Can I Read Your Mind

covered it on that show as well. But since we've now got people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg behind the efforts of creating BC eyes, I figured to be a good time to revisit the topic, talk about what it is, how far along or not far along we are with the technology and the ethical can iterations we need to keep in mind when we're developing tech like this. So a brain computer interface is exactly what it sounds like.

It's a methodology to allow a user to control or interact with a computer directly through brain activity through thought. It marries the complicated subjects of neuroscience and computer science and a lot of media outlets sort of gloss over

how truly complicated this is. We have a tendency to either think of our brains as being kind of like computers, or of computers as being kind of like brains, but really they're quite different, and creating an interface that can translate the operations of one so that it makes sense to the other is harder than it sounds. The goal of a brain computer interface is to strip away as much of the barrier between our intent and the computer's actions as possible, is to get beyond the limitations of

other types of interfaces. So let's talk about those other interfaces for a second to kind of have a comparison here. So, in the very early days of computers, like the earliest electro mechanical computers, the interface was incredibly complicated. It consisted of switches and plugs, so you'd have to physically make changes to the machine to run a different calculation. You

programmed it by physically changing the connections. Operating a computer required learning a pretty intricate system, so it was a very high barrier to using computers. But on the other hand, there were hardly any computers to use, so it wasn't like people were stumped all the time. It wasn't like you were in the I. T Department looking at a manual that was five thousand pages long. There are only

a few computers in the world at all. Now, gradually this gave way to other interface systems, and it first they were still incredibly complicated, at least by today's standards. The punch cards of yesterday are a really good example. You could feed a series of punch cards which represented

a program, to a computer. The computer would read the punch cards, make whatever calculations were indicated by those punch cards, and then it might in turn spit out a different set of punch cards, or it might light up some indicator lights. Maybe if you were lucky, you had a printer and it would print out a result. But boy, it was still a pretty tough barrier of entry as far as computer use was concerned. It wasn't something the average person could tackle on his or her own. Now.

A huge breakthrough was the incorporation of computer displays and keyboards, and there were other advances in computers at the time that also made a huge difference, like the development of operating systems and high level programming languages. And we obviously still use keyboards and displace today. So these were really sticky types of interfaces so to speak. Actually that could be literal if you tend to drink sugary sodas while

you're computing, but I'm mostly talking about the metaphorical here. Anyway. The computer mouse would then expand how we would interact with computers, as would the graphic user interface or gooey. This would allow us to have new ways to interact with our machines, and then we would see further advancements

like voice recognition systems and touch screen interfaces. It was pretty typical that each advance in technology, if it was implemented well, would make interactions with computers easier and more natural. So when you see a kid look at a screen and the kid has never really played with keyboard, mouse or even touch screens, yet you might see them reach out and try to touch things on the screen, Well, that tells you, oh, a touch screen might work better

for certain things. Maybe not everything, but certain things. And then you start to implement that kind of interface in low and behold, you see I've created a new way to interact with this machine. Well, brain computer interfaces would remove even those small gaps between our intent and executing

a command on a computer. Ideally, you would have a non invasive technology, meaning you wouldn't have to have any kind of surgery or anything in order to actually use this stuff, and that technology would be able to interpret your thoughts as commands, and then the computer would carry those out, and the computer could potentially send information back to you through those same channels that you could interpret

in some meaningful way. And there are a lot of potential uses for this kind of technology, and many of those uses are truly noble in their mission. For example, and I'll talk a lot about this in this episode, it could allow people who have severe mobility issues and outlet for interacting with the world around on them that

they might not otherwise have. With the proper interface, someone who is paralyzed and may not be able to move or even speak could use the interface to activate commands on a computer in order to communicate with others or carry out tasks with the help of robotics and automated systems. We've actually seen applications of brain computer interfaces do this kind of thing already to a limited degree, and frankly,

it's amazing and inspiring. I I highly recommend you seek out stories and videos about these types of projects because they are phenomenal. But there are use cases beyond helping people gain more autonomy, and some of them are a bit well, let's say they're a bit questionable. So let's walk down the history of brain computer interfaces and then we will revisit these specific examples, as well as what is currently going on with Elon Musk and Facebook getting

into the game. Well before such a thing could even be theorized as a brain computer interface, we first had to understand more about how the brain itself works. And this is a non trivial thing. The brain was largely an organ of mystery for a very long time. In the late nineteenth century, physicians and scientists were first starting to learn that there is electrical activity in the brains

of mammals. We started to get an understanding that our nervous system is an electrochemical system, that electricity and chemicals play a very important part in sending messages through this system in a very sophisticated way. Now, this was the same time that physicists were getting a better understanding about energy, and so there was a curiosity about energy in the brain. The brain does stuff, It must get energy, it must

use energy. What is that mechanism? What the physicists of the time didn't yet understand was that the brain was this electro chemical machine. They didn't have a complete picture yet. So for a few decades, research mostly with animals like dogs, rabbits, and monkeys, showed that brains generated electrical activity in some fashion, and by the early twentieth century we had a rudimentary

understanding of brain waves. Then Hans Burger, a German psychiatrist and physicist, recorded the first human E E G. In the mid nineteen twenties. Now, Burger was interested in investigating psychical energy in the brain. He was convinced that there is some energy beyond what is needed to do quote unquote work that would be thinking and operating the human body.

He never did uncover any sort of psychical energy and his research, but his invention of the electro and cephalogram would set the stage for neuroscience in the twentieth century. And I'll have to do a full episode about Burger in the future because he was a really interesting person. His life story is full of drama. Now, over the next several decades after Burger's invention of the e G, or at least the the refining of the e G, since there were sort of precursors to the E e

G before Burger got involved anyway. Over the following years, scientists and doctors refined their understanding of electrical activity in the brain, and they observed phenomena like R E M sleep. They identified different types of brain waves. Neuroscientists also got a deeper understanding about what the different parts of the brain do and are responsible for, and that gets really

super complicated. Their sections of the brain that are dedicated to very specific tasks and major parts of the brain include stuff like the frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, the temporal lobe, the occipital lobe, cerebellum, and more. And I am no neuroscientist, and to go into deep detail on all of these parts would necessitate at least a couple of episodes plus an expert on the subject matter. So I'm just gonna leave the general discussion of the brain

with an acknowledgement that they are really complicated. Now, there's still a ton that we don't know about the brain, and probably there's stuff we don't know that we don't know but we've made a lot of progress, which has led to some enterprising researchers, scientists, and technologists to look into ways to create an interface between the machine in

our heads and the computers around us. In the nineteen sixties, a neurophysicist named William gray Walter demonstrated that the electrical signals and brains could do useful work outside of our noggins. And it was a fairly primitive demonstration, but an effective one. He had subjects who had electrode implants for e g s. By the way, e g s can either involve having surgical implants of electrodes or electrodes that are part of you know, the sticky pads that stick against the scalp.

They have to be positioned in very precise places. But you can have invasive or non invasive e g s. What William gray Walter was working with were the invasive types. So he had these people who are wired up e g s and they were navigating through a slide show with an old slide show projector, and they were using a remote control to advance to the next slide. So when they were done looking at a slide, or if they were told to go to the next slide. They would push a button and it would go to the

next slide. But what Walter didn't tell these people who had their e g s hooked up to the system was that the remote control was a nert it. It didn't work at all. It was just a dummy remote. Rather, when the subject's brain sent the command I'm going to use the remote now, the electrodes would pick up that brain activity and it would send those signals onto an amplifier, which would boost the signal enough to send a command

to go to the next slide to the projector. It's a very simple one, just the same sort of electrical impulse that the projector would get if you push the button now. The subjects reportedly were startled by this experience because frequently they would make the decision that they were going to go to the next slide, and they would be in the process of pushing the button when the slide would change in advance before they had pushed the button. They said it started to feel like the slide projector

had anticipated their action. It had guessed that they were ready to move on even though they had not yet pushed the button. And in a way, that's exactly what it had done, or rather it was able to act faster than the subject was, and it raised some really interesting questions about consciousness because the implication was that we can arrive at a decision to do something before we

are actually aware of the decision we have made. And so in theory, if you have a brain computer interface, you might get the sensation that you're working with a machine that's actually anticipating what you want to do before you are aware that you wanted to do it, which is both kind of creepy and amazing. Now, in reality, it's because you wanted to do that thing, but your awareness of your desire hasn't caught up yet. It's brains

are funny things. It's also possible that because of those implanted electrodes, which can detect activity and relatively small regions of the brain, allowed for more precision when looking for signals that would indicate I'm going to push the button, rather than signals that would indicate something like blink now or eat soon or whatever. So, in other words, it's very important to target the neurons that are going to

be responsible for whatever activity you're looking for. You can't just have, you know, a general brain reading device that's looking for any electrical activity in the brain. There's always electrical activity in the brain, so you have to be looking for precise activity, or else you would have a

system that's constantly activating under no particular impulse. Jacques J. Vidal coined the phrase brain computer interface in nineteen The DOLL presented a plan towards establishing the technology for such an interface at the University of California at Los Angeles. And it should come as no surprise that one of the big organizations that has funded a lot of research into brain computer interfaces is DARPA, or the Defense Advanced

Research Projects Agency in the United States. This is the part of the Department of Defense that oversees money that can be granted to projects that relate back to national security and defense strategies for the United States. Sometimes these projects have an obvious connection to national defense, such as

research into new types of weaponry. Other times the connection might not be quite as clear, such as the DARPA Grand challenges that help bootstrap the development of driverless car technologies. But I think you could agree that brain computer interfaces, you could think of a lot of different potential uses to augment national defense with that kind of technology. So DARPA has funded a ton of research into BC eyes

and much of that work has had incredible results. Now I'm not just talking about device that would let you control, say a computer cursor with your mind, but technologies that would help people regain lost senses like hearing or vision. And it's all through stimulating neurons in specific ways, so it becomes a bidirectional communications channel. It's incredible stuff. And again the subject matter is vast and it would require

lots of episodes. But the bit I wanted to focus on in the early history was a project in nineteen seventy four. It was called the Close Coupled Man Machine Systems Project, and later on it would undergo a name change. It would become known as bio cybernetics. To quote the article, DARPA funded efforts in the development of novel brain computer interface technologies in the April two thousand, fifteen Journal of

Neuroscience Methods. Quote. This program investigated the application of human physiological signals, including brain signals as measured non invasively using either E E G or magneto and cephalography m EG, to enable direct communication between humans and machines, and to monitor neural states associated with vigilance, fatigue, emotions, decision making, perception,

and general cognitive ability. The program yielded notable advancements such as detailed understanding of single trial sensory evoked responses in the e g. Of human participants. These efforts demonstrated that neural activity in response to visual checkerboard stimuli alternating at different frequencies at each of four fixation points could be decoded in real time and used to navigate a cursor

through a simple maze. End quote. Fascinating stuff. Now we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, I'll give a little bit more about the history and talk about the different approaches to brain computer interfaces. Now to detail every bc I project since the early nineteen seventies would take us hours. There have been countless. Some of them have led to amazing sets and breakthroughs, some revealed frustrating barriers and challenges that we've yet to overcome.

I'll talk about a few more examples in a moment, and I should stress that I'm just kind of arbitrarily picking these examples because there's been so much amazing work in this field. But before I get into that, I want to talk about one of the biggest challenges in the way of a robust brain computer interface, and that's reading the signals of the brain reliably. So there are two broad categories you can consider when it comes to monitoring brain activity, and those would be invasive methods and

non invasive methods, or surgical and non surgical. Typically, though there are some methods that are considered non invasive that still involve implanting stuff into the brain, it's just it tends to be through less invasive procedures like an injection as opposed to brain surgery. And uh yeah, But generally we're talking about technology that has to be surgically implanted on the brain, or to anology that can monitor brain activity without first having to you know, crack open a skull.

And as you can imagine, this is a pretty big difference right between these categories. So let's break down the pros and cons of each of them. So the cons with invasive approaches are pretty darn easy to anticipate, right, I mean, we use brain surgery as a stand in for any activity that requires an incredible amount of knowledge, understanding, and skill to perform. It's right out there with rocket science.

We do that because we know brain surgery is freaking hard, it's risky, and I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of people out there aren't too keen to undergo a surgical procedure unless the potential benefits are truly impressive, maybe life saving or life changing. Invasive methods typically involve either implanting electrodes directly into brain matter or using small sensor pads that essentially stick to the exterior

of the brain. Implanting electrodes comes with its own set of challenge is and one is that it can cause scarring in the brain, and if scar tissue forms near the electrode, it can interfere with the electrodes ability to pick up that electrical activity from neurons, so the scarring process can prevent the electrodes from being able to do

their jobs. Another challenge is that sometimes an electrode could shift slightly in the brain, and even a small shift could mean the electrode would no longer be able to pick up signals from the targeted neurons. There have been some impressive advancements in getting around these challenges. Philip our Kennedy of Emory University, which is just down the road from our office in Atlanta, developed a neural electrode with a tip encased in a tiny glass cone. Neurons would

actually grow into the cone and reach the electrode. The cone helped protect the electrode from scarring, and the neurons growing into the cone helped it resist any shifting. Kennedy worked with a few patients to test the design and work out actual useful brain computer interactions. One of those patients was a man named Johnny Ray, a man who was nearly immobile and incapable of communication after a severe stroke. Surgeons implanted electrodes in Ray's brain in March, and Ray

learned how to move a cursor on a screen. He was imagining that he was moving the cursor with his hand like he was making hand movements, or imagining that because he didn't have that capability anymore. He later learned to move a cursor on a screen to highlight letters, and then he would click on them like with a mouse, except he did it by twitching his shoulders, one of

the few muscle movements he could still do. When he was asked by the media what he felt when he moved the cursor, he spelled out the word nothing, which doctors actually interpreted to mean that Ray no longer had to even imagine moving his hand anymore. His brain had become trained to move the cursor through thought alone without having to have the hand as sort of an intermediate step. And this highlights one of the biggest ed vantages that

the invasive methodology has over the non invasive version. Implants have a more direct path to the neurons that they are monitoring. They are more precise, they're more finely attuned. They can pick up signals much more easily. Brown University professor John P. Donohue is another pioneer using electrode implants as part of research into brain computer interfaces. His team created a system called brain Gate, which initially had ninety six electrodes arrayed on a small implant, and by small

immunit measures about four millimeters per side. It's about the size of a baby aspirin. As Science Daily put it, the stories about brain Gate are pretty inspiring. People who have become paralyzed have undergone the surgical procedure to have the electrode array implanted in their brains, then they have gone through an extensive training period to learn how to use this technology. In that training period, they learn how

to control some exterior technology with their thoughts. It might be a cursor on a screen, giving them the ability to communicate and run applications kind of like a computer mouse. It could be a robotic limb. And on top of that, there's been work to create systems that can replicate a

sense of touch in the user. So not only can the person with the implants in commands to an external piece of technology, they can also experience tactile feedback as if that external tech was one of their natural limbs.

So a person outfitted with a robotic arm connected to this type of interface could not just pick stuff up, which is already phenomenal with a robotic limb, they could actually feel how tightly they were holding the thing they picked up, and that becomes really important for things like

fine motor skills. And this is incredible stuff. But I would still argue that it's fairly primitive in the sense that I think we're just at the very dawn of being able to harness this type of technology that we We've made some incredible strides, but there's a long way to go. Now, let's get back to the non invasive approach. So a clear advantage here is that you don't have to have any sort of surgical procedure to make use of noninvasive technology. And an e G can be an

example of a noninvasive approach. Right, you just have those electrodes that you slap onto your scalp, but you don't have to have a transcranial system. Uh So you can't have e G s that are transcranial, meaning that they it requires brain surgery and you have wires that stick out through your cranium, through your skull. But you can

have noninvasive ones too. But even with the electrodes on the scalp, we run into other problems, and a big one is that the signals in our brains aren't really that strong electrically speaking, and their skulls are fairly decent

at muffling those signals. Plus, if we're moving around a lot having the rig we're using it, it needs to remain steady because otherwise we might end up misaligning things and again we end up reading the wrong neurons, and then an irrelevant brain signal could initiate a command that we weren't intending to send. That's obviously a big challenge.

Now we can get a really good look at what's going on inside the brain using noninvasive technology like an m r I, But in an m r I requires a person to lay very still inside a very large and very noisy machine for quite a long time, so it's not a practical solution. If you want to build a brain computer interface for day to day use. There's a lot of work going into finding a methodology to read brain signals, either directly or indirectly through noninvasive means.

Getting a method to a point where the precision and accuracy rivals the implanted electrodes is a non trivial challenge. DARPA is funding a lot of research into that area. However, it stands to reason that if the agency wants to use bc I technology for divinse purposes, it would be ideal to have a version that doesn't require the user

to first undergo a surgical for seizure. In May two thousand nineteen, the agency announced it was working with six different teams to explore non invasive bc I strategies and what was called the next generation non Surgical neuro Technology or in three program. Included in those teams are people from Carnegie Mellon University, the Palo Alto Research Center or Park, and Telendyne Scientific among others, and the proposals are really interesting.

One from Battel Memorial Institute proposes electro magnetic neuro transducers that are quote non surgically delivered to neurons of interest

into quote. They will then take electrical signals from the neurons and convert them into magnetic signals, which could then be picked up by an external transceiver, and the neuro transducers could also perform the same process in reverse, taking incoming magnetic fields or magnetic fluctuations and transmitting them as electric signals to neurons and the brain, so it could

be bi directional. Other methods including acousto optical approach, which means the team responsible plans to use ultrasonic signals to guide light into the brain to detect a neural activity. There's a similar one, but it would use magnetic fields rather than light, while still using ultrasonic signals to generate

localized electric currents in the brain. It's all really fascinating stuff, and it also quickly gets beyond my understanding of neuroscience and physics, so I won't spend a whole lot more time talking about them, but they are pretty darn nifty.

In the meantime, researchers have been relying on the established E e G. Technology to do a lot of the groundwork for a noninvasive approach, but as I mentioned, that has some big limitations to it, so it's just a stepping stone, and there are other groups looking at different ways to measure brain activity for the purposes of an interface.

Finding a method is replicable and accurate is still a really hard thing to do, whether it's looking specific fickly at neuron activity or maybe something like keeping tabs on changes in blood flow in the brain, so you're looking at sort of an indirect indicator in those cases. At the same time, researchers are starting to rely upon machine learning strategies to help train the technology to determine whether or not any particular signal is a real hit or

a false flag. So this is actually a multidisciplinary endeavor. It's going to rely on many different technologies as well as our understanding of neuroscience, which continues to grow. Okay, so we know about the tech and we know a bit about history. We know that still in fairly early stages of development. When we come back, I'll talk about Elon Musk, Facebook, and brain computer interfaces. But first let's

take another quick break. So in July two thousand nineteen, one of the many tech stories to come out about Elon Musk, because there's never a shortage of them, had to do with the startup company Neuralalink. Now, for some people, this was the first they had ever heard of Musk's interest in creating a brain computer interface, but in fact he had been talking about this kind of thing since at least two thousand and sixteen. At the CODE Conference of two thousand and sixteen, he talked about a ton

of stuff, including a technology called neural lace. Neural lace is a term for a mesh of electrodes that could graft into the brain through a simple injection in the ideal implementation, so no full brain surgery was would be needed, and ideally it would be wireless and offer the chance to interact with computer systems through thought alone, which is pretty nifty, but it's also essentially science fiction, at least

in that incarnation. Not that the idea has no merit, but rather, we hadn't any real clue on how to go about doing it. Yet it's only a little bit better than saying, you know, it's sure would be nice if we had teleporters. Well, yeah, it would be nice, But that doesn't mean we can suddenly build teleporters just

because it would be nice to have them now. In two thousand sixteen, Musk said he was interested in developing this neural lace technology and if nobody else was going to pursue it, he would do it himself, meaning he would fund it himself. The next year, two thousand seventeen, for those keeping score, he announced he was backing a startup called Neuralalink, which would attempt to bring this dream

to life. Musk said at the time that one of the biggest challenges was around bandwidth, or how much data can pass through an interface in a given amount of time. I would argue that challenge it is a big one, but it's further down the road than some of the more immediate challenges. So why did Musk say that, I'll get to that. The two thousand nineteen announcement was all about giving a few more details about the general plan

to achieve this science fiction vision. And Neuralink is working to create flexible threads of electrodes, and each thread would have essentially an electrode array with a potential density of three thousand, seventy two electrodes distributed across ninety six threads. Now by comparison, brain Gates array had a hundred twenty eight electrode channels in it, so this would be much

more dense. The threads themselves would only measure a few microns in width and would be very very flexible, which would hopefully cut down on the possibility of them shifting. They would be able to to move with the brain instead of remaining still with comparison to the brain and Neuralink has worked on a robotic device that would automatically embed the threads into the brain of a recipient. This

would require surgery. According to the Verge, this robotic device looks like a cross between a microscope and a sewing machine and it can implant up to six threads per minute. Now.

Musque stated the reason he was talking about neuralinks were at the time was largely as a recruiting strategy to get more talent to apply to work on the Neuralink team, and his end goal is not to help those who have severe mobility and communication limitations gained some autonomy, although they will be some of the people that would first be exposed to this technology. Instead, it's to create a

bridge between humanity and AI. And this might be why Musk was talking about that barrier, that bandwidth barrier, because for there to be a meaningful exchange of data, you need to be able to move a lot of information very quickly back and forth. Presumably, and Musk has made it pretty clear that he is concerned about the possibility that AI could bring about an existential crisis for humanity. So to me, this sounds like if you can't beat them,

join them type of strategy. Musk seems to say the interface would serve as a step toward merging human and artificial intelligence, perhaps pushing humanity into a trans human state. We'd no longer be human beings as we would classically define the term. Now, I have to stress again that such a future, if it is even possible, is still

a long way away. The neuralink approach has a long way to go just for a basic functionality, and building a meaningful interface that can bring together human and artificial intelligence is another matter entirely. In fact, I'm not even sure what such a thing would mean. That would it mean enhancing human intelligence with AI? And and if so, how would that work? How could a computer system and a brain work together like that, not just communicating back

and forth, but working as a cohesive unit. I'm not really sure. I'm not sure if anybody is sure. Now that's not to say it's not possible. It very well maybe possible, but it's way beyond my humble understanding. Musk's vision is an interesting one, but it also raised is a lot of ethical questions. Now, presumably this technology will not come cheaply, so who exactly would be able to

afford such a bio enhancement. So let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Must's vision becomes reality, and that this technology works the way he intended it to, which I'm still not convinced is actually possible. But let's say it is possible and it happens. Would that mean we would actually see a new class system, one that essentially mirrors the massive divide between the most wealthy and the

poorest people of today. But more so, would we have a very small population of elite rich and enhanced people overseeing a massive you know, the rest of us, because I know I don't make enough money to fall into the cyber human tax bracket. Again, we're so far away from this being oppressing matter, but it's the sort of question we have to ask when we talk about an amazing future. Whose future or are we talking about? Because if it's not everyone's future, I think it kind of stinks.

Speaking of stinking, let's segue over to Facebook, and that might betray my opinion on this next item in our bc I discussion. So at the two thousand, nineteen f eight or FATE Conference, which is Facebook's conference for developers, one of the many presentations was on Facebook's efforts to fund the development of what has been called a mind

reading device, So what gives well? Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco are helming this project and the ultimate goal, at least the ultimate short term goal, is to create a non invasive device or method that will allow a user to transmit words or commands to

a computer device through thought alone. And the short term goal is to develop such a system that can handle up to one words per minute with a one thousand word vocabular larry, and an error rate below sevent Now those parameters should already tell you that this goal is

a tough one. We have no way to take raw brain data from the speech center of the brain and figure out what a person is trying to say all by itself, right, I couldn't just slap a headset onto a person have them think words and no immediately what they're saying. To get to that point, we actually have to train a computer system to recognize certain brain patterns that represent specific words and the speech center of the brain.

That's what the researchers have been working on. So, like the other examples I've given, these researchers have been working with volunteers who elected to have surgeons implant electrodes into their brains. And these were volunteers who were already undergoing surgical procedures to treat stuff like epilepsy, So it wasn't like they just walked in off the street. They were electing to do this in addition to other treatments they were seeking. The subjects were then given a series of

multiple choice questions. Now these were questions that didn't have a right or wrong answer, so you could get a question like how are you feeling today, and then the answers could include stuff like tired, happy, sad, lonely, that kind of thing. That's just an example from my own head. By the way, I don't know for a fact that that was an example question from their procedure. The subjects

would then answer out loud. They would say what their choice was verbally, and during the whole test, the researchers would record the brain activity in the subject's speech center as it was going on. Doing this over and over would establish a sort of picture neurologically speaking of how specific responses quote unquote looked in the brain. So when you were ready to say happy, then the neurons in your brain fire in a specific kind of pattern, and the the the the e G picks that up and

it it's kind of like making a picture. So if the computer sees a picture that looks like that one, it might interpret that you have said the word happy. After training machine learning algorithm on the data, the researchers tried to test the system and they would feed brain data into the system without telling the system what the data referred to. It would say, all right, which question was asked and which answer was given, so the system tried to figure that out based upon the amount of

data it had gathered in its training process. It did fairly well figuring out which question was asked, getting it right s the time, so three times out of four. It was slightly less successful at guessing what the answer was by the subject. It was not as good about that it was about success rate, but that's still pretty impressive.

It's a long way away from the stated goal of the project to get that error rate down below sev Especially with a vocabulary of a thousand words, it's got to get more complicated as the number of words increases, because the more words the system has to identify, the harder it has to be. It has to be able to recognize differences between each of those words to determine

which one was intended. Okay, so what does Facebook want to do with this technology, assuming that they're able to mature the technology and have it perform up to the level that they want well, the company has said that the goal is to create a system in which a user can just think a command or message and send it to a computer. So rather than look down at your phone to dash off a quick text to your BFF.

You could concentrate and send that message by thought alone to your phone, and then commanded to send the message onward without every taking the phone out of your pocket or out of a purse or whatever. You're just concentrating and making it happen. Now, the skeptics among you might say, hey, Jonathan, wouldn't you say that Facebook has a somewhat spotty reputation when it comes to stuff like privacy and security? And my response would be, you bet you. I'm sure the

company has anticipated this. Folks at Facebook have already said that this system would only pick up words that were in the speech center of the brain, and only words that the system had been trained on for that matter, and that it wouldn't pick up just random surface thoughts. So you'd have to be thinking about saying the word

for it to be detected by the technology. Presumably this makes everything okay, I'm not quite ready to sign on to that just now, but anyway, that being said, I would imagine for the system to work, each user would first have to train their individual instance of that system. It's sort of like the old voice recognition programs out there.

You first had to go through a fairly extensive calibration process with voice recognition systems that had to learn your voice in order for it to be able to respond properly. I imagine you'd have to do something similar with a mind reading system like this, where you'd have to actively think about specific words in sort of a two to oriole in order to train the system on how your

brain lights up when you are thinking those words. To put it another way, the neurons in my head might light up a slightly different way when I say the word cat than they would in your head when you say the word cat, and each person would need to make sure their version of this technology understood how they thought. But that also means putting in a lot more prep time before you can actually use the technology to dash

off an email or something. Another potential use is for a hands free interface for technology like augmented reality glasses, which frankly makes me even more worried. You can see

the use of such technology right away. You could wear one of these glasses which can overlay digital this information on top of your view of the world around you, so you could stare at a building, for example, and think what address is that, and just by thinking that the a r handset could consult the Internet and come back with some information and say that is this address on this street, which is pretty useful. But let's paint a more terrifying scenario. Facebook has an enormous amount of

information on millions, in fact billions of people. So let's say you've got a pair of Facebook branded augmented reality goggles and it's got a brain computer interface as part of the system, so you can just think commands and the goggles will pick up on what you are asking them to do. And because so many people use Facebook and many people have public accounts, you could walk down the street and get quick bits of information about all

the people you were looking at. You know, you get facial recognition software, it recognizes who the person is starts pulling up your information on them that's publicly available. Maybe you even figure out how to exploit the system and get access to information beyond what was allowed for the general public. This could be a massive privacy problem. Now, again, we are a long way away from that particular type

of technology becoming reality, but the possibility is there. There's no denying Facebook has access to a stupendous amount of information about all of us and we don't even need the brain computer interface for that to be a problem. You could just have the A R glasses themselves with a deep connection to Facebook's databases and a way of interacting with it, even if it's with voice commands or mobile app or whatever, and you can still have these problems.

It's just it seems even more insidious if you don't have to do anything other than just stare at someone and think it. It seems pretty spooky and creepy. And it's these sort of scenarios that remind us we have to be careful as we develop technologies to make sure that they are applied ethically without posing harm to others.

We've got to ask ourselves what are the consequences of this technology, both the intended and unintended consequences, and who benefits most from it and who could be who stands to to be victimized by it anyway, I think brain computer interfaces really have great potential to do an enormous amount of good, especially for people who otherwise have a really difficult struggle just being able to interact with the world around them and to have any sort of autonomy

at all, and to even just be able to communicate with others. I think that that alone makes it a worthy endeavor to pursue, but we do need to make sure that we're doing it for the right reasons and we're not just doing it because somebody is scared that robots are going to take over the world, or a company really wants to know what you're thinking, because the more data the company has about you, the better it can sell things to you or sell you to other things.

Keeping that in mind is very important. That's it for this episode. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, maybe something that's happy and fun and not nearly as terrifying and orwellian, send me a message. The email is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can pop over to our website that's tech

stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive of all of our previous episodes on there, as well as links to where we are on social media and a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.