Re:Poll: Will keyboards still be around in 20 years?
by showerst on Thursday January 06, 2011 @04:47PM
(#2077379)
I'll (attempt to) draw a counter to that: A machine need not understand out brains 'native' language processing, just a trained 'output' version.
There is already a crude toy out there that will 'read your mind' and raise or lower a ball based on a signal you send it, you just train it to a binary state. I've heard it described as mellowing out vs concentrating hard.
There's no reason in principle that a reader with fine enough discrimination couldn't be trained to recognize a few hundred states, and you couldn't be trained to 'think' a few hundred things, where the reader would recognize and translate the pattern into a number, letter, or symbol. I'm no neurologist so I have no idea how these things actually work, but it seems easier in theory than understanding the whole of brain and language.
There is already a crude toy out there that will 'read your mind' and raise or lower a ball based on a signal you send it, you just train it to a binary state. I've heard it described as mellowing out vs concentrating hard.
There's no reason in principle that a reader with fine enough discrimination couldn't be trained to recognize a few hundred states, and you couldn't be trained to 'think' a few hundred things, where the reader would recognize and translate the pattern into a number, letter, or symbol. I'm no neurologist so I have no idea how these things actually work, but it seems easier in theory than understanding the whole of brain and language.