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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

In 1000 years perhaps we will understand how the mind works and scientists will take out this glass brain and read it.

What an incredible journey it would be if it were possible for a man’s glass brain to yield enough data to reconstruct his consciousness and awaken him in the far future! There must be some sci-fi story like this.

Almost every week there's a discussion on hacker news that leads to a great idea for a sci-fi story and this is one of them.

Any compilations of such ideas?

I have jotted some of them down over the years. But I bet searching the full catalog of hacker news comments would yield a bunch of entries.

Yes, can’t remember the name, but there’s an old short story about alien explorers who find a dead Earth with futuristic buildings.

They revive a knight who attacks them and gets killed, a hippie who they kill off after questioning, and finally a future human with psychic powers who steals the revival device.

A.E. Van Vogt wrote it. Brilliant author. I am sure one of the tales in "The Voyage of the Space Beagle" was the inspiration for "Alien".

1000 years? We already have brain to machine interfaces that seem able to interpret words with 50%ish accuracy and sometimes even beyond.

By no means perfect but it's surprisingly close. Granted I think that interpretation is from looking at stuff like electrical activation and not just brain structure itself and the fossil is the latter.

If only "read words" was the same as "read brain" eh?

In certain contexts it is in fact the same thing because one thing brains can do is think of words, and this brain activity can be interpreted by machine-to-brain interfaces.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/5/4/23708162/neurote...

Well, you could probably ask an LLM today what knowledge his brain contained and get plausible sounding answers. ;)

Right, and we have to be careful not to misinterpret such declarations by LLMs as if they're the real thing. I will never forget the first wave of Chat GPT reporting from the likes of Kevin Roose, who took its conversations completely at face value, not realizing it was reacting to his cues, and frankly playing down to the quality of his input.

But bring to machine interfaces are an entirely different thing altogether and they test it with controls and training unknown examples and then proceeding to prediction based off of training.

It may be a bit anticlimactic when we discover that he was just thinking about food and sex

Roman Empire

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