Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Monday, October 13, 2008
Preface
"Mind control?" said thompson, eyebrows raised.
"Look, dude. It's not like in the movies. There are very particular strengths and limitations. We're talking MRI-at-a-distance, kind of." James scooted his chair back so thompson could see the screen; there was a little technicolor brainmap glowing there.
But thompson still looked skeptical, so he went on. "Okay: it's already possible to put on a little headset -- this is consumer-level technology, here -- and track eeg waves, play silly games by activating particular brainwave patterns. It's not star trek -- it's very basic -- but think about what you can do with a little interpolation. What you can do if you keep it tracked on one person and study the patterns."
"Like Google?"
"Exactly!" Now they were back on the same wavelength. "Okay, so google isn't magic. It's the same technology as anyone else on the hardware level, just maybe a little bigger. But Google takes that commodity hardware and builds it up until they have a supercomputer capable of analyzing just an incredible fuckload of *data*. Data is the key. If you have enough of it, you don't need some magic analyzing technique; you just have to be kind of smart and you can generate, say, a translation engine from english to spanish. All you have to do is scan in a bunch of documents that exist in both languages."
"So you're using the google-style technique to understand people's minds?"
"Yeah, kind of. You have to observe them at the same time. You know, offline." He grinned. "You watch them say a particular phrase and see which synapses light up. Do that enough and you start to be able to tell what phrases they're *thinking*."
Thompson was silent for a moment. "James..." James was just a graduate student. He was totally unprotected. Thompson knew, somewhere inside himself, that a technology this powerful wasn't going to be a basement project. It wasn't going to lead to an ordinary sequence of research papers and publications. But he didn't know what to say to make James understand. Drop it? That probably wouldn't go over too well. Instead, he just stared out the window and sighed. "Be careful, okay?"
James smiled. "Don't get weird again. You want to go shoot some hoops?"
"Look, dude. It's not like in the movies. There are very particular strengths and limitations. We're talking MRI-at-a-distance, kind of." James scooted his chair back so thompson could see the screen; there was a little technicolor brainmap glowing there.
But thompson still looked skeptical, so he went on. "Okay: it's already possible to put on a little headset -- this is consumer-level technology, here -- and track eeg waves, play silly games by activating particular brainwave patterns. It's not star trek -- it's very basic -- but think about what you can do with a little interpolation. What you can do if you keep it tracked on one person and study the patterns."
"Like Google?"
"Exactly!" Now they were back on the same wavelength. "Okay, so google isn't magic. It's the same technology as anyone else on the hardware level, just maybe a little bigger. But Google takes that commodity hardware and builds it up until they have a supercomputer capable of analyzing just an incredible fuckload of *data*. Data is the key. If you have enough of it, you don't need some magic analyzing technique; you just have to be kind of smart and you can generate, say, a translation engine from english to spanish. All you have to do is scan in a bunch of documents that exist in both languages."
"So you're using the google-style technique to understand people's minds?"
"Yeah, kind of. You have to observe them at the same time. You know, offline." He grinned. "You watch them say a particular phrase and see which synapses light up. Do that enough and you start to be able to tell what phrases they're *thinking*."
Thompson was silent for a moment. "James..." James was just a graduate student. He was totally unprotected. Thompson knew, somewhere inside himself, that a technology this powerful wasn't going to be a basement project. It wasn't going to lead to an ordinary sequence of research papers and publications. But he didn't know what to say to make James understand. Drop it? That probably wouldn't go over too well. Instead, he just stared out the window and sighed. "Be careful, okay?"
James smiled. "Don't get weird again. You want to go shoot some hoops?"
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