In “Black Mirror,” a Netflix series about a futuristic world moved by high-tech, scientists have found a way to peer inside human minds — to surveil their thoughts to separate truth from lies.
Well move over, TV watchers.
This scenario is now a case of fiction finding reality. If some scientists have their way, it won’t be long before artificial intelligence algorithms are able to “read” a person’s mind and determine what’s being thought.
Think it’s all science fiction and fantasy?
In January, Venture Beat blared this headline: “Black Mirror’s mind-reading tech could be here sooner than you think.”
The headline came after four Japanese researchers — Guohua Shen, Tomoyasu Horikawa, Kei Majima and Yukiyasu Kamitani — released on the scientific peer platform, BioRxiv, a report on how they used artificial intelligence to decode test subjects’ thoughts.
They called their process “deep image reconstruction,” which is really quite different from most of the previous science-based, mind-reading approaches that have used MRI scans to record brain activity and piece together the pixels in image with various, albeit tepid, results.
As CNBC put it: “Machine learning has previously been used to study brain scans … and generate visualizations of what a person is thinking when referring to simple, binary images like black and white letters or simple geographic shapes.”
But these Japanese researchers have gone beyond. They’ve tapped into AI to decode images with colors and shapes and objects — complexities of the imagination.
It’s not as if scientists have yet developed some sort of magic elixir to precisely read thoughts.
But the goal line is clear. And the game’s going strong.
Mary Lou Jepsen, a former Google and Facebook official who left to start her own company, has vowed to develop a technology hat that will make telepathy possible, all within the next few years.
Researchers tied to Harvard University have been busy for years trying to develop technology that transmits information from one person’s brain to another, over distances of thousands of miles. Just recently, they reported success with one test that telepathically linked individuals located in India and France.
Entrepreneur and Kernel CEO Bryan Johnson, meanwhile, has been pushing his team of neuroscientists and engineers to develop a computer chip with downloadable abilities that can be implanted into a person’s brain.
The social benefits that A.I. mindreading technology could bring are certainly enticing.
For instance, how about a brain chip that can read a comatose patient’s thoughts and imagery, allowing doctors and medical professionals to prescribe treatment accordingly? Or, a telepathic hat that can translate over long distances and locate for police, say, a missing or abducted child? Or, an A.I.-powered implant in an Alzheimer’s patient’s mind that transmits the user’s surroundings?
But the potential for misuse and abuse is devastatingly alarming.
In this day and age of growing surveillance and ever-increasing data collection, the imaginations of one’s own mind may very well be the final frontier for individual privacies.
Take that away, and what’s left?
A science fiction nightmare where thoughts become as public as speech, where private imaginations are a thing of the past and where creepy technology intrudes on even the most sacred of worlds.
