But it’s not easily usable, and really it’s only for general-domain knowledge or certain types of broadly available statistics. Consider the difference between having to search on a given topic and having a subject matter expert on that topic on the phone, (especially pretty academic or locally-specific ones that have poorer search results). That’s a gap yet to be bridged just by conventional search technology.
Ahh, you’re talking about expert systems. I agree that this does hold a lot of potential—in fact in a related tangent I’ve been spending a lot of time coding some machine learning algorithms, and I can safely say that in their target domain not only are these algos a lot better at inference then I am, but given certain shortcomings that I have not (yet) been able to tackle, the combination of myself and the algos is significantly better than either of us in isolation.
So in a way, I’m already a cyborg, and in this specific case I don’t think a simple BCI would improve matter much.
A full coding cortex OTOH...
Expert Systems suggests a particular set of ideas and functions, and brings to mind software made int he 1980′s that often failed to live up to expectations. I do mean something similar to that, admittedly, but bringing in the best design and information retrieval ideas developed in the 30 years since then.
And yes, when predictions are being made, combining different predictors almost always yields superior results. Another natural “cyborg” area.
Let’s not forget that this is fundamentally an economic question and not just a technological one. “The vast majority of R&D has been conducted by private industry, which performed 70.5 percent ($282.4 billion) of all R&D in 2009.” -http://bit.ly/1meroFB (a great study of R&D since WW2). It’s true that any of the channels towards strong AI would have abundant applications to sustain them in the marketplace, but BCI is special because it can ride the wave of virtualization technologies that humans are virtually guaranteed to adopt (see what I did there :). I’m talking about fully immersive virtual reality. The applications for military, business, educational training and entertainment of a high efficacy BCI are truly awe inspiring and could create a substantial economic engine.
And then there are the research benefits. You’ve already put BCI on the spectrum of interfacing technologies which arguably started with the printing press, but BCI could actually be conceived as the upper limit of this spectrum. As high-bandwidth BCI is approached a concurrent task is pre-processing information to improve signal, expert systems are one way of achieving this. The dawn of “Big Data” is spurring more intensive machine learning research and companies like Aysasdi are figuring out techniques like topological data analysis to not only extract meaning from high dimensional data sets, but to render them visually intuitive—this is where the crux of BMI lies.
Imagine full virtual realities in which all of the sensory data being fed into your brain is actually real-world data which has been algorithmically pre-processed to represent some real world problem. For example, novel models could be extracted in real time from a physicists brain as she thinks of them (even before awareness). These models would be immediately simulated all around her, projected through time, and compared to previous models. It is even possible that the abstract symbology of mathematics and language could be made obsolete, though I doubt it.
Betting on such a scenario requires no real paradigm shift, only a continuation of current trends. Thus I am in favor of the “BCI as a transitional technology” hypothesis.
But it’s not easily usable, and really it’s only for general-domain knowledge or certain types of broadly available statistics. Consider the difference between having to search on a given topic and having a subject matter expert on that topic on the phone, (especially pretty academic or locally-specific ones that have poorer search results). That’s a gap yet to be bridged just by conventional search technology.
Ahh, you’re talking about expert systems. I agree that this does hold a lot of potential—in fact in a related tangent I’ve been spending a lot of time coding some machine learning algorithms, and I can safely say that in their target domain not only are these algos a lot better at inference then I am, but given certain shortcomings that I have not (yet) been able to tackle, the combination of myself and the algos is significantly better than either of us in isolation.
So in a way, I’m already a cyborg, and in this specific case I don’t think a simple BCI would improve matter much. A full coding cortex OTOH...
Expert Systems suggests a particular set of ideas and functions, and brings to mind software made int he 1980′s that often failed to live up to expectations. I do mean something similar to that, admittedly, but bringing in the best design and information retrieval ideas developed in the 30 years since then.
And yes, when predictions are being made, combining different predictors almost always yields superior results. Another natural “cyborg” area.
Let’s not forget that this is fundamentally an economic question and not just a technological one. “The vast majority of R&D has been conducted by private industry, which performed 70.5 percent ($282.4 billion) of all R&D in 2009.” -http://bit.ly/1meroFB (a great study of R&D since WW2). It’s true that any of the channels towards strong AI would have abundant applications to sustain them in the marketplace, but BCI is special because it can ride the wave of virtualization technologies that humans are virtually guaranteed to adopt (see what I did there :). I’m talking about fully immersive virtual reality. The applications for military, business, educational training and entertainment of a high efficacy BCI are truly awe inspiring and could create a substantial economic engine.
And then there are the research benefits. You’ve already put BCI on the spectrum of interfacing technologies which arguably started with the printing press, but BCI could actually be conceived as the upper limit of this spectrum. As high-bandwidth BCI is approached a concurrent task is pre-processing information to improve signal, expert systems are one way of achieving this. The dawn of “Big Data” is spurring more intensive machine learning research and companies like Aysasdi are figuring out techniques like topological data analysis to not only extract meaning from high dimensional data sets, but to render them visually intuitive—this is where the crux of BMI lies.
Imagine full virtual realities in which all of the sensory data being fed into your brain is actually real-world data which has been algorithmically pre-processed to represent some real world problem. For example, novel models could be extracted in real time from a physicists brain as she thinks of them (even before awareness). These models would be immediately simulated all around her, projected through time, and compared to previous models. It is even possible that the abstract symbology of mathematics and language could be made obsolete, though I doubt it.
Betting on such a scenario requires no real paradigm shift, only a continuation of current trends. Thus I am in favor of the “BCI as a transitional technology” hypothesis.