Thanks—since the paper is paywalled and HN tends to prefer the best popular article on such a topic, we've changed the URL to that from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1119-1.

A pdf of the paper itself is linked from elsewhere in this thread.

Nature has an editorial on the paper that is better and free

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01328-x

Ok, we've switched to that from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/health/artificial-speech-.... Thanks!

Sadly the comment section on nytimes.com is absolutely appalling...

I usually find the NYTimes comments mostly fine, save for the expected ideological bias.

I read your comment, went back to check comments, and couldn't believe my eyes. People think this is mind-reading.

> the article is using a benevolence trope ... to cloak the real purpose of this research — interfaces for perfectly healthy (and likely rich) people to control maybe their car or television with their minds (which would be cool!).

> Soon employers will be able to require that all employees will have their thoughts recorded while performing any work-related task, as "performance of these tasks carries no expectations of privacy."

So many people missing the fact that the technique (ECoG) requires a surgical procedure. It's not a consumer product, and it won't be cheap or easy any time soon.

Is there a Gell-Mann amnesia effect [1] for comments sections?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

While your points are far more relevant, I feel obligated to point out also, that no employer would wish to hear the thoughts of their employees, because it would not be at all pleasant for them to hear all of that. Imagine working with employees who say out loud exactly what they are thinking all the time. No one wants that, not even (especially?) control freaks.

I'm not an expert in this field, but it seems like any mind reading we can do today with ECoG we can do tomorrow (or next decade) with EEG; the invasive electrodes make it easier, but we should be able to read signals non-invasively with better clarity in the future. When you say it won't be cheap/easy "any time soon," what does that mean to you? 10 years? 50? 100? The privacy concerns seem valid to me, though I'm not saying the sky is falling. I look forward to thinking text into a computer. I'd be extremely skeptical of any company demanding that I put their hardware on my scalp, but I'd be willing to put my hardware on my scalp and present some limited interface between it and the company hardware. Also, I expect the problems with invasive surgery to decline.

I would be moderately surprised if you could infer ECOG at 150 wpm via EEG. That would be roughly akin to claiming that, because you can infer water flow in an pipeline to Los Angeles from magnetometers welded to the pipe, you can do the same thing using a constellation of geosynchronous satellites.

There's a lot of things happened in between the pipe and outer space. Similarly, there's a lot of things happening between the arachnoid mater and the surface of the skin: innumerable liquid-solid interfaces of varying types being a major class of issues. The electric activity in the arrector pili, the galea, etc. Distance, bone, etc.

I didn't say "everything," this is kind of a side-tangent but in particular I imagine writing to the brain might be really difficult to do non-invasively while keeping per-write side-effects as low as invasive alternatives. I disagree with your projections of the future, and expect that geosynchronous satellites will be able to infer water-flow in a given (non-shielded) pipe within the next 30 years. I could be wrong.

To be fair those ideas about mind-reading aren't absurd to bring up. Yes this device requires ECoG, but maybe this paves the road to figure out how to do something similar with an EEG helmet.

The employer listening to your thoughts thing? yea I doubt it. Maybe possible at some point but unlikely it would be normalized anytime soon.

Nutty, but not too far off from predictions I see on HN from time to time. Just replace mind reading with facial recognition or voice analysis...

+1 For introducing me to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect which I didn't know had a name before