Top
Best
New

Posted by devanshp 7 hours ago

I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy(naomibashkansky.com)
109 points | 178 commentspage 4
nee1r 7 hours ago|
are you specifically focused on non-invasive methods/why? seems like you reach a noise barrier which limits things like this
foolswisdom 5 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.

mbgerring 5 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 3 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 4 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 4 hours ago|||
Like Edward Teller wanting to develop hydrogen bombs while Oppenheimer was trying to prevent an arms race from starting.
soco 4 hours ago|||
"I will kill you now since you're dying anyway so just hand me all your money"
codeduck 4 hours ago|||
It's called being insulated from the immediate consequences of their actions and hubris.
rufasterisco 3 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 4 hours ago|||
To me, this reads as an attempt to raise easy investment money.
Aurornis 4 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 4 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.
dudefeliciano 4 hours ago|||
well she is only 23 so naivete would make sense, although it looks like she held some AI safety roles so...
symfoniq 4 hours ago||
In the same way that “Anthropic” apparently means misanthropic, we can probably add “AI safety” to the list of newspeak.
wuschel 4 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 4 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 3 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.
commieneko 1 hour ago||
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.

dgellow 1 hour ago||
> 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

drivebyhooting 5 hours ago||
You know how a microphone can also serve as a speaker?

Can this technology also do text to thought?

chasd00 4 hours ago|
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.
goatlover 4 hours ago||
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.
amoe_ 5 hours ago||
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.
yunnpp 4 hours ago||
> 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.

caycep 2 hours ago||
granted one should really look at the LFP output from EEG electrodes before getting too gung ho on this sort of thing...
fatcatsbestcats 1 hour ago|
No, thank you.
More comments...