Technology able to read our thoughts is rapidly progressing. Elon Musk’s Neuralink is attempting to develop chips implanted directly into the brain, acting like interfaces between man and machine. The company recently received permission to start testing on humans.
Numerous other companies are working on comparable and slightly different approaches to mind-reading technologies. With several owned or backed by the world’s biggest tech companies and venture capital extremely interested in the space and happy to fund promising startups.
Advances in AI are rapidly bringing into focus an age where technology will be able to accurately capture and interpret our brain activity. In other words, read our minds.
There is a huge range of hugely positive implications for this kind of mind reading technology. There are also some very obvious fears over how, once the cat is out of the bag, it could be used by bad actors or ruthlessly exploited by tech companies for financial gain.
In most cases, think of nuclear technology and the internet, the good and bad are two sides of the same coin. We can’t leverage the positive use cases of groundbreaking new technologies without opening the door to potentially negative, unethical or dangerous applications.
Mind-reading tech will almost certainly be similar. This is an exploration of the miracles that will benefit millions it is set to realise in coming years. And why many are also hugely concerned about the potential for catastrophic consequences.
New mind-reading tech breakthroughs on the cusp of improving millions of lives
The story of Sarah de Lagarde, a mother of two young daughters from Camden, is both inspiring and will offer hope to millions. It is, however, the outcome of a tragic accident. One that would, until very recently, have seen her spend the rest of her life coping with a severe disability after she lost an arm and a leg when run over by a tube train at London’s High Barnet station – twice.
Ms de Lagarde fell under a train carriage after slipping off a wet platform. Her right arm and leg were crushed beyond hope of repair when the train, oblivious to her presence, pulled out of the station. When another train pulled into the station ten minutes later, her cries for help had still not been heard and she received further injuries.
Eventually airlifted to hospital, her life was saved but her crushed limbs couldn’t be.
That was last September. Things have taken a remarkable turn for the better since thanks to recent leaps forward in AI and robotics. She’s now on the verge of becoming the first woman in the world to be fitted with a bionic AI-powered prosthetic arm. It will be able to pick up and interpret the signals from her brain that would have previously instructed her muscles how she wanted to move her elbow, wrist and fingers.
The AI in the prosthetic arm’s software also better learns better over time which movements the wearer wishes to make, helping it to respond more quickly and dexterously.
In Ms de Lagarde’s words:
“It will be like moving the arm with my brain. The socket will attach to my upper arm and it will have sensors which detect my muscle twitches and the software will convert those impulses into arm movements.
“I have seen videos where the hand is able to hold an egg with three fingers or pick up a coin from a table.”
The arm Ms de Lagarde is being fitted with has been developed by Leeds-based
The bionic hand was created by Covvi, a specialist next-generation prosthetics company based in Leeds, while the other parts for the prosthetic have been developed abroad.
Covvi is far from the only company developing mind-controlled prosthetics. And the happy reality is that this category of technology will offer amputees far greater prosthetics mobility than has been possible until now. And the technology will only improve. It’s very possible that in the not-too-distant future, many kinds of prosthetics will offer the same kind of dexterity as organic limbs. Potentially even better.
This kind of technology is unfortunately still extremely expensive, costing around £300,000 which was able to be fundraised in Ms de Lagarde’s case. But it is also still in the very early stages of commercialisation. While such high-tech prosthetics are never likely to be cheap, they will become increasingly affordable as more are made and the technology becomes commoditised.
Scientists and software developers at Musk’s Neurolink also see the mind control of next-generation prosthetics and other bionic body parts as one of the most promising applications of the tech they are developing. Curing paralysis, blindness and even treating mental conditions like depression are other targets.
However, Musk’s ambitions go further. He sees the future of humanity as one in which we are all essentially cyborgs. Neuralink’s goal is to create a “general population device” that will act as a bridge between the human brain and supercomputers, helping us keep up with artificial intelligence.
He has also suggested that the device could eventually extract and store thoughts, as “a backup drive for your non-physical being, your digital soul.”
Why are so many scared by the implications of tech that can read our minds?
Most of the mind reading technology currently being developed is focused on the ability to capture and interpret the electrical signals our brains send to our bodies. These signals, usually operating at various depths of our subconscious, regulate our vital functions or instruct our bodies to execute a particular action, like sitting down on a chair.
But what about conscious thought in the form of emotions felt or even thoughts that play out in a language? What if machines could verbalise in English, or any other language, the thousands of thoughts, more and less formed, that flit through our minds daily?
That’s already happening too and with some success. A study recently published in the Nature journal describes the findings of research carried out by scientists from the University of Texas at Austin. They have developed a technique able to translate brain activity like unspoken thoughts into actual speech.
Invasive brain implants have already achieved the feat to some extent. But the latest techniques are based on non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCI) that combine fMRI scans, which measure blood flow to different areas of the brain, and large AI language models like ChatGPT.
The research involved using AI to track the blood flow in brains shown by scans when they hear a particular word or phrase. LLMs now mean the vast numbers of potential combinations between words and phrases can now be narrowed down and converted into likely sequences.
The result is a thought decoder that isn’t quite able to exactly transcribe thoughts but does a very impressive job of getting the gist of unspoken words and phrases passing through the brain.
Subjects were asked to come up with a story in their minds the tech would try to interpret then subsequently asked to recite it out loud to see how accurately the tech had interpreted the thought version. Two examples are:
“Look for a message from my wife saying that she had changed her mind and that she was coming back.”
Translated by the decoder as:
“To see her for some reason I thought she would come to me and say she misses me.”
And
“Coming down a hill at me on a skateboard and he was going really fast and he stopped just in time.”
Translated by the decoder as:
“He couldn’t get to me fast enough he drove straight up into my lane and tried to ram me.”
While the translations are far from perfect they are certainly close enough to be both highly impressive and indicate how accurate what is still very early stage technology is likely to get.
This kind of technology would clearly be potentially life changing for some individuals, such as anyone suffering from locked-in syndrome, other forms of extreme paralysis and more severe speech problems.
A far darker theoretical scenario would be bad actors using it on hostages with sensitive information or intellectual property that would be dangerous in the wrong hands.
Our thoughts are the only thing that is truly private and the seat of our inner personalities and identity. Technology that could, in theory, wrest that final frontier from us is terrifying.
While that is still some way away, it is no longer not visible on the horizon. There will of course be regulation and strict laws. But once the technological genie is out of the bottle, we’ve seen many times already that it’s very hard to put it back in.
Over the next decade or two it is likely we’ll see a lot of hugely positive results to come from mind-reading technology. But there will be a nagging, underlying worry about the potential negative outcomes too. There should be.