Can AI Machine Read Your Mind in the Future?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to grow and AI will soon be able to read our thoughts. We are a little closer to being able to spread our thoughts on a screen with AI.
Japanese researchers are inventing a mind-reading AI
Japanese scientists have created an AI capable of reading a person’s brainwaves and displaying an image based on what they are looking at. If a person stares at an image of the letter “A”, the AI will manage to create an image that looks like a fuzzy version of this letter by reading the mind of the person.
The scientists published their article “Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity” in which they state:
“Here, we present a new approach, called deep image reconstruction, to visualize the perceptual content of human brain activity.”
How does machine read your mind?
Over a period of 10 weeks, scientists showed images to human subjects and recorded their brain waves. Sometimes subjects’ brains were monitored in real time as they watched the images, at other times they were asked to “remember” the images. The researchers used brain scans to form a deep learning network to “decode” the data and visualize what the person was thinking.
When these machines learn to “read our minds”, they do it in exactly the same way as human psychics: by guessing. If you think about the letter “A”, the computer does not really know what you think; it just knows what brain waves look like when you think about it.
It visualizes your thoughts by guessing what we want to see based on the data of our brain – unlike the “psychic” humans whose assumptions are based, we will simply say: less scientific data.
AI is able to do a lot of riddling – so far, the biggest trick in the field has been to give the AI the opportunity to ask and answer their own questions at breathtaking speed.
The machine takes all the information it has – the brainwaves in this case – and transforms them into an image. It does it again and again until (without seeing the same image as the human, obviously) it can somewhat recreate this image.
Communication-free understanding
For now, this is obviously not perfect – but it is almost certain to be a case of use for the field of deep learning that sees extensive development.
One day, technology like this can turn our minds into projectors or allow us to share streaming images of our current dreams between us. It’s hard to imagine the ramifications of a technology that could make our brain the penultimate peripheral of the computer’s input.
This could enable a communication-free understanding: the ability for humans to gain knowledge from machines or other humans instantly.
It could also destroy the idea of privacy, ruin poker forever, and start the third world war, but it’s a different article.
