, neither of which seem to be yielding much, at least by way of loud/mainstream advancements. Imagine giving a modern CPU to a scientist from the 1930s—theoretically they have the ability to understand it, if you gave them a diagram and explained “so and so is an AND gate, &c”—but just by looking at it, running voltage through it, even imaging it via x-rays wouldn’t be enough—even though the science of that era is entirely able to explain and model the behavior thereof on an abstract level, you’d never be able to because you can’t get a good look at the damn thing to be able to explain it in the first place.
I just saw a post about mindreading tech. Has there been/is there going to be any interest among the LW community to consider the likelihood of such technology being within reach or if it’s even already here and well-developped through Manhattan style projects?
It’s a very murky subject and I’m curious how LWers would approach it.
My intuition is that what’s holding us back from it is measurement, not analysis—ie if we could extract a sufficiently high quality signal of brain state/activity, the rest of the problem will fall quickly. The state of the art currently seems to be either noninvasive highly sensitive magnetic measurements, or Neuralink-style “stick a couple wires in them”, neither of which seem to be yielding much, at least by way of loud/mainstream advancements. Imagine giving a modern CPU to a scientist from the 1930s—theoretically they have the ability to understand it, if you gave them a diagram and explained “so and so is an AND gate, &c”—but just by looking at it, running voltage through it, even imaging it via x-rays wouldn’t be enough—even though the science of that era is entirely able to explain and model the behavior thereof on an abstract level, you’d never be able to because you can’t get a good look at the damn thing to be able to explain it in the first place.