A new machine can translate brain activity directly into written sentences

[C C]

https://massivesci.com/articles/brain-ma...xt-speech/

INTRO: You've probably been there: wanting to text someone quickly, but your hands are busy, maybe holding the groceries or cooking. Siri, Alexa, and other virtual assistants have provided one new layer of interaction between us and our devices, but what if we could move beyond even that? This is the premise of some brain-machine interfaces (BMIs). We covered these at Massive before, and some of the potentials and limitations surrounding them.

Using BMIs, people are able to move machines, and control virtual avatars without moving a muscle. This is usually done by accessing the region of the brain responsible for a specific movement and then decoding that electrical signal into something a computer can understand. One area that was still hard to decode, however, was speech itself.

But now, scientists from the University of California in San Francisco have now reported a way to translate human brain activity directly into text. Joseph Makin and their team used recent advances in a type of algorithm that deciphers and translates one computer language into another (one that is the basis for a lot of human language translation software). Based on those improvements in the software, the scientists designed a BMI that is able to translate a full sentence worth of brain activity into an actual written sentence... (MORE)

[stryder]

TBH, the technology is not new. I know it's been around for over 20 years. The problem though is that back then it wasn't "commercially viable", that meant individuals, Corporates and even Academics a like couldn't afford to put the technology together to make it possible (The pay masters would of questioned what it was they would eventually get from it, other than a dent in their wallet and a notch in their belt)

This meant the only people that conducted such operations are based upon Government operations (Both Scientific research and Clandestine operations). The thing is now, those operations are coming to a point where they've either got to move out the way of open progress within the other sectors or risk being exposed for all the things they've done over the years without the general public's consent.

It does however generate a problem similar to what existed at the end of the Second World War, when the victors divided the spoils of war amongst themselves. Some such spoils were Physiological, Psychological and Intellectual data that had come from nefarious sources. (Stolen from people that were executed, tortured or exterminated) Which raises the question about morality in regards to where the information sources mysteriously come from. For instance how many clandestine projects actually add to the papers on BCI's where the knowledge of just how inhumane and abusive those operations are is purposely left out since it would be more than a black spot on the researchers careers.