Thought Computing

[CiscoGuy]

Fellow Nerds,

Yesterday a thought came to my mind.... what if we can create a software with human interface which can enable us to communicate with computers with our thoughts.... Just imagine the endless possibilities....

We can do product design in no time.
We can image a great routing program which will automatically create code for Cisco gear and upload it.
We can create our own OS which will work as per our specifications.
We can create programs to do whatever we like.
Need to link two PC's together... just think and the two boxes talk to each other...

Just a thought....

 

[Shalmanese]

That would be the holy grail for computing. The reason its a holy grail is because, by the time we find it, theres probably going to be many, many corpses littering the road to it. Its a DAMN hard thing to do.

 

[dejitaru]

There have been brain chips succesfully installed that control devices.
But writing an app that converts neural impulses to machine language would be quite a task.

 

[Shalmanese]

Yes, a couple of guys have managed to make monkeys play ping-pong with robotic arm 600 miles away over the internet, which I personally think is pretty cool. They monitored a couple of hundred neurons and trained the monkeys to control an arm using a learning algorithm.

However, that is still VASTLY different from what Cisco is on about. While motor control is easy, we dont even know the data structures the human brain uses. thought is going to be many orders of magnitude harder.

 

[everman]

It would seem to me that in order to truly interface with the human brain entirely, you would need a computer at least as powerful or else it would be too slow to compute all of the information in such a way that you describe. I think the steps leading to that might be machines which interact with specific portions of the brain.

On a similar note, I believe there has been research done with mechanical eyes which have been implanted into patients who are blind and allow them to see some kind of monochrome images. The road to which that leads would I imagine would be some kind of image enhancement devices implented into normal humans to give us greater visual ability.

And all of this leads to a rather interesting conclusion... can you say Borg?

 

[Akira13]

Once true molecular computing becomes prevalent, I think we'll see more (and better) human interfaces. The massive parallel computing power of a molecular computer could possibly be enough to react to the brain.

Resistance is futile? Heh.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Akira13
Once true molecular computing becomes prevalent, I think we'll see more (and better) human interfaces. The massive parallel computing power of a molecular computer could possibly be enough to react to the brain.

Resistance is futile? Heh.

Yeah watch, we wind up creating extremely intelligent computers and robots that then happen to access a Star Trek episode, see Borg, and think "good idea." All will be assimilated.

 

[Kaiynne]

There are two things holding us back from being able to implement such a link, the first is as previously stated raw power, there are a few computers that are approaching the raw computing power of the brain, but there are no software solutions which even come close to the complexity of the brain. I think the likelyhood that someone will be able to design one from the ground up is essentially zero. So how are we going to be able to interface, well the only real chance we have as far as i can see is to use the same tool that allowed us to have such a complex brain. Genetic algorithms, we have a rudimentary uderstanding of how the brain interfaces with the body, see above monkey experiment, now we just need to use that massive computing power to evolve a system which can understand the output of a human brain not just from a movement perspective but from a thought perspective. As humans i think we are rapidly approaching the end of the line for what we are powerfull enough to conceive, it will soon be obvious that we will need to rely completely on computers to design the incresingly complex machines we conceive.

 

[dejitaru]

The computer doesn't need to be as fast as the brain, only fast enough to accept the complex analog-type input given to it by the brain. Aside from a few math operations, the brain is far superior (for practical purposes) to any computer.

Perhaps the program itself should be loaded into the brain, rather than a CPU.

 

[liquidtech]

Before daydreaming about a computer that can read your thoughts you should dream about a trully human computer. Humans can't read your mind (only your mom sometimes lol) but thats a place to start. Fuzzy logic is one of the topics related to trully thinking machines since you can't really predict how it will act and in a way it would have a mind of its own. Strangely enough fuzzy logic is already being used in many chips such as in hdtvs and some other electronics.