cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19628702
image transcript
screenshot of this bluesky post (which you can read without logging in here) from
@comraderobot.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.
–
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
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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
Please Choose Your 8-Hour Ad Experience to Continue Your Free-Tier Dream
F u
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
But do I get paid for that?
Barely
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.
Well, in the case of Ender’s Game, that was the point. Trick kids into thinking they were playing a game and they wouldn’t think twice about being as brutal as necessary to win. So if your goal is to have cars murder people, having people control them with their dreams is a pretty good idea.
Funny ragdolls!!
Dream Scenario (2023)
I can already drive a real car in my dreams by taking Ambien
Good god, I was finally prescribed Ambien for the first time recently, and I definitely now realize why it has the reputation that it does.
Hell yeah can’t wait to control my virtual car with my dreams.
I can already do that in my dreams. Though I usually crash it often into something inexplicable.
I make sure to only dream about Tesla’s (they actually work in the dream world)
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.
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%!!”
So I can spend less time at work??
CEO: “Umm…next question please”
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.
Man, Futurama was shockingly prescient, wasn’t it.
You really don’t have any interest in controlling virtual cars with your dreams? That alone has me signing up as an investor.
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?
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.
Putting that in my virtual gps
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.
Matthew McConaughey is driving and he won’t shutup about wanting to fuck a Lincoln.
“Who am I?”
“Why am I here?”
“When I’m done rolling up this booger, should I eat it or throw it out the window?”
Ahh it was a solid movie but it was a marketing funded piece based on the “center piece”
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!
25/8 work ethic
Yes
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.
I guess people with mind blindness or blurry minds will be fucked out of luck on this tech, huh?
Aphantasic here. We still dream. It’s all about whether you’re a visualizer or a conceptualizer, we’re not brain damaged.
I mean, I know it doesn’t mean you’re brain damaged. I just am bad at visualizing things in my own head. I’m like at a number 3 here myself.
So I wouldn’t think external technology would suddenly make your brain better at internal visualization. Like, I am really great at abstractions in my head for things that don’t really have visual components. On the flip side, when I’ve had lucid dreams, the scenery and people are always wavy and indistinct. I really just meant this technology sounds bogus because it can’t make our brains better at visualizing physical things.
Please forgive me if it sounded like I meant I thought people experiencing aphantasia were brain damaged, they most certainly are not.
Jesus, that’s some real desperate idiots there.
This is just the game “Hypnospace Outlaw”
Everyone needs to be warned about the danger of Beefbrain
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.
PROFESSOR HELPER HERE! READY TO HELP!
That was one of the (many) things that mad me go “Yes! That’s what it was like! That’s what the internet was really like in 1999!” And those download accelerators, which we then recklessly installed on the family computer and gave it virusses.
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.
Part of the script that got cut by Hollywood was literally Switch being a different gender inside the Matrix and outside.
That’s literally why they were originally named “Switch.” Switch is in the original film and dies in the original film. Not the sequels.
But sure, not a trans allegory.
The part that gets said is a “trans allegory” but isn’t is the red pill as a stand-in for estrogen.
I went back and looked at the articles I had read and dug a little deeper to get to an interview with Lilly Wachowski herself:
Continuing on The Matrix**, you confirmed a couple years ago that it was a trans allegory —**
No, I didn’t.
You didn’t? Tell me more.
Yeah, so that came from an interview I did for Disclosure. They had a bunch of Matrixquestions. And the question they asked me was about Switch, who was originally written as a trans character who was male in the real world and female in the matrix. And they took that response and attached the question that everyone now references that it’s a trans allegory. And so it was slightly out of context, but I don’t sit here and put a stink up about it, because it is a trans allegory in that it was written by two closeted trans women. And so all of the things that are in it are super-duper trans. The idea of transformation, even the whole “My name is Neo, Mr. Anderson —” that idea of claiming identity, it’s undeniable.
https://www.them.us/story/lilly-wachowski-mentoring-the-matrix-interview
To be honest, her statement doesn’t seem like either a denial or confirmation to me so 🤷♂️
Yeah, it sounds to me like she has issue with just that specific thing being treated as a trans allegory rather than the whole thing, the film, The Matrix, itself, as trans allegory as a whole, and the idea that it was purposeful rather than happenstance.
It sounds more like “we were closeted at the time, and we unconsciously were putting in trans allegories to our own paths and ideas” which still means its trans allegory, even if it was unintentional at the time, because they still hadn’t “come out” to even themselves yet.
And so all of the things that are in it are super-duper trans. The idea of transformation, even the whole “My name is Neo, Mr. Anderson —” that idea of claiming identity, it’s undeniable.
In other words, it’s undeniably trans allegory, but perhaps that wasn’t consciously on their mind at the time they wrote it.
Thanks for the link, I hadn’t read that one. Definitely clears it up a little.
I just hope the devs are more competent and don’t [spoilers].
This has to be a joke
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.
if it were possible to record dreams
mmmm… this is gonna destroy a whole lotta marriages. My wife knows I’m scum so I’ll probably be ok.
It IS possible to reliably trigger lucid dreams, done that. There are a few techniques. It just doesn’t come quickly, would require some “tuning” and practice. Depends on the person of course.
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!
Reminds me of Hypnospace Outlaw. https://store.steampowered.com/app/844590/Hypnospace_Outlaw/
Better sleep would actually improve people’s lives rather than just making it worse.
I’m sorry but your sleep subscription level does not support Ad-Free Sleep^tm . If you feel you’ve reached this message in error can reach our customer service team during your next allotted REM period.
Our records also show 3 unauthorized attempts to enter REM in the last week. Please remember to pay your unauthorized REM fees or we may have to block REM functionality.
HypnOS 2025 looks insane
It just occurred to me how similar AI images are to dreams, always related to the prompt, but never quite how a conscious brain would imagine it. All the weird, illegible text, the grotesque bodies, etc. really do match up fairly well with unconsciousness.
I always thought the same thing, they’re very similar
