Re:Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-i...
by extr on Saturday October 01, 2022 @02:26AM
(#33044395)
There's nothing theoretically impossible about the suggestion, giving it a shot would be doable today if someone with resources really wanted to. I'm sure people at Neuralink or similar companies talk about stuff like this all the time.
But there's a big difference between "it wouldn't be theoretically impossible" and "the resulting model would actually work and be useful for anything". I would bet with p80 if you literally tried this with a lot of good researchers and resources, you would get a model that outputs a bunch of mashed up electrical brain data that, hey, actually looks pretty damn realistic. Maybe you could use that to better understand how the brain works, and improve the model. But I would almost guarantee you wouldn't suddenly be talking to a man in the computer. The compute isn't there. Maybe in 50 or 100 years.
Obligatory link to the very cool wiki-article-from-the-future style fiction that talks about this exact thing: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
Honest question: how close are we to actually being able to do this now? Obviously the answer depends a bit on how you define "decent", but as someone pretty unfamiliar with most learning techniques beyond a very rudimentary high level, I have absolutely no idea if this is something that we can do now, will be able to do in months/years/decades, or if it's unlikely to happen in my lifetime at all. It seems like it's worth at least having some sort of answer there before spending a whole lot of time thinking about it. (Not saying it's not worth thinking about at all if the answer is that we aren't likely to ever see it in our lifetimes! But there's a difference between a pressing ethical issue and an interesting but hypothetical philosophical discussion)