Lucid dream startup says engineers can write code in their sleep. Work may never be the same
https://fortune.com/2023/11/30/lucid-dream-startup-prophetic-headset-prepare-meetings-while-sleeping/Open linkView original on lemmy.worldSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.worldhttps://fortune.com/2023/11/30/lucid-dream-startup-prophetic-headset-prepare-meetings-while-sleeping/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
107 replies
this is gonna go nowhere per usual, but still, the very idea of working in your dreams is fucking horrifying. black mirror type shit.
This concept would make a good episode.
Rick and Morty already did it.
Go get HYPNOSPACE OUTLAW on Steam now EVERYONE GO DO IT
ZANE RULEZ
Followed quickly by the quote "control is what we want"...sure, they mean for you over your dreams, right?
Imagine having the ability to lucid dream and your first thought is, great, more time with Excel!
“Why not abolish days, and just work an endless stream of hours?” —Elon Musk, probably
Hypnospace Outlaw has a similar premise.
just a clickbaity headline. Obviously any time spent doing work will count as work hours, and employers don't need futuristic tech to push for more of those. So nothing is changing in that regard.
You put a lot more trust in our corporate lords and masters than I do.
there's no trust in my statement. The incentives to increase work hours already exist, and even if it's not snake oil, this tech won't change that. A work hour is a work hour regardless if the worker is sitting down or in a lucid dream.
In the US not long ago, families were thriving on a single income. And then some families sent two parents to work and saw large relative benefits. As more families did this, the relative benefit lowered. Employers found they could pay people less and the family would make up the gap with two incomes. Today, many families struggle with two incomes.
This is a technology that is again, a potential way to double your income if you can work while you sleep and awake. The people who use it will see a relative benefit. Until it becomes necessary for everyone to work while sleeping.
So if it holds true that they just count as work hours, most people will eventually be required to double their workload to afford their necessities.
You ever have a crazy intense epic dream and come up with this awesome new idea that you think will change the world, and after a minute or two of being awake and coming to your senses, you realize how utterly idiotic you sound? There's going to be a lot of that.
When I was twelve, I woke up convinced that the color yellow was called yellow, because humans had figured out that word was intrinsically linked to that color.
I was devastated my "epiphany" stopped making sense after I fully woke up.
Not too far off from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia
To be fair, that's a bloody rad dream! Love the concept lol
Have you ever had a dream that you, you had, your, you could, you’ll do, you wants, you could do so, you’ll do, you could, you want, you want him to do you so much you could do anything?
Probably. I have been able to lucid dream since I was a kid, if we're talking about knowing you are dreaming and controlling aspects of the dream.
It's still just your own brain, and if you're controlling it you're actually being less outside-the-box creative than in the dreams where you're not.
If you're so in control you're able to force it to do work tasks then what's going to be generated will probably be lower quality than waking tasks, not higher.
I wrote a hit song with the Rolling Stones and was able to sing the whole thing when I woke up. It was gone by lunch time.
This would actually be insane for music creation. The few times I had dreams where I was playing an instrument, it was pure fire
And no tooling will certainly improve the coding abilities. Especially since I remember all the code, including the changes others made in the time since I last looked at it.
That happens with whip its too
AI hallucinations weren't enough, we need real natural bed-to-table hallucinations
I sometimes lucid dream, something tips me off that it's not real, and then I can take some control. Mostly I like flying, but sometimes I go full crimefighting superhero.
Realizing you are in a dream world and deciding to work, is like winning a billion dollars and deciding to spend it all on a nice car somehow. What a boring waste.
If you think LLMs hallucinate too much, wait till you check out code literally written during hallucinations.
I posted this in another comment, but during uni I did in fact write code in lucid dreams. A friend can vouch for a specific time when I woke up from sleep during an all nighter, to fix a very specific bug (which I just remembered, we didn't even know it existed), then went back to sleep. On another occasion, I designed a recursive path-finding algorithm to replace djikstra's algorithm, all in my sleep.
It definitely can be done (though I doubt it could be done consistently and without actually imagining shit up), but it really shouldn't be done, I really doubt I was really resting while doing that.
I was sitting here thinking how useful a loop to count bananas before running out of time and losing my shoes and or pants before realizing I'm in a large college auditorium and everyone is laughing at me would be!
Cash-drawer?
Till is also used for short hand of until
Software engineer says: “Fuck off and let me have a life.”
Yeah, seriously.
This just sounds like a way to squeeze more work out of a person.
Work/life balance? What's that...
Well if i could work well sleeping and then live my life while awake that'd be pretty sweet.
Doubt that's what a lot of company owners would want but that is maybe the only plus side of this.
Third comment in this post about this from me, but I've done university work while lucid dreaming, solved bugs we didn't even know existed, stuff like that. I don't think you rest as much while lucid dreaming, I'm pretty sure I built up fatigue at many points in my life just due to how much lucid dreaming I was doing. I now avoid lucid dreaming, and have started losing the ability to do it frequently (which frankly is a blessing). I feel more well rested now than I did when I lucid dreamt a lot. No way this idea doesn't just leave you completely tired after a while.
I have a lot of lucid dreams, and they're often in a specific city, and sometimes I even go to work in these dreams. I haven't lived in a city and worked in an office in over 10 years, so it's some kind of reverse escapism. I can always leave, and weird stuff happens anyway. I wouldn't trust any of my work output there.
But to let a company try to take over your dreams and never let you escape, you need to stand up and fight that shit. Put them in a never-ending nightmare where nobody gives them money.
I've had weird lucid dreams.
The subconscious has weird fucking ways of communicating.
This concept actually makes me want to have AI take my job
If I’m going to be working in my dreams, I better get paid for it.
This is stupid for a wide variety of reasons, but one of the more interesting ones is that text is notoriously inconsistent in dreams.
A very common "reality check" to see if you're dreaming is to look at a clock or text, look away, and look back. The time/text will nearly always change.
So explain to me how they expect COMPUTER CODE to work?
Well, I guess they'll have to patch that bug first.
I became obsessed with lucid dreaming after seeing the Waking Life movie, around when I started high school, and yeah that's one of the things I used to induce them. Kept a dream journal and had a digital watch that I would always look at, light switches etc. I did have lucid dreams but never got really good at it and eventually just neglected the practice... about when I started having real life sex LOL
Ha funny how that works.
I never got into dream journaling but frequent reality checks and practicing meditation was pretty effective for me. 100% of the time when I wake up from a lucid dream I get bad sleep paralysis where I feel like I'm suffocating, so I kinda fell out of the habit.
i regularly have lucid dreams but i'm only able to turn it into a nightmare by spawning a demon or falling from a roof. and i get a sleep paralysis every single time. this happens about three times almost every night. it's getting pretty lame by now.
Well I never had that... that's disturbing. I'd probably have about a lucid dream per week and it's weird how it lost it's novelty. Same thing happened with DMT for me where I more or less have the same trip every time.
If this is the same startup I read about a while ago... Well the technology doesn't actually exist. There's a vague suggestion that maybe lucid dreams could be induced through techniques that are not properly understood yet, and that's about it.
Well FWIW there are somewhat reproducible techniques, I've used them, but I couldn't tell you how I've used them if my life depended on it (honestly, brain chemical imbalances or fatigue might be a prerequisite). I actually got tired of lucid dreaming and started avoiding certain positions in bed, and started shifting around if I felt myself getting close to jumping into a lucid dream during hypnagogia.
I also worked on university assignments during lucid dreams, solved countless bugs in my code while asleep, a friend can even attest to it since one time I instantly woke up to solve a specific bug and then went back to sleep, with him right next to me (all nighters woo hoo).
It can be done. It really shouldn't be done. The reason why I grew tired of lucid dreaming is because I didn't feel like I was actually resting at all. That disconnect and peace that falling asleep gives you, it's not there for me while lucid dreaming (at least not if I jumped in through hypnagogia).
Yeah, unfortunately my weak brain instantly wakes up as soon as I realize I'm in a dream, the rare times it happens
Focus on something up close in your dream, like the texture of a wall or table, it'll pull you back into the dream. Works for me!
The other suggestion is to spin around, but I did that to stay in a dream once and noclipped through the floor. Which woke me up.
I was often sent flying with no way to come back down. Went up fast. Not great for anxiety. The "focusing on stuff" trick does work, though if I overdid it I also woke up because I tried engaging my senses too much.
Where can I invest?
DM me hun x
the other guy had it almost right, you're looking for DMT
With enough venture capital, anything is possible! Cheques in my name, please.
I already work in my dreams. I’m always having dreams about going back to jobs from my past. God owes me money or something.
You’re a sick person
Lucid dreaming is such a cool concept. The ability to mentally experience things in a truly boundless environment, untethered by laws of physics or standards of reality.
Why the fuck would you want to waste that experience on work?
Won't anyone please think of the shareholders?!
If im dreaming and thinking of shareholders . . . my lawyer has advised me to not finish this train of thought.
I feel also the concept of "work" is viewed from employer/employee perspective, but I'd argue it should be viewed more from "useful” development one. Like reading a fiction book vs a non-fiction.
Doubt
Don't worry, the whole thing is pure BS
So are a lot of worker antagonistic business trends.
Doesn't stop some CEO from trying to implement it.
This is really a scam. A sleeping engineer cannot code in his dreams. This is not how the human body works. This guy is trying to scam ignorant venture capitals.
Similar to theranos. They exploit deep ignorance on biology of people who spent their life doing money
Hypothetical situation, if there was a way to induce lucid dreaming and record the dreams as well? Coding doesn't really lend itself to this but advertising, filmography or architecture would benefit at least at the early concept stage.
I agree It's all very sci-fi but if they can make a product that works like they say (sending ultrasounds to target specific parts of the brain to induce lucid dreaming), it has amazing entertainment value right out of the box regardless of its work use.
Ever tried to read something in your dreams? Coding is basically 90% reading and 10% writing. Then you have to insure that shit compiles and runs.
I can't speak for you, but I don't think my brain has a valid edition of the Java Development Kit.
It's like asking a computer in sleep mode to run a screen saver and pretending close-to-random loosely-guided images are result of a rational creative process. Sleeping brain work differently, for a reason. At that point they should put money on AI to improve awake productivity. Programming during lucid dreams is a scam
Regarding entertainment, there is a reason the humans needs to sleep. Disrupting natural patterns creates only issues
Just think: People having to get help because the job they quit three years ago keeps showing up in their dreams. What's worse is that they keep doing it, in control but unaware of the fact that they aren't getting paid, threatened by their in-dream former boss with being fired if the quota wasn't met.
Staying awake yet unemployed becomes one of their only escapes. They turn to stimulants to stay away from 'work' just a bit longer, just a little more peace.
But they then 'crash', falling asleep for almost a day, and starting a shift that feels like an eternity, Inception style.
I don't know the answer to this, but I thought lucid dreaming still counted as getting rest as far as your brain was concerned. I lucid dream about once a month, and I never felt tired after it or like I was missing sleep.
@dogslayeggs no, the brain needs to cycle through four phases. REM only takes up a portion of your sleep. Even if it felt like you were dreaming all night, you likely weren't.
I think his point is that the REM portion still does its job regardless of if you are lucid or not during the phase.
@Jaded I think you're right, that does make sense.
I don't entertain media with clickbait titles, and you shouldn't either.
Well this is fucking dystopian.
I spend enough time at work during the day, I'm not letting some manager take my sleep from me too. Fuck that.
For a job this would be horrifying. But for my hobbies? This would be cool as all heck.
Futurama - S01E06 - Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Futurama - S01E06 - Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Can we call this timeline a dystopia yet?
No because this kind of shit will never be a thing.
Get your beefbrain shield pro quick, we're headed into hypnospace
I'm probably not a lucid dreamer, but at times when I write code all day long I may also dream about it at night. Sometimes, I would wake up in the middle of the night and write an "amazing solution" down so I can implement it the next day. Not surprisingly, most of the "amazing solutions" are total nonsense.
Edit: If this happens to you, it's probably a sign that you code way too much. I know it might be difficult, but try to relax more please.
I've had it for doing too much of coding, math (can't speak for meth), and playing online fps. But yes, I don't know if these experiences count as lucid dreams.
Same... dreaming about calculating limits and integrals is pretty exhausting. Playing minecraft in your dreams is more fun :D
Sounds like the sleeping equivalent of epiphanies while on drugs.
To be honest, some of the solutions were quite good. But I still don't recommend it. Toilet debugging is better :D
I dunno, that's pretty subjective really. I've seen people who do hard stuff like heroin and meth just straight up quit after using shrooms once, having had an epiphany that they need to live cleaner. Then I've seen a young guy stay awake for days talking about how he found the secret to never dying, because he realized sleep is a conspiracy... So maybe you're right, I dunno lol.
You have no idea the shit that's in my dreams. You wanna see me code like that?
Buckle up, chuckle-nuts.
No. Fuck no.
Great The Onion stuff. Hard to make this shit up.
Your waking life for minimum wage and your dreams for free.
This would lead to awful code, but it's 100% bullshit.
Imagine if you could study in your sleep... Or "watch" a book and be acually there... Hmm that wouldn't really work for innner dialogue of other characters...
Are you really sleeping then? I thought the point of sleeping was to wash away the buildup of plaque (amyloid?) in your brain. IINM the inability to get rid of it is one of the reasons for Alzheimers and dementia.
I would really like to know what they measure and how it compares between users and non-users of this ultrasonic tech. Disrupting brain functionality to be quasi awake might not be the smartest thing to do.
hopping the paywall
The technique I've used to trigger lucid dreaming is noticing when "static" text changes or is otherwise nonsense... so I have my doubts. And zero desire to learn more because I'm full up on dystopias right now.
Huh, I don't think I've ever seen writing in a dream.
One of the best indicators that you are in a dream is if you can't read something that you are trying to read. For whatever reason, reading is impossible while dreaming and most people don't even have writing in their dreams to read. I do have writing in my dreams, but only rarely and am not able to read it. I've definitely used it to trigger lucid dreaming. I also use stuff like, "wait, how am I breathing under water?"
I usually didn't either, but the (tedious) technique I used led to a lot more text in my dreams. I think because my subconscious was looking for them.
You have to spend a few weeks making this a habit: Every time you see a sign read it, look away, look back, and read it again. Once you've done that awake long enough it'll become a proper habit and it will carry through in to dreams. And in a dream when you look back the sign will be different - which will make you realize you're in a dream.
That's a common method people use to lucid dream. One thing I've read about is people making it a consistent habit to check their watch regularly while awake, so they eventually do it while asleep. Apparently clocks always look fucked up in dreams, so that's when they're able to figure out they're dreaming I guess?
But yeah, something about not being able to read text or a clock in a dream. Gets all weird.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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.
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.
The original article contains 771 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Yes and then you wake up more tired than when you went to sleep (talking of my experience with lucid dreaming).
Getting closer and closer to making you part of the Matrix. Your productivity is not allowed to stop.
Hey guys do you wanna fly on the plane I dreamt into reality?
doubt
Someone somewhere is already planning how they will get people to work around the clock this way, and someone else somewhere is probably desperate enough to feed themselves or their family that they'll take it when offered.
It looks like interest rates aren't high enough.
No thank you.
Upcoming app ideas from a world of restless engineers:
yes, complaining about everything gives upvotes even when it's an obvious clickbait, but:
what people are afraid of: extended work hours
what's more likely to happen and I'm excited for: typing effortlessly at the speed of thought, writing code while working out, having more creative ideas while resting