Although DeWave only achieved just over 40 percent accuracy based on one of two sets of metrics in experiments conducted by Lin and colleagues, this is a 3 percent improvement on the prior standard for thought translation from EEG recordings.
The Australian researchers who developed the technology, called DeWave, tested the process using data from more than two dozen subjects.
Participants read silently while wearing a cap that recorded their brain waves via electroencephalogram (EEG) and decoded them into text.
their goal is 90%. I could see it if the ai was given a long enough time with feedback on what you are doing. Which I think would be tough with stroke patients. Great for folks that would like to control a pc with thoughts but not get cut open though.
Lots of scary shit will have to be banned. I’m always surprised when I watch a new Star Trek episode and they describe some new terrifying technology that is outlawed.
The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language
With further refinement, DeWave could help stroke and paralysis patients communicate and make it easier for people to direct machines like bionic arms or robots.
The article doesn't even hint at any use in a justice system. There's nothing to suggest that this could even in principle be used as a lie detector.
Ignoring the technology itself, I found it interesting that it has a lot less trouble with verbs compared to nouns (tho the article does not give much information about it).
Would it mean that humans keeps actions very separate (even if similar), while keeping things and concepts more clustered together? Is being precise on what is happening much more important than clearly specifying the subject and object of the action?
I'd wager that humans have much more neural hardware relating to verbs, since they relate to the things you yourself do over longer periods. Let's say I clean my bathroom, or my kitchen, or something else - the actions I take are very similar, and my head has to keep my body doing the right thing for long stretches of time. It's much harder to clean the wrong thing than to clean the thing wrong.
This is definitely progress, but we need to keep in mind that the particular language a person speaks can significantly influence how a person's brain works.