I am a neuroimaging scientist with expertise in autism, memory function, and brain development. I am also a part-time coder, part-time composer, and part-time table-top enthusiast.
Sounds like another Chinese Op to me; Ensuring Chinese compliance would be incredible hard to enforce or to check.
Look, I am scared of where we are heading, but I cannot see how we can change the dilemma towards mutual cooperation unless, as humans tend to do, only react massively after something really bad happens.
So, at some point, will our devices connect to their corporate offices in any environment, even without providing access to your network, short of putting it inside a Faraday Cage?
Its like we don't already show faces in fMRI experiments because we know that it will often activate the fusiform face area. Its just light years away from anything dangerous, that I am compelled, as a neuroscientist, to try to shake some sense into people. This is HN, but it feels like twitter on some topics.
A completely off-topic anecdote, then a completely unfounded fear based on a clear misunderstanding of this research. If companies ever start making us live in a MRI machine so they can reliably activate brain areas with certain stimuli, I think there is a bigger problem we are having.
Here is how I see it. This type of research helps us understand the brain, helps us do things like model potential surgery sites better (e.g. for seizure activity interventions). What it does not do is become the basis for mind reading.
Just so that you know that I am not totally unsympathetic to your apparent worldview, let me tell you how I think your concern might actually play out:
AI continues to get more powerful, and computer brain interfaces begin to move beyond EEG scalp electrodes, but begins to take the form or brain augmentation via integrating networked AI compute into implanted chips with electrode neural interfaces, where our brain's neurons and the neural interfaces learn to speak each other's language (i.e. integrate). I can actually see this happening within 20 years. At first, it would be our brain using this augmentation for greater intelligence, etc. However, remote manipulation of the interface could reverse control of brain activity, leading exactly to your fear.
But this research? This is light years from that,,,so much so that it is not even relevant to bring up unless you are just against all technology.
Oh you are right. Let's just end neuroscience altogether. Also computer science, aerospace, and biology in general. In fact, let's go full Amish. Wait, no. Someone might use a buggy cart to run people over.
yeah. This is one of those things where they used previously collected data, built a model that has validity on modeling validity between simulation and actual brain (encoding model for digital twin), then built a new model using the encoding model that tries to reliably activate particular brain regions. The next obvious step is to validate this back to the original person, but they will need to collect new data, and so likely, will need to get research funding. One step at a time.
The digital twin types of models will become more and more useful, but I don't think we will be at the point where all research will be done entirely within these models.
A. Unless you think that brain science is immoral science, then I do not see any problem with this kind of research. As a neuroscientist, I strongly object to the insinuation as unfounded.
B. "Digital twins" e.g. [1] are a growing class of brain simulations that can successfully approximate brain activity patterns at large scale. I think these can be very useful, but we shouldn't think that they are at the level of actually simulating a brain. They are usually made of model neuronal approximative simulations (e.g. integrate and fire, balancing excitatory and inhibitatory neural populations within units), then using diffusion imaging to estimate white matter axonal wiring between those populations from the subject to increase the accuracy of the simulation. These are increasingly being used to, for example, model how a surgical intervention would effect seizure propagation prior to actual surgery.
Here is a nice episode of Theoretical Neuroscience podcast [2] on the Virtual Brain [3], one of the available models for this kind of work.
C. In terms of validation. Only partly. From my quick read, this NEVO model optimized neural response only in the digital twin encoding model. While the digital twin model reportedly has solid predictive validity [4], which by the way was not the Virtual Brain model I mentioned in point B. Moreover, the outputs looked neurobiologically plausible, but at this point, there is no independent model or new fMRI showing the optimized stimuli actually drive the target regions. This was performed using previously collected fMRI data, and full validation of this model *IS* the obvious next step, but the money to collect such data does not come from nowhere: funding will be needed, and such a paper as this can help them get it.
D. A final point I'd make. We have long been able to create static stimuli that we can be fairly certain will activate above baseline certain brain regions, on average. Certain stimuli-region pairs ar emore homogenous between people, others e.g. the fusiform face area (FFA), are small enough that individual differences prevent a simple ROI approach, and identification depends on using face stimuli to identify at the individual level, but for the most part, it is reliably locatable. Brain activations are very coarse things. In fMRI, you are talking about ~3x3x3mm voxels (27mm^3) where the hemodynamic responses have a ton of spatial autocorrelation, or in EEG, where the surface spatial area of the reeptive fields are very large(~400 mm^2). These virtual twin models already do a decent job of modeling dynamics of the brain there parameters are tuned to *at this scale*..but this scale does not have a ton of information content. Automating this with video content is not that much a reach.
I sometimes wonder if they are leaving their best models for purely internal use. They are after regular users, integration locking with their full stack lock-in...having the best AI public might not add much to that play...just good enough for most people...while their internal models can help their company achieve faster production.. idk
the title was flamebait, but its true for him...and for me. I do neuroimaging. It won't answer any question / coding task having to do with data analysis / statistical analysis. etc. It IS useless, for me.
I absolutely have been unable to use Fable for any neuroimaging work.
Its fine. The other models are good enough, honestly...and while I AM annoyed that the filter is so broad, I also understand it, as I do believe that models can become dangerous as WMDs, eventually. Still, it is completely useless for me.
The only question I had was being flagged for other reasons, so I asked it a mechanical engineering question, and it was just fine with that.