Official News page 9

REAL LIFE NEWS: MICROSOFT THE MIND-READER

by Hazed

Microsoft has just applied for a patent on some revolutionary technology - they want to read your mind to find out what you are thinking when you use a computer. They say this is desirable because interrupting people at the time to ask them what they are thinking is too distracting, and asking them afterwards is no use because they won't remember exactly what they thought when doing specific things.

In fact, they say, asking people what they think of a machine and the way it works is absolutely useless as a technique because "humans are often poor reporters of their own actions" - in other words, we mis-remember and make stuff up.

So the plan is to monitor brain activity and record the results along with a log of what the user was doing on the computer, in an attempt to find out what they are really feeling and thinking when dealing with a piece of Microsoft software.

Now, recording brain activity is one thing, but interpreting the data, not so much. Not least because you have to filter out all the non-computer-related thoughts, such as, oh dear my back hurts, what shall I have for dinner tonight? how long do I have to keep this stupid helmet on? and so on. They also have to ignore all the non-conscious stuff, like the signals that occur when you blink or fidget in your chair.

So the patent is for a method to filter out the noise and just study the cognitive signals.

Hmmm. I am sure you can write your own jokes here!

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