Coming soon: Mind-reading computers

An "emotionally aware" computer being developed by Britons and Americans will be able to read an individual's thoughts.

The story "Coming soon: Mind-reading computers" published June 25, 2006 at 5:15 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[lesfilip]

Better for robots than computers

People generally do not like intrusion by outside parties into <br />their lives, especially if the outside party is trying to trick them <br />into buying something. If the outside party happens to be the <br />government of any number of countries, including the United <br />States, you have what George Orwell referred to as "Big Brother". <br />No one in their right mind wants this level of intrusion.<br /><br />On the other hand, someone in the near future who buys a <br />helathcare or entertainment robot would eat this up.<br /><br />Private information should remain private. Have a nice day.

[kirkules]

A tight rope balance

I can see both good and bad coming from this!

[wingslikeshieldsofsteel]

public monitoring

So if I don't like it, I can always cover the camera up? I can rather imagine this being integrated into the public CCTV cameras and used to detect, for example, a crowd of protestors becoming more agitated. "Wow, here's a solution. Let's find a problem."

[gatornuke]

i'm sure it'll work as well as voice recognition

that is, not at all... <br />i've used microsoft voice command on my pda, and played around with voice recognition on my pc. this only results eventually in me yelling angrily at my devices like a mad man, since they think i've said anything other than what i actually have. <br /><br />voice doesn't work and neither will this

[jabbotts]

it'll work . . . eventually

Voice and visual-que input will both work splendidly, eventually.<br /><br />I don't know if it'll be before, after or in part with the development of a more aware AI system. <br /><br />I'm sure I'll eventually find myself wondering what ever happen to those quaint keyboard thingies we used to use back in the old 21st.<br /><br />I'm sure also that when I get frustraited and raise my voice at the "damn'd machine" my video phone will automatically connect me with one of the state's "mental health coaches" who will inquire as to the source of my boggle.

[tnt1954]

mind-reading satellites, thought police

some people swear this technology is already<br />in use. most of society calls them schizophrenics for having these allegedly<br />'false beliefs' or 'delusions'. george orwell<br />spoke of a thought police in his book 1984.<br />our thoughts are generally policed indirectly.<br />there are norms of thought. much of military<br />technology is top top secret. mind-reading<br />has always been a parlor game. psychic fun times. some people totally think it is real.<br />when you ask them the lottery numbers for next<br />week, they reply, psychic abilities are not<br />used to make money.

[Joe Blow]

Ohhhhhh, Puh-leeeeeeze!!! ...

I was at the MIT Media Lab about 12 years ago, and saw a demo of what was purported to be a highly-accurate face recognition system that was based on models of facial musculature and bone structure, derived from a dual-camera system that used both visual and infrared data to detect these attributes that underlie the skin (thereby preventing use of makeup, latex prostheses, masks, etc., to disguise one's identity or attempt to look like someone else). Like most facial recognition software, it built up models of faces based on the ratios of the distances between facial features, such as between the centers of the pupils of the eyes, the corners of the mouth, the tip of the nose, etc. Using a database of several hundred volunteer MIT students, faculty and staff, the system was shown being able to perform 100% correct recognition on the subjects in the database. However, as soon as images of arbitrary faces were added, where the images weren't quite straight-on photos of faces under ideal conditions, especially using cameras/sensors not used to build the original database, the recognition rate fell off to well below 20 percent immediately, and got much worse as the number of samples increased. This is known as the "plateau effect", where a system performs well within a very limited domain of inputs, but as soon as the data moves off the plateau, performance and accuracy literally fall off a cliff. This is similar to what happens with generic voice recognition, handwriting recognition, and other such technologies.<br /><br />I wonder why anyone is continuing to fund this kind of malarkey, since any first-year graduate computer science student should be able to explain the difference between context-sensitive (which is what these kinds of problems involve) and context-free systems (e.g., computer programming language parsing - it's completely structured, with no ambiguities). These kinds of projects are going to keep failing to deliver unless and until high-resolution/wide-dynamic-range sensors, distributed processing power, and memory technology approach that of the human brain, not to mention the very-difficult-to-develop parallel-processing software to tie all the hardware together. Even then, it's going to take a long time to debug such systems, and there's a whole lot more important R&#38;D that needs to be done in other, more pressing areas, like how to eliminate spam, once and for all.<br /><br />Anyone who funds technology research ought to at least be familiar with the first principles of the technology on which they're spending (usually taxpayer) dollars. However, the MBA crowd will tell you that management is an art, not a science, and that anything can be managed by a properly-schooled manager. Yeah, right, and maybe that's why things like the Space Shuttle keep turning into lots of little pieces, along with the multitude of other colossal management debacles like Enron, the Dot.bomb bubble, etc.<br /><br />Oh, but don't pull the purse strings too tight just yet - I have this great idea for turning lead into gold - it's gonna make us all bazillionaires ...<br /><br />All the Best,<br />Joe Blow