NYTimes: “Neural data can offer unparalleled insight into the workings of the human mind. B.C.I.s are already frighteningly powerful: Using artificial intelligence, scientists have used B.C.I.s to decode “imagined speech,” constructing words and sentences from neural data; to recreate mental images (a process known as brain-to-image decoding); and to trace emotions and energy levels. B.C.I.s have allowed people with locked-in syndrome, who cannot move or speak, to communicate with their families and caregivers and even play video games…Advances in optogenetics, a scientific technique that uses light to stimulate or suppress individual, genetically modified neurons, could allow scientists to “write” the brain as well, potentially altering human understanding and behavior. Optogenetic implants are already able to partially restore vision to patients with genetic eye disorders; lab experiments have shown that the same technique can be used to implant false memories in mammal brains, as well as to silence existing recollections and to recover lost ones.”
Arnold Kling: “Think of democracy as a principal-agent problem in which the voting public is the principal and the government is the agent. Standard public choice theory focuses on the faults of the agent. Hanson says to look instead at the faults of the principal. As Mencken said, the people are getting what they want, good and hard.”
FT: “If data is the oil of the 21st century, then “brain” data is the crude oil.”
IEA: “Today’s socialists are bursting with self-confidence, more precisely, with that easy self-confidence that comes from knowing that your opinions are fashionable, and that the cultural momentum is on your side. If ‘history’ is a battle of ideas between people who believe in completely different ways of organising a society, then history is well and truly back. Those of us on the other side of that battle better act like it.”
MaxSource: “The failure of the attention-based model is simultaneously fostering the growth of the Intentional Economy. This nascent structure is defined by a direct, transparent value exchange between the creator/provider and the consumer, built upon active user choice, quality, and utility…The bankruptcy of the Attention Economy is not a collapse of opportunity, but a revaluation of capital. It forces a necessary transition from quantity-based survival to quality-based thriving, benefiting creators who produce meaningful work and, most importantly, users seeking genuine value.”
