i.e. if I think think something stupid, I still control whether my mouth lets that out (typically). Do they have control over mode of operation, like they think "OK Synchron!" and then issue some speech?
The person types either by using eye tracking to move the cursor and clicking with the BCI device, or with a custom interface that cycles through characters one at a time and using only the BCI device to say yes to that character.
So the decoding of intent isn’t at the level that your thought experiment is concerned about, but in general, you definitely could implement something that decodes an initial intent before subsequent recording (e.g., think about waking up the device). Trivially for Synchron’s device this could be X number of consecutive movement intents. For intracortical BCI devices with single neuron resolution, you could imagine more precise neural activity correlated with the intent to begin decoding.
It's surprising that no one has used a camera plus ML whizzo stuff including predictive text to speed up the process.
for the first time in my life I'm thinking "now here's something that should be called UX"
I am not listing the manufacturers since most of them are also involved in either/or/and military and marketing applications and I am done supporting surveillance and murder capitalism.
But the eye movement interfacing tech is there and becoming more and more wide-spread. The major players have pilot studies at hospitals and r&d medical facilities across the world.
With the implant the concept is that with further development, it can be used for connection to locomotion etc. The proposed future potential of direct interfacing is larger, so to say.
An exoskeleton with direct input from a fully paralyzed wearer can significantly contribute to rehab, just one scenario.
I feel like I have three levels of thought - unconscious, unprompted and active. Unconscious are what you'd imagine - I don't actively think them (like I don't hear the thought in my head), but clearly something's happening in my brain that's affecting my actions.
Unprompted and active are both things that I hear in my inner monologue or picture in my head. The former, as the name would suggest, are things that I'm not trying to think about - intrusive thoughts are certainly an example. The latter are things that I am purposely shaping my thoughts around.
Active thoughts are almost the only thing that come out of my mouth (if I'm very surprised, an unprompted thought might come out). Would I have that same level of control here?
So if you think LEFT, you can move the selector on the keyboard to the next key to the left. And if you think CLICK, you can trigger a click. But you are focusing on asking your hand to physically make that click. Which your hand can't do obviously, but they can track those neurons to simulate the action for you.
It's strange, but I feel like this is what you're talking about with unprompted thoughts.