, Columnist
AI Can Read Our Minds as Well as Steal Our Jobs
The ability to use technology to decode thoughts opens up exciting and scary prospects.
Can you read me?
Photographer: MIGUEL MEDINA/AFPThis article is for subscribers only.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,” John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost. But what if the contents of our minds became available to others to peer into? Would that be heavenly, or hellish?
A team led by computational neuroscientist Alexander Huth has used noninvasive functional magnetic resonance imaging to decode thoughts. By tracking brain activity through the flow of oxygenated blood, they produced a model for predicting patterns associated with different word sequences — with spectacular results that Huth himself described as “kind of terrifying,” writes Faye Flam.