This is a linkpost for AR Might be the Key to BCI from my Substack.

Summary: Pairing augmented reality with yet-unrealized advances in noninvasive, high-resolution brain scanning technology could be a key unlock in collecting and scaling data needed to enable robust brain-computer interfaces. I see this as especially useful in determining a shared latent space (i.e., an embedding interface) between neural data and such modalities as audio, vision, text, or even behavior. As the component technologies mature and become widespread, this could eventually open multiple paths to human emulation.

I was inspired to collect these thoughts more concretely after finally clicking through the hypertext in The Intelligence Curse and coming across Richard Ngo’s piece The Gentle Romance in the Asimov Press.

Setting the Stage (in the Theater of the Mind)

In The Gentle Romance, the narrator’s path to post-humanism begins with a pair of augmented reality glasses; a device not too dissimilar to nascent offerings from the likes of Meta, Xreal, and Viture. The spectacles offer a private virtual workspace, immersive gaming, and, critically, an AI assistant which learns from the user’s habits to better assist them.

In the story, the narrator quickly becomes frustrated at his speed of communication with the assistant. The sluggishness of text pales in comparison to the more abstract visual communication system demonstrated by an old college friend; a feature which allows the assistant to superimpose patterns of light in his periphery, initially pairing them with a verbal translation to bootstrap comprehension. Enabling this, the narrator becomes adept at interpreting the shapes and patterns, the pictorial pidgin coming to serve as an intermediary between the language of his mind and the AI’s incomprehensible embedding space. Eventually, hemodynamic brain scanning technology becomes mature enough for commercial applications; the assistant, or “meta-self”— previously a limited model of the narrator’s cognition extrapolated from his actions— can now “read thoughts in real-time.” In the short run, this gives the narrator greater command over his tools. In the long run, this is the first step towards simulating mental states learned straight from the source.

It seems to me that reading the mind is contingent upon getting a good signal from the brain, associating it with a stimulus or an...

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