This story about AI decoding brain signals was the topic of an interview I tuned into on the radio while driving between some errands. The person the host was interviewing was a social scientist of some sort but I had missed the introduction. The whole conversation was rather alarmist and insinuated that the day is not very far when random entities can eavesdrop on our brain signals, intercept them and direct them in ways that served their needs. A bonanza for advertisers and anyone who wanted us to act in a specific way to further their business goals. They went so far as to speculate that it would be possible to get a murder conviction without laying a hand on the suspect or ever interrogating them. The brain signals would be tapped to get the confession - nice and easy.
.. the researchers addressed questions about potential misuse of the technology. The paper describes how decoding worked only with cooperative participants who had participated willingly in training the decoder. Results for individuals on whom the decoder had not been trained were unintelligible, and if participants on whom the decoder had been trained later put up resistance — for example, by thinking other thoughts — results were similarly unusable.
My first thought when I heard that interview in the car was if this technology gets close becoming viable and a threat to our last bastion in privacy, it will have people seeking out ways to control their brain and their thoughts. Maybe average people will gain skills to go into meditative trance at will and much more. The kind of mastery very few have today will become much more common as our survival will depend on it. That can only be a good thing if we collectively calm our minds and direct our thoughts to better things if only to evade AI-enabled eavesdropping.
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