Thought-Recognition Technology on 60 Minutes
60 Minutes has a great story, How Technology May Soon “Read” Your Mind, covering the latest work in thought-recognition technology.
“As Lesley Stahl reports, neuroscience research into how we think and what we’re thinking is advancing at a stunning rate, making it possible for the first time in human history to peer directly into the brain to read out the physical make-up of our thoughts, some would say to read our minds.”
The report highlighted the work of Drs. Mitchell and Just (shown to the right) at Carnegie Mellon University that we have tracked closely in this blog. They combine brain scanning technology with machine learning (artificial intelligence techniques) to reliably recognize when your are thinking about a hammer, house, celery or other object.
Impromptu, they tested the system on a member of the 60 Minutes team and it recognized 10 out of 10 thoughts correctly!
Although many worry about the ethical implications of “mind reading” there are also some very big positive implications for cognitive designers.
Imagine being able to design and build devices that dynamically adjust their functionality in real-time based on the mental states of the user.
As one of my cognitive design students at Northwestern said “this will change everything”.
