MSP50 [] Who Owns Your Thoughts?

How could your business do better today? We're on 24-7 and close more sales. You need always on Viber with wireless backup, improves that with a DVD. Your fiber with unlimited data and calls.

Give my customers better Wi-Fi experience! You can boost your Wi-Fi speed and signal. Join the Viber Nation and help your business grow with Maxis One Business Viber now from only 99 Ringgit per month. Search Maxis One Business Viber for more info.

I shared with you on Geek Scrops a couple of weeks ago. So today we are going to ask who is the president of your brain. It's time to next plane. What was that for, Matt?

It's episode 50. Can't we celebrate it just a little bit? No, and we really don't need to talk about this topic. Again, I think we've covered it as well as it's humanly possible.

Well, for one thing, I'm not entirely human. And I think what you just said about the celebrating, we might have to rethink this entire relationship. This is the 50th show, we're still here. I know we're not getting any better, but we're still here.

No, I mean, I don't want to denigrate or disembowel the way that you handled the story a couple of weeks ago. As I said to you at the time, I think there are a lot of aspects to it that we couldn't do justice to because we had time constraints for that segment. And also, in the meantime, I've been presenting and discussing various aspects of AI at conferences and talks over the last couple of weeks. So I wanted to integrate some of the information I've learnt from those experiences into this topic as well.

All right, so what would you like to add? Well, the brain is kind of the first prize in biotechnology. It's the most complicated organ in the body. And as a result, it's one of the most difficult to understand and control.

So to give you an obvious example, many paraplegics are not paralyzed because they have damage to their arms or legs. Often it's down to damage in the brain or the spinal cord. So in the case of the brain damage, the organ is unable to process and send the information that controls those limbs. Or in the case of spinal damage, then the transmission mechanism has been disrupted or disconnected.

You are already making all of us sound like machines. Well, we are machines. It's just that we're thinking, feeling, sensing, and self-determining machines. You know, we're conscious.

You can press a button or issue a command that will wake Siri or Alexa up. But the best those devices are is a one-dimensional representation of who and what we are. We haven't found a way to mimic or replicate that consciousness, at least, not yet. And now we can.

This is another one of your killer AI shows here. It's not killer AI, but there will be plenty of AI. It's weird, isn't it? I talk about 3D printing twice in a year, and people would say I was obsessed.

We could literally rename this show, Matt and Jeff talk about AI, and nobody would bat an eyelid. Or positive. Well, precisely, yeah, to answer your previous question, though, no, we don't have conscious AI as yet. But strangely, and I think somewhat creepily to some of our listeners, we can use AI in various ways that will unlock and unpick the secrets of our brains and our minds.

Is this like tweaking your DNA in a garage? Something you can do because you can. Well, I think one of the reasons we've been so preoccupied with creating humanoid robots is precisely because we have so little understanding of what makes us conscious. So I'm going to stick with the technology side rather than the philosophy today mainly because I know about as much about philosophy as a 16-year-old who's been studying selfies, at least with technology, you know, I can lie and make things happen.

Nobody finds out till later. So understanding the brain is a bit like decoding our personality or our sense of self. The last frontier of medicine, then. Well, maybe not quite.

I mean, our bodies still contain plenty of mystery, like the appendix. Its only purpose seems to be to create excruciating pain and ruin family holidays. We've become much better, I think, at these kind of routine. And as we said, mechanical parts of medicine.

If your car gets in an accident, you can pop down to the junkyard and get some panels off another wreck. And it's as good as new. And we can do a similar thing with people. We can replace arms, legs, and wiggly bits that attach to those limbs.

So you're trying to say that we can bucklite our insights here? Well, for those listeners who don't know what baccatae is, honestly, don't Google it because you're better off not knowing, it really stretches the definition of what food is and can be. Oh, it's good. But you do make a valid point that we can replace organs.

And we can even perform face transplants, which is incredible, odd, and a little bit frightening. But when it comes to our brains, we're a bit like mountaineers attempting to scale a peak for the first time. We've got maps that take us some of the way. But on the whole, it's this kind of maddening game of trial and error.

And all of which is taking us further away from machines that can read our thoughts. I'm just trying to say that that's all. We're painting a pretty picture. On geeks, we have to race through the stories.

So here, at least, we can give them a little bit of room to breathe. And talk about baccatae. Well, you're the one who keeps bringing up baccatae. Yeah, the image of all those brains and bits floating around in soup is really turning my stomach.

I think I find this story so interesting, because it has some of the same implications that the CRISPR technology has. We're making, or rather in the past, making discoveries about the brain, has been slow, laborious, and it requires huge amounts of equipment, lots of test subjects, and lots of highly qualified people. Some of this new technology is going to make it far cheaper and far easier for scientists to conduct this kind of research. So for the first time, we may be able to see real-time analysis of literally dozens of subjects, all exploring their minds and their brains all at the same time.

And what's been holding us up? Well, as we said, that complexity of the brain. Until now, it's mostly been trial and error when we talk about brain scanning. You have to sit in an MRI and you think about something and the technicians sees what parts of the brain light up.

Then you have to take all those scans and compare them to each other. And you have to try and figure out which parts of the brain are not just firing on autopilot, because our brains never switch off. There's always stuff going on. So there's a lot of noise and filtration that needs to be done as well.

The did-cemon effect. Well, yeah, there was an infamous test back in 2009 when an MRI picked up what seemed to be activity in the brain of a dead salmon, which, of course, turned out to be a false positive because dead salmon don't think, live salmon don't do a great deal of thinking. What really interested me about this story is why was a dead salmon in an MRI machine in the first place? I know medical students like to play strange jokes on each other, but I cannot come up with any scenario that that works with.

And AI can handle that sort of sorting process. Well, yeah, even when we've used mechanical sorting in the past, we have to tell the machines what to look for. With AI, we don't have to be so explicit, because they're great at coming up with their own patent recognition systems. And don't forget, we're talking about an organ that contains tens of billions of neurons.

And that's a staggering number for human neuroscientists to have to wade through, even when they're narrowing everything down to specific areas of the brain. For an AI, though, one million, one billion, it's all just the same. It's just a question of how long it takes to process them. So we're starting to see these really interesting and unexpected patterns emerge from the data.

Like the examples, I guess, on geeks. Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, you mentioned the team at Purdue University in Indiana, so they can essentially recreate images from our thoughts, which I know is very frightening. Do you remember we talked a few weeks ago about an AI that will create, I think, not quite works of art, but images and illustrations that are based on words and sentences.

Vaguely, the one based on Microsoft API. Yeah, the interface was put together by a guy called Christobale Valenzuela. And this is a bit like a brain version of that. At the moment, I think it only works with around 15 words or categories, but when you think about that word, the AI takes that pattern of neurons firing in your brain, and it translates it into an actual picture that pretty much resembles the thing that you're thinking about.

And those images can be recorded like JPEGs and played back and looped like a movie. Wow, so we could record our dreams. Well, that's one application that researchers are looking into, definitely, and we do talk about some fairly strange and freaky stuff on the show from time to time, but this really is about as freaky as it gets. We're finally getting to the stage where we can peer into the human mind and start to have a bit of a poke around.

It's just like the movie being John Malkovich. It's almost exactly like that, and that is a very strange and genuinely unsettling film. It's also a really good film. If you haven't watched it out there, do try and watch it this weekend.

I think it's probably on the streaming services. But what would be even stranger and more unsettling is if the movie actually turns out to be science-packed rather than science-fiction, that would be really weird. When we come back, the mind is a terrible thing to taste. We'll be back, 89.9.

How could your business do better today? Run 24-7 and close more sales. You need always on fiber with wireless backup. Improves up productivity.

Get fiber with unlimited data and calls. Give my customers better Wi-Fi experience. You can boost your Wi-Fi speed and signal. Join the fiber nation and help your business grow with Maxis One Business Fiber now from only 99 Ringgit per month.

Search Maxis One Business Fiber for more info. Burning for more. BFM 89.9, the Business Station. And Rebecca, it's fun Friday.

My name is Rata and we're together with College of Bobs at Amadec. I know you want to talk about the implications of all these new technologies that we've talked about earlier. So let's talk about the cost aspect here, man. Why will this technology be cheaper?

Before the break, the examples we talked about still use MRI machines. Yeah, for sure. And those are enormous. They're heavy.

They cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They're not for a user-friendly. I mean, I can't imagine some of them are bracketing. Putting up these kind of sunny MRI use videos in the way that CRISPR demonstration videos are coming up.

So we know that this development isn't going to be so much around MRIs. It's going to be in the much simpler and cheaper technology, which is the EEG. This is the electronic swim caps. Yeah, we had a story last week, I think, the one about Tetris.

Yeah. So in that story, three people were wired together wearing these EEG electrode caps. And an interface allowed them to collaborate and play a game of Tetris. And I know we can do that with an Nintendo Game Boy.

The achievement is actually the collaboration of doing it mentally rather than the actual game itself. Are we finding new ways to use EEG? So is this just another area where artificial intelligence is actually enhancing technology? That we already have here?

It's very much that enhancing idea. EEGs can be used very simply. They can be used with very straightforward interfaces. So they're very adaptable for experiments.

But the problem is that they're very sensitive and we're extremely noisy. You know that's going to need some explaining, right? As was the original version of that sentence. I had to revise a few times.

Yeah, I mean, they're covered in electrodes that pick up electrical current. And even though it doesn't feel like it, our bodies are actually bristling with electricity. So not only will the caps pick up brain activity, they pick up every blink you make, every twitch. And let's see how infectious this is.

Every little itch on your scalp and your face and your body. So raise your hand if you've suddenly developed an itch when I mention that. OK, you can put it down again now. This is radio.

We can't see you. You're just looking like a crazy person. But those twitches generate a current that is maybe around 100 times more powerful than the neurons in the brain actually generate. So they physically drown out the signals of the brain.

So the AI part helps to filter out some of that noise. Yeah, I mean, I'm assuming it's something again, like patent recognition. So it can filter out again those twitches, those itches, and all the type riches. Now scientists are starting to repeat experiments that they previously conducted on MRI machines to see if they can replicate the results with this simpler technology.

Early tests by researchers like Adrian Lester at the University of Toronto are seeing a high degree of accuracy in basic tests like building a face for memory. So we are starting to see interesting results. And as I said, this could really help to open the field up. So for example, with an EEG, you don't need a medical professional to be on hand to operate a big machine like you do with an MRI.

And you suddenly have a testing system that's portable. So that means you can go out to groups of subjects rather than having them come to you. So you can start to do a lot more interesting things and start doing things in a lot more geographical locations. Presumably it's also easier to hack around and customize it.

Well, we've already seen it being used for, as we said, things like controlling a game of Tetris. This kind of technology has been used to control the simple movements of a robot. So somebody imagining a robot picking up an egg or a cup. We can even pilot drones using this technology.

So the technology is relatively straightforward and versatile. So it really could allow us to use these kind of mental interface systems for a much wider range of applications. I'm going to pick up on that word application. Yeah, where there are applications there are apps.

So the simplicity of this technology means it's not just medical applications that we're talking about here. Companies like Microsoft and Facebook are also very interested in the potential of this kind of technology. Microsoft registered a patent for an EEG-style device in November 2017. And remember earlier we mentioned the guy who built the illustration around a Microsoft API.

So you can start to see how the company is looking at converging the different aspects of these technologies, the AI taking words and sentences, the devices taking thoughts. So you can see that picture being put together. I know the idea of a data driven companies and mind controlling apps will probably be very controversial. But this is OK.

We're talking about a send only application. It's controlling an app. Well, even if those controls are very basic, say up and down, left and right, it's still a device that's interpreting your thought. So you have to think fairly carefully about how that's going to be implemented.

And even if it's send only and it's kind of passive, like Microsoft, that's not the only version that's out there. So remember last week we talked about the Facebook mic drop moment. And I was saying that I was astonished that Facebook would choose to market a device like the portal when their credibility and reputation is such a low point. Well, guess what?

The company isn't erring on the side of caution with mind reading technology either. I think I mentioned this in the Geeks piece. Facebook wants to build a typing interface so you can literally literally think your posts. Yeah.

And we mentioned what an appalling idea of that is. It's like drunk texting to the power of infinity. I don't think there's a single person other than maybe Mark Zuckerberg who wouldn't lose their job within about 72 hours of this being introduced. I mean, imagine he'll musk with a brain interface.

He gets into him tweeting trouble with his thumbs. Yeah. If Donald Trump had one of these interfaces. Oh my god.

Yeah, he'd either start a world war in the middle of the night or be declared brain dead. You know, it's probably a 50, 50 chance. And Facebook's device is way more invasive than this idea of an EEG cat. Like some super-ray brain zapping laser.

Yes, it is exactly that. It is a super-ray brain zapping laser. The company is rumored to be using a special kind of near-infrared light. It registers bone skin or tissue as being translucent.

But it senses blood. So it picks up neural activity according to the blood flow and translates that activity into the words that you're thinking of. I know what this is. It's a microwave brain vampire.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory. It's not microwaves, but yeah, that's not going to stop the conspiracy guys. And if it is true, it's potentially another huge own goal for Facebook. Because people get fired up enough about aircraft engines leaving chemtrails that are numbing our brains or radio transmitters that are hidden in dental fillings.

And also governments using chemically-treated water to control. Exactly. I mean, what are the conspiracy nuts going to do with an actual, honest-to-god brain-ray that's marketed and owned by a global conglomerate? You can probably watch Alex Jones self-combust with angry joy just on the back of the broadcast of that.

Isn't Elon Musk working on a lace technology? Yeah, it's called Neuralink. And we don't know much about it yet. And it seems to be something that could actually be implanted under the skin of the scale.

Is there really possible? People really want to implant this kind of technology? Well, I was talking about something along these lines at a market research conference this week. And hello, John, by the way, if you're having to the office right now.

One of the things that comes up from time to time on the show is medical implants for devices like Alzheimer's. So people are working on these brain implantable devices. So it does seem plausible that, or rather, it doesn't seem implausible that somebody wouldn't simply decide to close the loop and connect all those devices to the cloud. And of course, once you have it in the cloud, you can connect it to Alexa and Siri.

And you already have an AI in your head. Why do nearly all of these shows come around to privacy at the end of the day? I think because we have to show everyone at home what the technology can do. And we have to let them decide if they want it to happen.

And besides, if we'd started this show talking about the need to protect ourselves from Facebook brain rays, I'd have sounded incoherent and absolutely insane. I don't think anyone would notice the difference. I think that's a fair point. Even the scientists working in this field are worried about the potential implications.

A group of experts called the Morningside Group is bringing up some of the issues that the realities of this technology are going to raise. They actually want the UN's declaration of human rights to also include a clause about neuro rights. Because we're talking about a chain of data that is going to start in our brain. So we have to decide who is going to own that information.

We do. Well, you own your smartphone, but you don't own the operating system. And you don't own the data that lots of those free apps on your phone generate. So once you move that operating system to a chip or a neural race in your head, who actually owns that information now?

This is probably more frightening for you than for me. But could someone hack your mind? I think it would be most frightening for the person who actually did hack my mind. The last MRI tech that tried to scam me had a nervous breakdown about 30 minutes later.

He's been drawing pictures of triangles and eyes in a cycload ever since. And he only looked at a picture of my mind. But yeah, we've seen some tech companies. We have a fairly cavalier attitude to cybersecurity.

And even the ones who really care about that security do get hacked. So yeah, having a connected device in your brain is going to come with some serious risk. OK, who's going to be able to pay for this? You'll all pay.

Pay for every insult and taunt you ever heard about me. That wasn't actually the question. No, that's something else that we've talked about before. That growing divide between people who can afford to enhance themselves and the ones who can't.

And then once they have enhanced, that enhanced group will have a vested interest in making sure that the technology doesn't become cheap enough that everyone else can start reducing that income gap and that intellect gap as well. So there are some fairly serious socioeconomic issues attached to the subject as well. You know, I realized that you haven't mentioned Amazon once to do. Because the stalking horse always stays in the shadows until it's time to play Marjong.

Wow, I don't know if that was meant to be any sense. I think Amazon is going to say fairly quiet. It's going to hang back and let the other players sort out all of the messy legal stuff. And I think it's going to wait until the public is a bit more accepting of this kind of technology before it jumps in.

But yeah, I mean once Amazon gets into your brain, I think it's going to be game over time. It's going to be Jeff Bezos, first and eternal minister of the Transworld retail republic. And I think, you know, pretty much there. You heard it here, episode 50, president for life, Jeff Bezos.

And we'll be right back with GeekSpot. This also can check out culturepop.com. It's culturepop with the key for transcripts off the show. And also you can find out how to bring a little bit of Matt's bleeding to your company.

We'll be right back. 89.9. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm 89.9.

The Business Station.