Are You Ready To Trust Facebook With Your Brain?

This is not Facebook's brain-computer interface

Yoshikazu Tsuno / AFP / Getty Images

In a 2015 Q&A, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that the future of communication may well be telepathy. “One day, I believe we&039;ll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology,” he said. “You&039;ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too.”

Now, two years later, Facebook is working hard to make Zuckerberg&039;s futurist vision a reality. And Regina Dugan — who headed up both the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Google&039;s Advanced Technology and Projects group — is leading the effort. Onstage at Facebook&039;s F8 conference Wednesday, Dugan provided concrete details on the company’s telepathy efforts for the first time, introducing a research initiative she hopes will someday enable us to type words into Facebook posts simply by thinking them.

“We have a goal of creating a system capable of typing 100 words per minute … straight from your brain.”

“It sounds impossible, but it’s closer than you may realize,” Dugan said. “We have a goal of creating a system capable of typing 100 words per minute — five times faster than you can type on your smartphone — straight from your brain.”

For Dugan, the idea of such a brain-computer interface is not nearly far-fetched as it might sound. More to the point, it makes good sense. Thinking our words into a computer would likely be more efficient than manually typing them. And thinking commands into our smartphones could free us from staring at them so much, giving us more time to engage with the world around us. It too could make glasses overlaying digital information on the real world feel natural, since we wouldn’t have to operate them clunkily via touch or voice. “Even something as simple as a &039;yes,&039; &039;no&039; brain click would fundamentally change our capability,” Dugan said.

It remains to be seen if Facebook can develop such a technology and widely deploy it. But should it manage to do so it’ll likely encounter a perhaps more monumental task: convincing people to trust a company with a bumpy history of privacy missteps with their brains.

Well aware of such concerns, Dugan stressed that Facebook is taking a measured approach to these new brain-computer interfaces. “To be clear, we are not talking about decoding your random thoughts,” she said. “We’re talking about decoding those words, the ones you already decided to share, by sending them to the speech center of your brain.”

“To be clear, we are not talking about decoding your random thoughts.”

Dugan’s emphasis on thought-typing’s tie to voluntary human decisions could be the foundation of Facebook’s “trust us” pitch for such technology. You typically don’t move your arm unless you want to do so; you typically don’t speak without intending to say something; presumably you won’t think things into Facebook unless you choose to do so.

There will be hardware involved, of course. Dugan told BuzzFeed News that thought-typing will likely be done via an electronic headband or augmented reality glasses — or perhaps something the team hasn’t thought of yet. Asked if she thought people might be hesitant to wear such a Facebook-developed device, Dugan parried the question. “I want to be careful not to dial forward to a whole slew of potential hypotheses of what might and might not occur,” she said.

But Dugan did stress that Facebook isn’t blindly pursuing technological advancement without considering the implications. “We ask questions about technological progress and we always will,” she said. ”I feel optimistic about technological progress; I also feel responsible for doing the right things.”

Quelle: <a href="Are You Ready To Trust Facebook With Your Brain?“>BuzzFeed

Alex Jones And The Dark New Media Are On Trial In Texas

Infowars / Getty

AUSTIN, Tx — Halfway through the second official day of his 10-day civil custody trial, Alex Jones reclined in his chair and mopped sweat from his brow while watching a shirtless, pantsless version of himself hawk male vitality supplements on a courtroom television screen. It was hardly the most outlandish moment of the afternoon.

Indeed, the first full day of Jones’ battle to retain custody of his three young children was filled with bizarre allegations — claims that Jones took his shirt off during a joint family counseling session and once blamed his inability to recall basic facts about his children during a pre-trial deposition on having “had a big bowl of chili for lunch.”

The news from the Travis County courtroom — breathless tweets from a gaggle of journalists covering the trial — bled across the internet instantly. Since Sunday evening, when the Austin American Statesman broke the news that Jones’ attorneys planned to defend his custody on the grounds that his two-plus decades of conspiracy theorizing has been “performance art,” Alex Jones&#039; name and reputation have unexpectedly become one of the biggest stories in the country.

And while it’s unusual for a contentious family custody case to end up as fodder for late night television hosts (the Jones case got the extended Colbert monologue treatment on Monday evening), Jones’ trial is far larger than his painful and in some ways ordinary family dispute. For the millions on either side who both adore and revile Jones, the case offers the hope of answering a near-impossible question: where does Alex Jones the character end and Alex Jones the person begin?

But the herculean task of untangling Jones from his political views has put the 43 year-old broadcaster at the center of something bigger than himself. Unexpectedly, Jones is now the star of a courtroom drama that feels less like a quotidian family law case and more like a referendum on politics, the internet, and the media in the post-Trump ecosystem.

And that’s because at present Jones and his Infowars media empire sit at the intersection of the thorniest issues across the media landscape. Jones, depending on who you ask, is either a participant in, defender of, or the driving force behind everything from fake news, online harassment and conspiracy theories to the toxic, hyper-partisan politicization of seemingly innocuous events.

Which is what makes Jones’ trial — and his impending trip to the witness stand — so alluring. Perhaps less interesting than knowing exactly what Jones truly believes is the prospect of watching legal experts compel earnest testimony from one of the nation’s top exporters of loose facts, untruths, and partisanship. Jones’ unenviable position then — disavow your lucrative professional views or risk losing your family — feels like a rare shot at the truth at a time when disinformation and professionalized trolling are staples of both sides of the political spectrum.

And while Jones’ verdict will likely set few precedents when it comes to internet conspiracy theorizing, the national scrutiny is bound to imbue even the smallest rulings with added meaning. Jones’ performance art defense resonates deeply during a month in which CNN’s President Jeff Zucker prompted outrage by comparing political news coverage to a sporting event. Similarly, Judge Orlinda Naranjo’s decisions to admit or disallow Jones’ rants into evidence seem — perhaps unfairly — referendums on fake news. Mix in the trial’s custody element and the case’s rulings grow unanswerable and near-existential to an outside observer: can someone who trafficks in fake news simultaneously be a good father? Just how amoral are conspiratorial thoughts when they’re published for a wider audience?

And because Jones and the Infowars empire are creatures of the internet, the trial stands to put the engines and platforms of information distribution on trial in unexpected ways. On Tuesday there was confusion in the court as to whether Jones’ impromptu Facebook Live streaming videos — which depict him shouting at protesters and slurring words ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration — should be classified as part of Jones’ professional life or if they were videos of a more personal nature, given that they weren’t shot in studio. There’s even a debate to be had over the legal sincerity of certain online threats. Jones’ parenting, for example, was called into question Tuesday by the opposing counsel for bringing his 14 year-old son onto his streamed radio after having received death threats online during his broadcasts.

And if you’re looking to understand how alternative political and factual universes respond to news about polarizing figures, the first two days of Jones’ trial have been highly instructive. Jones’ attorney’s performance art defense was met by the mainstream media as an ideological checkmate of sorts while his defenders reflexively blamed the claims on a deeper, more sinister conspiracy. Jones himself denied the rumors and claimed that the media was doing to him what they claim he does: take a kernel of truth and spin it to fit a convenient fake news narrative. Jones’ critics react incredulously while his fans argue it’s unfair to politicize what should be a private family matter. All sides talk past each other, ignoring the other and assuming they&039;ve won.

This local custody trial is not supposed to be about Alex Jones. And yet his centrality to the proceedings is unavoidable. Still, despite the fact that this is at its core a family matter and an examination of Jones’ dueling personae, it is hard to shake the feeling that there’s something greater looming over the 10 days. This is the 21st century media’s century’s Scopes Monkey Trial (we are the lower primates here, not the earnest schoolteacher), and the trial’s symbolic meaning will overshadow its subjects, litigants, and even its verdict. Instead, it standing in as a referendum on a divisive moment, to be interpreted differently by all who follow along. Trials with media personalities highlight this further. Last year’s Hulk Hogan lawsuit against Gawker Media was largely viewed as a condemnation of a bygone era of sensationalist online writing and reporting. And in its own overdetermined way, Jones’ trial, coverage, and fallout feels a bit like a trial for the media — with all its attendant volatility and uncertainty and toxicity — in the year 2017.

We are riveted to our olive green, cushioned seats in the gallery of the Travis County Courthouse this week because of Jones’ profound influence — both intentional and unintended — on our politics, culture, and on a conspiratorial ideology of fear that transcends party lines. The case of Jones v. Jones resonates so deeply at this moment because we are living in a moment that Alex Jones himself ushered in.

Quelle: <a href="Alex Jones And The Dark New Media Are On Trial In Texas“>BuzzFeed

Facebook’s New Camera Could Make It Even Harder To Tell What’s Real

Stephen Lam / Reuters

Onstage this morning at Facebook’s annual developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg used the image of an ordinary coffee cup — displayed on the gigantic screen above him — to demonstrate Facebook’s new in-app camera, which uses superior artificial intelligence to recognize objects and then seamlessly manipulate them. Facebook’s software will know it’s a mug — just tap on the coffee and a toolbar will pop-up with relevant effects like a cloud of steam. Or, said Zuckerberg, “you can add a second coffee mug, so it looks like you’re not having breakfast alone.”

Without naming his muse — Snapchat — Zuckerberg told the crowd of thousands that Facebook is ready to take augmented reality mainstream, to make it accessible to anyone with a smartphone. On stage, Zuckerberg ran through the primary use cases for Facebook’s camera, including adding digital objects, a la Pokemon Go, or the ability to “enhance digital objects like your home or your face.” Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, chief technology officer, offered a more seasonal example: “Let’s say I took a wonderful vacation photo and a windsurfer rudely interrupted my view.” With Facebook’s camera, the offending surfer could be easily edited out, Schroepfer explained, using a slide screen to show just how easy it was rewrite vacation history.

The examples sounded as innocuous as could be, until you considered how they might play out in the real world. In the keynote, Facebook floated right past questions like: Can Facebook’s camera erase a man on dry land from a photograph as easily as it can a windsurfer? Are there realistic-looking items can Facebook instantly insert into a photo? In other words, just how much will people be able to doctor the photos that appear in their feeds? And will the people who see them know they’ve been manipulated?

Facebook didn’t demonstrate this trick on stage, but during an earlier interview, the company showed BuzzFeed News how its radical camera could take an ordinary photo of a person and manipulate their facial expression to make the person smile, or frown, or display whatever other emotion the smartphone-holder desired. Back in December, the Verge warned that artificial intelligence was already making it easy to make fake images and fake videos, pointing to a startup called SmileVector that can make any celebrity smile.

To be clear, many of the effects available now — like breakfast sharks flying around Zuckerberg’s cereal bowl — are clearly cartoons. Facebook declined to comment on the record, but the company&#039;s Camera Effects Platform is still in closed beta: effects have to be submitted and reviewed by Facebook before being shared. Each effect also has to adhere to Facebook’s policies and terms governing what’s offensive or illegal. The company monitors how effects are being used and will update accordingly.

But soon enough, these tools will soon be distributed to nearly two billion users, with frictionless ease. And, as Zuckerberg said many times on stage, they’re still primitive. That&039;s an interesting posture for a company with a major fact-checking problem that has seen time and again the way its products can be used to foster hate speech, violence, and division. It&039;s worth noting that a recent report about Silicon Valley reengineering journalism, traced fake news opportunists back to Zuckerberg’s (seemingly benign-sounding) goal from 2014 to build a personalized paper.

We don’t know how Facebook Camera and the products built on it will be used in the real world until they&039;re, well, out in the real world, in the pockets of a billion-plus people — some of whom are assholes (or Macedonian teens). The people who use technology are, all too often, more creative than those who make it: They find new and ingenious ways to hack the algorithm, evade the censors, further their agendas, and make certain topics go viral. Facebook’s new camera effects could very well end up being an innocuous way to make breakfast fun and fix your vacation pictures — or it could mean we’ll soon be a nation divided over fake photos instead of fake news. In the meantime, that steam sure is cool.

Quelle: <a href="Facebook’s New Camera Could Make It Even Harder To Tell What’s Real“>BuzzFeed

We Tried Out Facebook's New Social VR App At F8

SAN JOSE — Facebook announced a new social virtual reality app for its Oculus Rift headset today at F8, the company&#039;s annual conference for software developers. It&039;s called Facebook Spaces, and you can download the beta version from the Oculus Store now.

In her keynote address, Rachel Rubin Franklin, Facebook&039;s head of social VR, said that Spaces signaled “the very beginnings of social VR.” People on Twitter said it looked a lot like Second Life and The Sims. Perhaps not coincidentally, Franklin previously worked as vice president at Electronic Arts managingThe Sims game.

Oculus Rift already supports the social game Altspace VR, made by an independent game publisher of the same name, where people can gather in virtual rooms via human or robot avatars and host events, play games, make art, watch 2D videos, or socialize.

Here&039;s how Spaces works:

First, you connect your Facebook account to Spaces in the “Devices Requests” tab of the Facebook mobile app. Then you&039;ll strap on your Rift headset and navigate to the Spaces app, which will appear in your library. You&039;ll need the Rift Touch controllers, which retail at $100 a pair, to use Facebook Spaces.

To create your virtual self, you choose from several versions of an avatar whose features are drawn from scans of your Facebook photos. You can customize some features, like hair, eye color, and glasses. The majority of the avatars seem to have large foreheads.

You can invite up to three friends to your space.

If they accept, you&039;ll find yourselves sitting around a virtual table. They&039;ll see your virtual avatar and the backdrop behind it. (You can choose from default backgrounds or use your own 360 pictures.) Your avatar can also video call friends via Messenger, which you can pull up as a flat menu in the virtual space. The video will appear as a 2D screen that you&039;ll be able to grab and move around. If they&039;re not in Facebook Spaces when you call, you&039;ll see their IRL face and surroundings, and they&039;ll see your avatar and your virtual setting.

If you get tired of your friends, Facebook included the ability to mute them or wholesale remove them from your virtual space. Gurl, bye.

Here&039;s a friend appearing&#033;

To entertain yourselves, you can draw in 3D and take selfies.

Here&039;s my virtual selfie with Christian, who works at Facebook.

I was really into the 3D marker. He was unamused.

And here&039;s BuzzFeed video producer Allyson Laquian&039;s selfie, where she has a piece of pizza in her head.

The background is a 360 video of the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

360 videos can totally change your environment

To play a 360 video, you&039;ll open a menu of options using the virtual control interface, and you select from content Facebook publishers have made or that you&039;ve recorded. When you grab a video from that menu, it&039;ll appear as a small orb in your virtual hand. To play it you can either put it in your avatar&039;s mouth or in the center of the communal table.

The videos will play all around you, turning your virtual environment into the video. You&039;ll also be able to view two-dimensional videos and pictures from Facebook publishers and your own timeline within Spaces as movable flat screens.

Facebook said in a statement that it&039;s hoping to bring the app to more platforms in the future but didn&039;t specify which ones.

Quelle: <a href="We Tried Out Facebook&039;s New Social VR App At F8“>BuzzFeed