cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19628702
image transcript
screenshot of this bluesky post (which you can read without logging in here) from
.bsky.social(“Notorious RBMK”) saying:my friend who still lives in palo alto gave me permission to share this mailer he got.
there’s unhinged and then there’s tech unhinged
image in post has two photos of people wearing EEG electrodes, one xray of a human head, an EEG data plot over a silhouette of a head, and this text:
REM sleep is the next Al
The upcoming era of physical reality integrated with dream worlds advanced by the REMspace startup
- Controlling a smart home from dreams
- Transferring speech from dreams
- Controlling virtual cars from dreams
- Interacting with dream worlds using brain implants
- Social media for sharing dream journals
- Smart sleep masks powered by Al
- Many other breakthroughs from our lab (videos and tech)
Don’t miss the pitch of the year for potential partners and investors
Aug 29th Palo Alto
Above the image is an (inaccurate) BlueSky label saying “Possible tumblr screenshot” with a “hide” button.
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the guy behind this startup:
- (CW bloody photos) “I confirm the information published in the Daily Mail. On May 17, 2023, I performed by myself trepanation, electrode implantation, and electrical stimulation of my brain’s motor cortex. I needed it to test brain stimulation during lucid dreaming”
- https://www.newsweek.com/russian-implants-chip-brain-control-dreams-hospital-1814256
Even if all of that worked, why would I want it?
You don’t want it.
But the people who can put ads on your dreams want it.
Does anyone else remember Microsoft’s amazingly tone deaf slide deck about how integrating their systems and making thing seamless across multiple platforms including mobile phones and laptops would allow people to work during any/every spare moment in their lives, like while commuting?
Businesses want to own every moment of your life not strictly required for continued existence. If they can normalize using sleep time for extra “passive” income by using your dream power or by just renting out “spare” brain computation power, they will.
CEO: “Did you know that people can do basic work during REM? And they won’t even feel like they have worked after waking up. We can boost employee productivity by 40%!!”
Hustle mindset. 25/8 work ethic, baby. It is actually incredibly cool and fun to be a cog in the corporate machine. Liberty! Whiskey! Sexy! They’re giving out the good soma when you work in the Dream Mines, baby! Get with the program!
You really don’t have any interest in controlling virtual cars with your dreams? That alone has me signing up as an investor.
I sort of already do. It’s called dreaming about driving a car.
I think these folks forgot that random dreams play an important role in information processing. I’d rather not mess with that too much.
I heard that their tech will lower the virtual carbon footprint of the car you are dreaming about driving.
i hope you’re joking but if you’re not i assume you live in the bay area? if you want to go to their pitch tonight, here’s its eventbrite.
Yeah, that’ll go great when the car is suddenly driving 14 miles down the driveway of the house I lived at as a child - a driveway that is walkable in less than a minute - before entering the garage which is a large house that slightly resembles a place I used to work and has a view over a clock tower that may or may not be larger when you look at it from a different angle and I think I’ll nap in this bed that’s here.
Now tell me: Where is the car relative to its position when that five-second-long dream sequence began, and will that pedestrian ever walk again?
Interactive dream worlds is essentially full dive vr. I guess you could just not use it, and while you’re dreaming about losing your teeth, I’ll be living through whatever movie I picked before going to bed.
Expecting any part of the brain to work that simply is foolish. We already know that REM sleep does a lot of the lifting for forming long term memories and processing complex input from your waking hours. Not to mention the importance of it for actual rest/recharging so you aren’t an exhausted zombie all the time.
Sounds like a wonderful idea to just fuck around with that.
There’s a saying in my language that roughly translates to “the morning is wiser than the evening” in English. I believe in English it’s common to say “sleep on it” for tough decisions.
I often wake up and come up with a solution to my toughest problems from the previous day. My REM sleep brain is already keeping me gainfully employed.
No idea why anyone would want to fuck with this. It’s awesome.
Tbh, if it were possible to record dreams or reliably trigger vivid lucid dreams, that could be one of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of art, recreation, and psychology. The fact that some startup is trying to grift on the idea with IoT/gig economy bullshit doesn’t change that.
Agree 100%, though the idea of recording dreams would be A privacy nightmare on another level from anything we’ve dealt with before
In the interest of fairness every citizen should have their own mandatory public dream channel on DreamTube.
Shit wait that’ll lead to some people becoming popular DreamTubers. Oh no, Dreamfluencer will become a thing. Quick, burn that timeline to the ground!
I saw the tagline and thought it meant that REM sleep is the next big thing people invest in because sleep is good for your health so they’re selling solutions to boost your sleep quality
Boy was I wrong
Oh, so they can’t get autonomous driving to work, thus the next step is to get people who are sleeping to steer the cars remotely
They’re going to ender’s game you. It’ll be pitched as a game or training and it’ll come out it was real cars
I will totally abide by all traffic rules when playing a virtual reality driving game in my sleep. Nothing can go wrong there.
This is just the game “Hypnospace Outlaw”
Or the original plot of The Matrix, before the studio execs decided audiences were too stupid.
I mean, to be fair, they were.
What started as an allegory for the path of a trans person realizing they’re trans and taking “the red pill” to find the reality of their world and escape “the Matrix” that forces them into a confined box in which they don’t actually fit…
…turned into the dumbest bro’d out bullshit from people who think the “red pill” means you’re the strongest smartest man who is has figured out society and you’re a superman like Neo who can fly and shit.
Honestly, I’m on the side of executives on this one. Most people are too fucking stupid for it.
From what I’ve read, The Matrix wasn’t created as a trans allegory, it’s just that you can apply the fundamentals of its story to many concepts. One of the most popular interpretations happens to be gender identity because its creators transitioned years after the original trilogy ended.
Glad to see I’m not the only person on earth who has played it. Such a remarkable, funny and weird game. Still trying to get that damned Seepage song out of my head.
