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Comment by perdunov | Hacker News Reader

Another possibility is the new, more efficient, ways to interact with your computer.

Direct brain interface maybe.

Pretending that your computer is a human is actually NOT an efficient way of communicating with it. Moreover, it is unreliable and dangerous because those "intelligent" assistants lack intelligence and may do something a human would never do. So one cannot (should not) use them for any mission-critical tasks.

As yet, it would be nice to see at least a non-painful way of editing text on a tablet. Or something better than pen and paper (or an electronic pen and a tablet) to quickly express your thoughts in a graphical form.

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Direct brain interface requires invasive surgery and is still a ways to go. Its constant need for recalibration basically precludes it from any useful utilization, much less commercialization of it on a massive scale.

Even if the AI part is mature, I do not think speaking at length (in a public setting) telling your computer what to do is desirable.

I think our best bet is a device that reads neural signals going to our voice box. We can "speak" without vocalization and still have the device pick up our words. I think they call it EEG sensing of imagined speech.

Well, that may improve in the future. The main property of inventions is that they are often completely unexpected.

Maybe there is a wireless way.

Maybe it will be compulsory to have a DBI (direct brain interface) connector in your skull in the future (I hope it won't).

Videos have been successfully reconstructed from fMRI of people's brains. This will certainly improve as fMRIs improve and more advanced machine learning is used to decode the data.

There is also fNIR which can potentially do the same job if I understand correctly.

What makes you think that it would take less sophisticated AI to parse the signals from your brain directly than it takes for it to parse natural language?

Actually, the direct brain interface and AI are kind of orthogonal. There may be a direct brain interface that would allow to replace mouse and touch interaction, for example, so the interaction method would be purely mechanical in this case. Passing non-spoken words or thoughts to the computer instead of speaking is a different thing.

Because the brain contains extremely useful representations that are difficult to learn from scratch. Data from brain imaging has been used to improve natural language processing algorithms.

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