🎤 More NSA Spying and A.I. That Can Literally See Your Thoughts 🤖

America's National Security Agency has the power to identify people by the sound of their voice. They are thought to be using technology much more advanced than that of Apple or Amazon. That's according to a report based on documents leaked by the agency's former contractor Edward Snowden.

Last month, AI researchers at computing hardware manufacturer Nvidia developed a neural network which was able to ‘imagine’ scenes or images it had never seen before. This, naturally, led to a great deal of nervous hand-wringing by neo-Luddites worried that artificial intelligence will somehow make human beings obsolete or begin to distort our perception of reality in strange, terrifying new ways. Now, a team of Japanese computer scientists has taken things one step further into the nightmare realm by developing an AI that can literally see your thoughts. As usual, I just have to wonder: what could go wrong?

The system works by attaching to individual’s heads fMRI scanners which can detect changes in blood flow within the brain. The signals from the scanners are analyzed in real time by an incredibly advanced neural network which is then able to actually visualize and recreate what individuals are seeing. Researchers ‘trained’ the system by showing participants and AI images of the natural world so that the network could get used to what blood flow in the brain looks while subjects perceive different images. After initial training, their neural network was then able to reconstruct images it had never seen before such as letters and numbers.