🤖 AI Summary
「大手テクノジー企業があなたの思考を収集したい」という記事は、消費用神経技術が研究室から家庭や職場へ急速に進化していることを報道しています。Apple, Meta, Snapなどの企業は脳活動の監視や解釈を行う製品を開発しており、その技術力は著しく向上しています。
脳画像技術（fMRI）と機械学習技術のおかげで、現在は抑うつなどの中間的な感情から映画の再構築まで様々な思考を読み取り可能となっています。また、2023年にパラリベーションによる言語生成が成功し、脳内の思考を実時に口頭化する技術も進歩しています。
しかし、これらの高度な技術はプライバシー問題を引き起こす可能性があり、一部の神経科学者は「ネーロライト」と呼ばれる権利を提唱しています。これは精神的プライバシー、アイデンティティ、個人的な選択肢を保護します。
一方で、より侵入性の低い非侵襲的な脳波計も広く普及し始めています。これらの技術は今後さらに進化し、生活のあらゆる面に浸透する可能性がありますが、それとともに生じるプライバシー問題についての懸念が高まっています。
Wired reports that consumer neurotechnology is rapidly moving from the lab into workplaces and homes, with companies including Apple, Meta, and Snap developing products that can monitor or interpret brain activity. Researchers warn that as these systems improve, neural data could become the next major privacy battleground. Some neuroscientists are already calling for a series of core rights, coined "neurorights," that protect "mental privacy," "identity," and personal "agency." Here's an excerpt from the article: Over the past two decades, researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks the iron in the hemoglobin supplying oxygen to neurons, have been building up increasingly detailed maps and inventories of the mammalian cortex. Thanks to huge advances in machine-learning artificial intelligence -- computer algorithms that are able to sort through enormous amounts of information and use statistical methods to make classifications and predictions -- fMRI scans can now be used to identify everything from depressive thoughts to the nuanced feelings of envy and schadenfreude. Other algorithms have been able to accurately piece together reconstructions of movie clips watched by subjects, just by analyzing their brain scans; or have detected, in probing the brain activity of swing voters in the US presidential election, responding to photographs and videos of presidential candidates, which candidates provoked anxiety or even disgust, and which elicited positive responses or feelings of empathy.
In just the last few years, neuroscience researchers have progressed from decoding images and emotions as they play across the cortex to sounds, words, phrases, and even language. In 2023, in a remarkable demonstration of this emerging technology, a woman called Ann Johnson, who had been paralyzed for 18 years by a brain-stem stroke, was able to speak again through the insertion of a grid of 253 electrodes onto the surface of her brain, which translated her neuronal signals into sentences, in real time, at a rate of 78 words per minute (just about half the speed of standard conversation). The research team at the University of California, led by neurosurgeon Edward Chang, had combined this brain-computer interface with an animated avatar of Johnson's head, which spoke in her own voice, as reconstructed from a recording of a 15-minute toast she had given at her wedding. Just as the avatar's mouth spoke Johnson's words as she thought them, so its expressions were similarly influenced by the nuances of her brain activity, which turned her thoughts about facial gestures into displays of emotion -- from smiles to pursed lips and frowns.
[...] The more invasive the recording equipment, the richer and more detailed the data. Surgical interventions are at the vanguard of neuroscience and remain very rare -- fewer than 100 people on the planet have brain-computer interfaces like Johnson's embedded beneath their skulls. Yet almost inevitably, a concerted trickle-down effect is occurring. In the summer of 2023, a team at the University of Texas demonstrated that they could use fMRI to translate brain scans into words and sentences, after subjects listened to 16 hours of the storytelling podcasts The Moth Radio Hour and The New York Times' Modern Love to train an AI model. When the subjects then listened to new podcasts, the algorithm was able to convert the gist of what they heard, as it manifested in their brains, into words, phrases, and sentences that roughly captured the stories. As the team's lead computational neuroscientist, Alexander Huth, put it in an interview with Science, "Our thought when we actually had this working was, 'Oh my God, this is kind of terrifying.'" Now noninvasive, wearable brain scanners are beginning to proliferate beyond the lab, making their way into our workplaces and, through the vast global consumer market, into our homes too.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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