Just ran across the abstract of a paper (with some informative diagrams) called “Reconstructing visual experiences from human brain activity with Stable Diffusion”. The gist appears to be this: experimenters present an image to a test subject, and use data gathered by monitoring the subject’s brain activity to make a reconstructed version of the original image. From what I can see at the webpage (see for yourself, here), it’s already working pretty well.
I have to say: wow! That’s truly exciting progress, especially once we ditch these cumbersome smartphones and just get that intracranial chip that’s bound to be coming along any time now.
“Any time now?” You bet. It’s bound to be coming soon, because a lot of people are racing to get it to market first, and the technology for developing it is advancing at exponential rates. Things that accelerate this way always happen faster than we expect, because humans, who are given to linear extrapolation, always underestimate the future slope of exponential curves. (That’s the whole idea behind “gradually, then suddenly”.)
Imagine: a chip in our heads that will enable us to be connected to the Internet (and to social media, and to Amazon and Netflix and PornHub, and all the other wonderful things we enjoy online) during every waking and sleeping moment – connected also to an AI that can read our minds.
Just think of the convenience! It’ll be a whole new world.
4 Comments
No thanks. I will continue to live with my own thought.
Yup, just think of it!
After witnessing how compliant a majority of the public was with taking unquestioning orders from the Government over the last several years I have no doubt of the massive lines there will be of morons chafing to get their chips installed asap once this tech goes live.
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Wendell Berry in 1999: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
There won’t be any need for the ‘Blue Pill’ at all.