Weekly New/Digital Media (65)
Facebook has 60 people working on how to read your mind
Summary: "Social network says it’s assembled a team to build technology that allows you to ‘think’ commands at your smartphone. But what if you think that’s scary?"
According to Facebook it’s developing technology to read your brainwaves so that you don’t have to look down at your phone to type emails, you can just think them. Hiring a brain-computer interface engineer and a neural imaging engineer. Its goal? To create a system capable of typing one hundred words per minute – five times faster than you can type on a smartphone – straight from your brain.
In order to support her argument and suggest that this is very possible to do She highlighted the example of a woman with ALS who had a pea-sized implant that could pick up on signals in her brain to allow her to type eight words per minute using the power of thought.
Instead, Facebook plans to develop non-invasive sensors that can measure brain activity hundreds of times per second at high resolution to decode brain signals associated with language in real time. “No such technology exists today; we’ll need to develop one.”
The technology will only focus on particular thoughts, the things you were actually going to say (apparently)
"But this is a false choice. Just because you aren’t typing into a phone doesn’t mean you aren’t distracted by its underlying capabilities. You are still composing an email with your mind even though you might be face to face with a friend. Arguably being present but distracted is worse than taking a moment to type a message into a device. At least the other person knows what’s going on."
They also want to develop this in order to create a "brain mouse" for their augmented reality developments. Even further "Another problem Facebook wants to solve is how to input those thoughts to another person’s brain. It’s all very well being able to think an email into existence, but the other person still has to read it. Facebook wants the recipient not to read the email, but to feel it."
Key statistics/ facts:
- Smartphones have been a powerful force in the world but they have had some “unintended consequences” she said. (Regina Dugan, the head of Facebook’s innovation skunkworks Building 8)
- “[The smartphone] has cost us something. It has allowed us to connect with people far away from us too often at the expense of people sitting right next to us,” she said. “We know intuitively and from experience that we’d all be better off if we looked up a little more often.”
- “It’s a false choice. This device is important.”
- Facebook is looking at using optical imaging – using lasers to capture changes in the properties of neurons as they fire – to glean words straight from our brain before we say them. If these signals can be read, they can be transmitted silently to other people.
- If the thought that a company that makes almost all of its money from harvesting your personal data could also have access to your thoughts is scary, that’s because it is.
- Dugan remained upbeat, describing the concept as having the “convenience of voice but the privacy of text”.
- In the future, said Dugan, “it may be possible for me to think in Mandarin and you to feel it instantly in Spanish”
My opinion:
I really really don't see the need to such developments. The arguments they provide are very flawed in my eyes. The first argument about helping audiences to stay 'connected' in reality is contradictive. If users only need to think to message the people they are with won't know what they are doing, they may think they are being paid attention to when in reality they aren't this would, i think, ruin relationships even further than if someone pulled out their phone in front of you - least you would know. It would also mean that users are are just less and less involved in their environment even though they look present which would make things extremely complicated to regulate eg. driving and texting isn't allowed, but if they can text with their mind? they'll look present but won't be. Its even worse, least their was a chance the police would have pulled you over if you were physically using your phone.
This concept of 'feeling' a message is also useless, in my opinion. Why do you need it? and its extremely complicated. We misinterpret what people say to us face to face less alone the scope of error for such a software.
Moreover, Facebook''s argument that it would only be the thoughts that you were about to voice sounds completely false to me. What about all the times you've nearly said something but held back? i don't think the technology would be smart enough to notice that. And what proof is there that they wont? they can easily gather so much data about the emotional responses of people, how they felt etc. and can data mine that even more than they already do of personal data.
I also hate the fact that human social interaction would be changing so drastically, if you want to make everyone more 'connected' make travel cheaper, encourage skype calls, so you can see them, hear them, its taking away all the complexities of human interaction and the emotional need for that interactions all to a simple few words, it isn't that shallow or easy.
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