The Article

Okay, I'm just going to jump right in because this seems too "sci-fi" to be legit. Apparently, some Japanese scientists created AI that could read a participant’s brainwaves and display an image based on what those participants were looking at. If one of the participants were looking at a letter, for example, the AI could create a blurred, and slightly distorted representation of that same letter. That's mind reading, right?

The scientists performed a 10-week study, where various images were shown to participants whose brain activity was being recorded. By using the data they gathered, they were able to train the AI to determine the image that was displayed to the participants based on the images they were looking at. In a sense, they weren't reading these participant's minds, the AI had simply been given enough information to know what a participant's brainwaves looked like when the participants were viewing particular images.

By knowing what the brainwaves looked like for particular images, the AI could recreate the image if they saw those particular brainwaves.

Here is how accurate the AI were:

As you can see, there is still much improvement to be made, but it is still crazy to see how accurate these are. And, given enough time, and resources, these AI could learn the brain activity attributed to every image and have a pretty good idea of what you're thinking.

Crazy Applications

After reading this article, I was thinking about the crazy things these AI could be used for:

1. Interrogation would became a fairly easy process once this was perfected. Imagine, government agents could sit criminals down, hook them up to this AI, ask the criminals trigger questions to get them to think of past events, and then record the images the AI were providing.
2. Dreams: So, I can't remember my dreams to save my life. What if you could hook yourself up to this AI while you were sleeping, and then play back all the images that were recorded that night? You could watch a movie of your dreams when you work up!
3. In time, if scientists could figure out a way to apply this technology over a distance, they could gain intel on just about anything you can think of.

I thought this was super cool, and I hope some of you all think the same! Let me know if you have any crazy ideas or questions.