The rise of the machine

[Rum]

Anyone else think Mark Zuckerberg looks like an Android? Just sayin’.

[pErvinalia]

Yeah.

[Svartalf]

I just wonder how much of him still is human, my guess is not much.

[Rum]

Machines are reading your mind and turning it into speech!


'Exhilarating' implant turns thoughts to speech https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-48037592

Scientists have developed a brain implant that can read people's minds and turn their thoughts to speech.
The team at the University of California, San Francisco says the technology is "exhilarating".
They add that their findings, published in the journal Nature, could help people when disease robs them of their ability to talk.
Experts said the findings were compelling and offered hope of restoring speech.
How does it work?
The mind-reading technology works in two stages.
First an electrode is implanted in the brain to pick up the electrical signals that manoeuvre the lips, tongue, voice box and jaw.
Then powerful computing is used to simulate how the movements in the mouth and throat would form different sounds.
This results in synthesised speech coming out of a "virtual vocal tract".
Why do it like that?
You might think it would be easier to scour the brain for the pattern of electrical signals that code for each word.
However, attempts to do so have only had limited success.
Instead it was focusing on the shape of the mouth and the sounds it would produce that allowed the scientists to achieve a world first.
■ The profoundly deaf girl who found her voice after brain surgery
■ Parkinson's Disease course uses shouting to help patients
Prof Edward Chang, one of the researchers, said: "For the first time, this study demonstrates that we can generate entire spoken sentences based on an individual's brain activity.
"This is an exhilarating proof of principle that, with technology that is already within reach, we should be able to build a device that is clinically viable in patients with speech loss."
How good is it?
It is not perfect.
If you listen to this recording of synthesised speech:

[Brian Peacock]

If true this is an amazing step towards a thought-based connection to a computer. I know they're talking about giving speech to those who have lost it or were born without it, and such a connection would certainly 'give voice' to those poor sods - but I can imagine a world where we communicate between ourselves and interact with technology by thought alone. It would make the bus ride to town a bit more peaceful if nothing else.

[laklak]

Make it a lot easier to police Thought Crime, too. Hell, the Chinee already got that "social credit" thing up and running, imagine what those clever little yellow fucks will do with this technology.

[Brian Peacock]

"Mustn't... think... about... the... launch... codes... "

[laklak]

Dear God, feminists could read my mind. I'd be dead, mate, fucking dead.

[Hermit]

The first AI universe sim is fast and accurate and its creators don't know how it works

Excerpts:

The speed and accuracy of the project, called the Deep Density Displacement Model, or D3M for short, wasn't the biggest surprise to the researchers. The real shock was that D3M could accurately simulate how the universe would look if certain parameters were tweaked -- such as how much of the cosmos is dark matter -- even though the model had never received any training data where those parameters varied.

"It's like teaching image recognition software with lots of pictures of cats and dogs, but then it's able to recognize elephants," Ho explains. "Nobody knows how it does this, and it's a great mystery to be solved."

...

"We can be an interesting playground for a machine learner to use to see why this model extrapolates so well, why it extrapolates to elephants instead of just recognizing cats and dogs," she says. "It's a two-way street between science and deep learning."

[pErvinalia]

<obligatoryskynetreference>

[Brian Peacock]

I hope they've disconnected it from the internet. We don't want the Russians hacking the universe now do we?

[Brian Peacock]

Can AI and new tech create a liberal utopia? This guy thinks so...

[JimC]

Can I please have an anarcho-syndicalist utopia?

[Brian Peacock]

Mercedes, Factory 56.

[pErvinalia]

What could possibly go wrong with robots driving themselves all over the shop?