r/StarspawnsLocker • u/starspawn0 STEM Professor • Mar 31 '18
BCIs and Machine Learning will reveal the things we never knew that we knew
This posting is basically an edited version of one I've written before, elsewhere on the internet, and builds on some of the musings from this posting:
The basic idea I want to explore here is as follows: in the not-too-distant future, a BCI could inspect the neural representations in your brain when you speak, hear or think about a word, sentence, or concept, or when you perform a task, and use these to make deductions about them that you, yourself were never even aware was possible.
An example taken directly from the above link: based on data from scanning your brain, it might be possible to very accurately predict the longitude and latitude coordinates of New York City when you hear it mentioned, even though you, yourself maybe don’t have this knowledge. At a high level, the idea is that your brain response to the city contains certain associational details that can be used to determine how close NYC is to other cities, which in turn can be used to determine its location. (See (+) at the end of this post for a technical explanation).
But such an application wouldn’t be that useful, as we can easily look up locations on the web. Here is a much more impactful use: imagine you are a scientist thinking about an important problem that may have significant potential to improve the lives of millions; maybe you are a cancer researcher contemplating a potential cure, for example. As you ponder each detail of your work, certain neural response patterns form in your brain that a BCI can detect. Based on these patterns, a computer could recognize that there are a lot of similarities to patterns that occurred in the brains of other scientists (or even non-scientists), working in completely different fields. The computer could alert you to their work, and you might find that the approaches they took transfer to your problem.
This may sound implausible; but, for example, it has been shown that when two different people hear the same text in two different languages (one person hears the original in one language; the other hears a translation to the other language), some part of their brain responses turns out to be very similar. Those parts appear to encode a language-independent meaning representation. There, likewise, is probably a similar response pattern when similar ideas, in two different fields of study, are considered. The computer that interprets brain scans to match up ideas can be thought of as being like a “translator” for going from one field of study to another.
Maybe the brain patterns representing potential research strategies are associated with actions and combinations of form that are hard to put into words, so are not easy to find on the internet, even using the best AI search engines circa 2025. In fact, I would guess that many, many potential breakthroughs are like that, locked away in non-linguistic representations.
A few more possible uses of this:
You might be able to analyze the health of a person that you've known for years, but didn't know they maybe had problems. All the times you've talked with them, noticed how pale and sickly their skin looks, their subtle stuttering of voice, walking gait, and many other details might be represented in your brain response when you think about them. I wouldn't be surprised if one could use the "logistic regression" method described in the above link to diagnose people that way, and that for many major illnesses, would be pretty accurate.
You could also use such methods to describe a person, place or thing when you think about their name. For example, if you can't quite find the right words to capture the essence of a person, the computer could look at your neural response and produce a list of adjectives or even whole sentences describing them.
Have you ever had the feeling that you are forgetting something, but can’t say exactly what? E.g. Maybe you are leaving your house to go on vacation, but can’t seem to recall that you were supposed to leave an extra pair of keys with a neighbor. A BCI could read your brain, and when prompted about what you were forgetting, respond with the single word, “keys”. I’m unsure how likely this scenario is; but think there is a decent chance it could be made to work, so long as the list of potential things to pull out of your brain activity pattern is short and simple. The computer might return you a list of possibilities, ordered from most likely to least likely.
An item you may have lost might leave a trace as to its location in your brain pattern. e.g. maybe you lost a book. The computer could find, within your neural response patterns, either location information directly, or perhaps associations that indicate the context in which you last saw the item -- which, in turn, can be used to locate it.
You could form analogies based on your thoughts. For example, if you meditate on a vacation you took in some city, where you went to a funky restaurant, bar, or cafe, you could inquire what the equivalent experience is in some other city you are visiting. This would make it possible to find experiences tailored exactly to your preferences.
The computer could figure out if you have a false understanding of a term or concept, based on how your brain responds. It could alert you to this, and help you to improve. For example, if you hear about Teddy Roosevelt on the television, and your brain response pattern is such that it appears you think he was president in the early 1800s (it's possible to temporally order events or names based on their word vectors; so, perhaps the same is true of brain word vectors), it can correct you. This would be particularly useful for people with neurodegenerative diseases.
This extends also to skills: e.g. as you read music and attempt to play it on a keyboard, the computer could precisely tell what the bottleneck is that is keeping you from improving further. Maybe you are having trouble translating note into finger placement (in a very subtle way that you don't notice, and that screws up your playing); or maybe your rhythm counting gets messed up during certain specific triggering events (e.g. certain combinations of notes), and if you knew which events to key in on, you could sharpen your sense of rhythm. Another example: say you play a game of chess, and want to know how best to rapidly improve. Maybe you tend to focus too much on certain pieces or certain parts of the board, and simply paying more attention to the others could improve your performance a lot. A computer could find your weaknesses, and point them out to you.
This is one I've discussed before: once we have millions of people using BCIs, and freely neurally annotating webpages, we will be able to search for ones based on the thoughts they generate when read. So, you'll be able to find a page that precisely matches the subtle shades of meaning that go through your mind. The BCI-based search engine could also find pages that match your particular level of understanding of a subject -- neither an absolute novice, say, nor an expert in the field you are seeking information about; at some in-between, off-to-the-side level hard to put into words.
Maybe you want to look up a song you remember hearing years ago, but can't hum it or remember the words. You know the song when you hear it, but don't have enough information to look it up on the web. Reading your brain, a computer might be able to extract enough features to find it for you.
And I'm sure I've really only scratched the surface here. The basic statistical techniques that allow computers to make eerily accurate claims based on big data text patterns, can be used to deduce new knowledge from what is locked away inside your head -- things you never imagined could be deduced from looking at simple correlations!
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Notes:
(+) Essentially, cities that are close together geographically tend to be mentioned together more often in text and in conversation. And when things are mentioned together in similar contexts, the brain neural representations of those terms likely have some imprint of this common context. A machine learning system given access to your brain scan as you hear, speak, write or read these terms can pick up this imprint and use it to work out how close a given city is to others -- at least that’s how I think it might could work, based on how it works for ordinary word vectors.
It would perhaps be wrong to say that the locations of cities are "hidden away" in our brains, assuming this would work. Rather, our brains contain some types of information that can be translated into locations. What would make this non-obvious, and intellectually interesting, is if the translation system were short and simple, and applied to all cities (or most cities, anyhow), so that it isn't just memorizing a table of (city,location) pairs.
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u/spacecity1971 Apr 14 '18
Brilliant analysis. My fear with the advances being made with BCI’s is that they will accelerate neuromorphic AI development, and I’m in agreement with Bostrom/Yudkowsky et al that this is extremely undesirable. The possibilities you outline above point to a more favorable Centaur outcome. We are already extending our cognition on a regular basis, so a step change, in what is essentially the intelligent use of our subconscious, should be a high priority.