Lucid dream startup says you can work in your sleep
Lucid dream startup says you can work in your sleep
Prophetic is developing technology to induce lucid dreams, in which CEOs can practice for board meetings and architects can design buildings while asleep.
welp, we finally found something worse than those people who wanted to put billboards in space. the entire tech industry needs to face the fucking wall
a headset that reliably helped you lucid dream could be amazing. why the fuck would your head go straight to using it for work
literal demons
They're going to figure out how to reanimate your neurons after you die so that you have an afterlife working a call center job
Imagine being a recently deceased, unfortunate soul whose brain is reactivated with all previous memories only to be used as a demo for the torment nexus. Oh, thought you were dead?
It’s kinda fun though because sometimes it’s hard to imagine something more dystopian. This is all human nature btw I don’t make the rules 🥰
I have no mouth but I must scream, but both are only available on the premium death plan.
I'll probably shove my geriatric body into a volcano before that ever happens
Dreadnoughts from Warhammer 40k, but instead of being used as super powerful weapons highly respected by everyone in the chapter, they're used to work some boring office job.
I’m pretty sure this is called robocop.
The underlying tech of stimulating brain regions via ultrasound looks cool. Didn't know that was possible at all, looks quite recent. "Transcranial ultrasound stimulation", allows you to do stuff that previously required electrode implants.
god, imagine a world where what little productive research we actually do fund wasn't constantly being derailed into the stupidest shit imaginable
oh shit, i thought this was an EEG machine dressed up to defraud investors. If they're using ultrasound, this is considerably more concerning. This won't achieve its goal, which is some pie-in-the-sky nonsense. What it will do is poison the well for research into what could be one of the biggest medical breakthroughs of this century...
...cus, as best I understand it, the ultrasound stimulation actually does affect cognition.
Quick rewind; For the longest time, nobody knew how anesthetics worked. They just did. And they work on everything -- mammals, reptiles, fish, plants,
single celled organisms. At a safe dose, it's a temporary universal off switch for living organisms. It's only recently that a reach team of anesthesiologists found out just what anesthetics affect. Inside every cell are these structures called microtubules. They are constantly forming from smaller proteins (called tubulin), falling appart, then forming again. It's like an all-in-one muscular and skeletal system. It gives cells their shape. It's how cells move. It's crucial to cell division. And as long as anesthetics are present, microtubuals don't form.The idea behind ultrasound treatment is to do the opposite of anesthetics. To use sound frequencies to stimulate and encourage microtubules to form more. They're hoping it may be a a treatment for Alzheimers and dementia. And this dumbass startup is trying to monetize it before it's even gone through preliminary studies.
For all the stupid Bazinga shit techbros talk about, a lot of the whole transhumanist utopia is possible...(eventually) Just not under capitalism. Even the very rich can't make it happen for them because they can't co-ordinate enough resources to achieve social rather than individual results.
Something like a suite of treatments for robust life extention, for instance, requires not just a miracle treatment but a complete overhaul of research, policy, treatment, care and monitoring methodologies. Even if you're rich enough to just buy and fund a full time research hospital devoted to you and you alone, it won't be enough to achieve the goal.
Even a cabal of the rich wont be able to co ordinate it, because at some point it'll get in the way of financial stability and their lanyard wearing handlers will do to them what the Bavarian government did to King Ludwig when his art projects got in the way of his personal finances (he never spent state funds contrary to popular belief, he was just rich enough to fuck the economy.)
And this is before we get to the fact that billionaires have lying grifters hanging from them like flies on shit.
If you want the cool tech shit, for you or your grandkids, communism is the only option.
Butlerian Jihad when
More and more people are saying this
Reminder that the capitalists want to develop a drug that makes you serve like 500 life sentences in prison in an hour's time. We're literally bazinga-ing our way to the torment nexus and nothing is stopping it.
they're going to weaponize salvia aren't they?
Jokes on them, I can handle that shit pretty well.
that ones a selling us the rope one for sure tho
Brazen bull treatment for the inventor I hope.
Every day my inevitable tedpilling slowly draws closer and closer.
They're just ripping off deep space 9 more and more.
If anyone takes my literal actual dreams from me I'm going to Kaczynskimode so hard I'll make Ulrike Meinhof look like a wine cave liberal. I will unleash a one-woman storm of fire that will engulf this entire continent and become the type of supervillain that only shitty capeshit comics can dream about
Queen Ludd origin myth.
The worst nightmares I've ever had have all been work related. It feels like poison.
You know when you start scanning items to hit the required rate in your dreams. And then it happens a few times. And then you wake up and go to work to scan items to hit the required work rate. And then you get home to sleep. And then it happens again.
Holy shit, that's dark. I'm sorry
Ah it's alright I escaped that hell hole - the Amazon warehouse.
Hopefully I'll never have to work in one again.
I have dreams where I go to work and it's a black lodge fusion of everywhere I've ever worked at once. Same with places I've lived or traveled to. Pretty sure most of it is a ptsd thing cause it's recurring and usually has to do with really bad shit thst happened.
Uh...doesn't dreaming dilate your perception of time? Congrats on envisioning a device with the potential to drive people postal in just a fraction of the time it would take at a normal job, I guess.
real "Chief O'Brien stuck in mind prison" hours
There were some proposals to do this to prisoners. Essentially it would make them feel as if they’ve been locked up for decades in a matter of hours
fuck you startup stay out of my dreams
It's the Onion, right?
...it's the Onion, right?dunno about you but i think it's a lovely idea to go inside a building some asshole literally dreamed up,
as we all know dreams are completely logical & conform precisely to natural law
Bazinga brains think it'll be Inception and they'll be shooting baddies and kissing hot babes and totally not The Backrooms.
I had a dream today that involved some girlfriend character in the plot. At some point this girlfriend was recasted as a tangerine and I did not bat an eye. Maybe I should change careers to a lucid dream luxury home builder.
Leela: Didn’t you have dreams in the 20th century?
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and the radio. And in magazines. And movies. And at baseball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree!
I think the first dreams should be ads
Finally, sleeptime computing will be real :zane: :pizza-dance: :skeleton-motorcycle:
This torment nexus entrepreneur says they can build the torment nexus in a year! Which torment nexus enjoyer will fund this tormenting venture? Preorder now, we're also doing some crowdfunding as a cover over here
sticking my head in a microwave brb
throw in some grapes for fun light show
the bazingas must be stopped
Wasn't this a Black Mirror episode
Severance is basically this.
So is Hypnospace Outlaw, effectively
This was literally a bit I did like 2 years ago. These people need to pay royalties for taking my idea
If I could earn enough while sleeping to spend my days playing games and watching Judge Judy reruns, plug me in!
You know that that's not how this works, right? The bulk of the population is paid at a rate that is just this side of starving because it's the least that the capitalists possibly could pay them and still have people working for them. Something like this, i.e. an expansion of working hours, would mean nothing in the long term but the ability to pay workers less because "they can just supplement it with their sleep job" which will probably pay not very much either, looking at how little gig economy work really pays.
Although I do love Judy, I was being facetious. Besides, I'm a short sleeper, I wouldn't be worth much.
If we can be made to work during sleep it will never be in the detriment of working during the day.
How about I sleep at work instead?
Paywalled, anyone got a clean link?
Full text:
spoiler
Lucid dream startup says engineers can write code in their sleep. Work may never be the same
People spend one-third of their lives asleep. What if employees could work during that time … in their dreams?
Prophetic, a venture-backed startup founded earlier this year, wants to help workers do just that. Using a headpiece the company calls the “Halo,” Prophetic says consumers can induce a lucid dream state, which occurs when the person having a dream is aware they are sleeping. The goal is to give people control over their dreams, so they can use that time productively. A CEO could practice for an upcoming board meeting, an athlete could run through plays, a web designer could create new templates—“the limiting factor is your imagination,” founder and CEO Eric Wollberg told Fortune.
Consumer devices claiming to induce lucid dream states aren’t new. Headbands, eye masks, and boxes with electrodes that stick to the forehead all populate the market. Even some supplements claim to do the trick. But there’s still an appetite for new technologies, since the potential for creativity and problem-solving is so great and since many on the market don’t work to the extent they promise, a dreaming expert told Fortune.
The potential of lucid dreaming is less about conquering specific problems and more about finding new, creative ways to approach topics that a sleeper couldn’t previously fathom. For example, a mathematician might not reach a specific, numerical answer to a math problem while asleep, but the lucid dream allows them to explore new strategies to tackle the equation while awake.
Early mockups of the Halo show a headband-shaped device that is worn like a crown. It will work by releasing focused ultrasound beams—or sound waves also used to monitor the health of a baby in the womb—into a region of the brain involved in lucid dreaming. The beams will activate the parts of the brain that control decision-making and awareness, initiating the lucid dream, the company says. To create the Halo, Prophetic is working with Card79 founder Afshin Mehin, who designed the Neuralink N1 device for Elon Musk’s brain implant company.
Wollberg founded Prophetic in March alongside chief technology officer Wesley Louis Berry III, who was previously creating augmented reality art. The two met through a mutual friend. Wollberg formerly worked at Gnowbe, the 500 Global–backed edtech startup, and Praxis, the Bedrock- and Paradigm-funded startup looking to build a futuristic city in the Mediterranean. Prophetic has raised $1.1 million in Series A funding from Escape Velocity, O’Shaughnessy Ventures, and BoxGroup.
The technology isn’t without its skeptics. “It’s just not that simple,” according to Antonio Zadra, a psychology professor at the University of Montreal who specializes in sleep and dreaming (and is a frequent lucid dreamer himself).
With other lucid-dream-inducing technologies, sleepers have been able to enter the lucid dream state, but they can quickly forget they are dreaming or get overexcited and wake up, he said. Being able to control a dream, which goes a step further than someone simply realizing they are dreaming, is even more difficult and something that experienced lucid dreamers struggle with, he said. Gaining control of the dream is vital for work applications like practicing for an interview or designing a building—“Control is what we want,” Wollberg told Fortune.
The Halo and other headbands might help induce a lucid dream, but it’s a combination of the device and other mindfulness techniques that can help get people to that point of controlling a dream, Zadra said. These techniques include meditation, writing in a dream journal, and visualizing what will happen in a dream before going to sleep. In response to this claim, Wollberg cited a series of studies that link the level of prefrontal cortex activation with the ability to control a dream. In short, the more stimulation there is, the better ability users have to control their dreams, he said. Many of the studies recommended additional testing to confirm their hypotheses. Prophetic’s product relies on research being conducted by the Donders Institute, a brain research center in the Netherlands. From the institute’s studies, Prophetic will determine what specific areas of the brain need to be targeted and with what frequency of ultrasound waves to induce lucid dreams. The company expects to get this data in spring 2024 and to begin shipping devices in spring 2025.
Halos will cost around $1,500 to $2,000 each, Wollberg estimated. Consumers are able to reserve a product ahead of time with a refundable $100 down payment. Wollberg wouldn’t disclose how many people have signed up but said in the first few weeks after the company opened its reservation system, it generated “several hundred thousand dollars in booking revenue,” suggesting the wait list is in the thousands.
Excellent, thank you!
I HATE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES! I HATE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES!
we actually live in hell
Death to America
I’m jealous this headline isn’t one of my own