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Posted by devanshp 6 hours ago

I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy(naomibashkansky.com)
88 points | 134 commentspage 3
andrethegiant 4 hours ago|
Visit from CIA in 3, 2, 1...

The only thing I would actually want this for would be a dream logger. Extremely invasive and quite dangerous otherwise.

mosura 3 hours ago|
There is probably good money in upgrading the polygraph security clearance ritual for the 21st century.

It doesn’t even really need to work of course.

bilbo0s 2 hours ago||
Not sure how valuable it would be for interrogations of state level actors? Ironically, I'd think it might even be better for your adversary if the technology does work?

We know that we can use classical techniques, (non-AI), to psychologically condition humans. In the lightest case, we do it with advertising and social media. I'm absolutely certain that state-level adversaries use even more effective techniques to train and condition agents for fieldwork.

If your adversary knows you are more likely to rely on intelligence gathered in this fashion due to its reliability, they can definitely game that. Or rather, I guess, I would definitely game it if I knew the Russians had this kind of technology. So I don't know why they wouldn't be thinking along the same lines.

Basically, make them think their new technology is working.. until it counts. If it consistently works 99 out of 99 times. They'll have no reason to believe it's not working the 100th time.

But I guess if you were interrogating, maybe a pot dealer or spouse muderer or cheating husband or something, it might be valuable.

mvanbaak 2 hours ago||
> My GPT-7 agent has been chugging away at the new encoder I’ve been exploring for over a day now.

How much are those people making to be able to afford things like this?

hgoel 2 hours ago|
As employees they have unlimited usage IIRC, and also these kinds of tasks can be surprisingly token efficient because a very large chunk of time is spent waiting for the calculation to finish, and AI agents love to run calculations excessively.
mvanbaak 2 hours ago||
If the employer is giving this to the employee, it will be income. somewhere this will have to be defended.
umeshunni 1 hour ago||
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
sam-cop-vimes 4 hours ago||
Hmm...how do you stop private thoughts from reaching the LLM? Suddenly you can be prosecuted for thinking the "wrong" thoughts?
komadori 2 hours ago||
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.

roguetoasterer 2 hours ago|||
As someone with OCD, this tech is pretty far up there in terms of potential nightmares.
pbjerkeseth 4 hours ago|||
Yeah, this whole area of UX scares me. Silent speech techniques could strike a balance, but it seems obvious it wont stop there - consider what a state actor would do if they could skip interrogation altogether?

Unfortunately I think this is inevitable because as a species we perform a steady march toward collective desires for items of science fiction, so start your adversarial double-think practice now.

dudefeliciano 3 hours ago||
Is it really collective desire or are these products being pushed upon us? And why does it always have to be the dystopic "destroying human nature and society as we know it" science fiction and not the utopic "everyone lived happily ever after" science fiction? Or does it just feel that way to me?
dag100 3 hours ago||
For a utopia to exist, everything has to go right. Dystopias are almost all modelled on some existing facet of human behaviour. Naturally one state is unstable as it requires practically complete co-operation in most cases while the other one is stable as it usually exists as some sort of undesirable equilibrium between competing forces.
hightrix 1 hour ago|||
Just wait until advertisers can get in on your real-time mental stream of thought.

This is a Black Mirror episode coming to life.

podgietaru 4 hours ago||
"My AI just sent my boss a 12 paragraph screed because I thought about how much I hate him"
randysalami 2 hours ago||
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.
AutomationGoat 2 hours ago|
Me too. I have meta glasses and it caps at 3 minutes and theres no auto recording.
podgietaru 4 hours ago||
"In a couple years"

In a couple years?! Get over the technical hurdles, do you think PEOPLE will be ready to telepathically talk to a computer in A COUPLE OF YEARS?

Apocryphon 3 hours ago||
"probably in our lifetime"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jroQCyWwEgE

deadbabe 4 hours ago||
vim already exists
hiAndrewQuinn 4 hours ago||
secret counterexample. people have been failing to learn vim for literal decades
the_sleaze_ 3 hours ago||
Upon trying it for the first time more than 60% of people never exit - that's just great retention!
recursive 3 hours ago|||
Every time I accidentally start vim, I just buy a new computer.
soco 3 hours ago|||
You mean 60% have still not discovered :q!
mbgerring 4 hours ago||
So is it just that these are people who haven’t personally experienced well-intentioned technology turning into a living nightmare? Watching the optimism and then collapse of Web 2.0 was a formative experience for me. I’m 38. Is this just naivete? What is this?
AdamH12113 2 hours ago||
According to her Wikipedia page, she's ~23 and went to Harvard, so A) her life experience is limited, B) most of the experience she does have involves being on a path to elitehood, and C) she probably sees a chance at a life-changing amount of money here.

People like this are the input side of the "oops we built the Torment Nexus" pipeline.

baron3dl 3 hours ago|||
Inevitablism, a fundamentalist belief system that resolves every moral hazard with an appeal to the inevitable. "we can't let someone else do this first"
goatlover 3 hours ago|||
Like Edward Teller wanting to develop hydrogen bombs while Oppenheimer was trying to prevent an arms race from starting.
soco 3 hours ago|||
"I will kill you now since you're dying anyway so just hand me all your money"
codeduck 3 hours ago|||
It's called being insulated from the immediate consequences of their actions and hubris.
Aurornis 3 hours ago|||
> Watching the optimism and then collapse of Web 2.0

What collapse of web 2.0?

Technically the website we're on is web 2.0 because we're interacting as users.

I don't think it's naiveté on their part to want to build new things. I think you're just jaded and hyperfocusing on the negatives.

dag100 3 hours ago||
With some technologies, the negatives are so severe it is difficult to see how they outweigh the positives. Mind-control technology is quite frankly just asking to be abused. It's the ultimate relinquishment of power - you reveal your entire hand to someone else AND let them do what they want with it. I honestly don't understand how some people are so optimistic that they think this technology won't be misused in ways that massively overshadow the good that could be done with them.
rufasterisco 2 hours ago|||
I understand where you are coming from. Yet.

Neuralink exists since 10 years, is in clinical trial, has been implanted on a living human being in 2 years ago.

The lack of adults in the room to set rules around moral hazard is hardly her generation's fault.

kleiba2 3 hours ago|||
To me, this reads as an attempt to raise easy investment money.
dudefeliciano 3 hours ago|||
well she is only 23 so naivete would make sense, although it looks like she held some AI safety roles so...
symfoniq 3 hours ago||
In the same way that “Anthropic” apparently means misanthropic, we can probably add “AI safety” to the list of newspeak.
wuschel 3 hours ago|||
"Die Gedanken sind frei..." - can someone guess them? A truly dystopian question.

It is been 10 years ago when I looked through some research in that area. Back then it was the problem to get enough good signal. Has the situation changed radically here for non-invasive electrodes or portable detectors?

I understand that the approach would be to turn weak signal, context, and LLM based signal processing into useful human computer interaction. For everything else, I have the feeling we are still in speculative territory.

mosura 3 hours ago||
I think this is actually marginally less evil than Meta Tribe. The whole neuro space is dangerous and while people go on about “AI safety” the world will trend towards this madness.

And this will provoke “well we need to regulate AI then”. No, you need to regulate poking around in people’s brains without asking them before that becomes normal.

pstuart 2 hours ago||
TIL -- dear god that's terrifying. I get that there's likely a lot of valuable and legitimate work that could come out of it, but I wouldn't trust Zuck as far as I could throw him out a window.
nee1r 5 hours ago||
are you specifically focused on non-invasive methods/why? seems like you reach a noise barrier which limits things like this
foolswisdom 4 hours ago|
From the article

> It’s hard to collect enough data using invasive methods. Few people want a chip in their brain! But non-invasive methods are getting much better. The hardware is improving and getting cheaper, though I apologize for being vague about the particularities of our hardware.

caycep 1 hour ago||
granted one should really look at the LFP output from EEG electrodes before getting too gung ho on this sort of thing...
almostdeadguy 2 hours ago||
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.
JSR_FDED 1 hour ago|
I knew you were going to do that
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