Comment by Novashi
8 years ago
Brave claim: we won’t actually invent good AI until two-way brain-computer interfaces become useful.
We need to augment human intelligence to handle systems vastly more complex than we can do today. Specifically memory creation and recall, and information assimilation rates.
How do you define 'useful'?
My keyboard and monitor are brain-computer interfaces. I'd argue that they are pretty useful.
I can imagine a way to consume information that is dramatically faster than the 500 or some odd words per minute I get reading.
But for input to the computer? I mean, I'm not saying that a keyboard can't be improved upon, but I think there are some hard limits to how quickly I can compose my thoughts; I think that it's fairly rare that the fingers are the limit. (Of course, making it so I think less about the fingers would be great)
What I'm saying is that there might be human processing speed issues that limit how much value we can get out of faster I/O.
On the other hand, maybe it's like reading was for me; before I could read at a certain speed and certain ease, I couldn't enjoy books, because I'd forget the beginning of the paragraph before I got to the end. Like I needed to load enough words at once to see the picture. It's totally possible that output would be the same way; if I could somehow output the equivalent of five hundred plus words per minute, maybe that would change my writing the same way passing that speed changed my reading?
I think most of the bandwidth would be computer -> brain, not the other way around, assuming it can teach your brain to retain knowledge and show it images/movies. The only exception would be if we could significantly alter the perception of time, but I'm not really betting on that despite how useful it'd be.
Even if I could only accurately sample 1-8 bits/second from the brain, that would be world-changing. There are a lot of clever people who could stuff a lot of utility through 8 bits/second given you are paired with a powerful smartphone and a proper "UX". Clever encoding schemes and signals could be developed. Especially if you go for sequences/chords that are executed over 1-4 seconds.
Plus the brain would likely just act as an index to fetch info that is then replayed to you. I really don't need a terabyte in the form of neuron connections when storage and computing would be ubiquitous.
can't you sample way more than 8 bits a second from my brain through the keyboard? I mean, I don't think it'd take much work to get to 8 bits a second using a twiddler or something with one hand.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't understand what a brain computer interface gets you if it's not faster than hands and monitors. (I mean, I guess there's portability, but that doesn't seem super life changing to me; phones are pretty portable already, and I can do 8 bits a second on those, too.)
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So brave.