It’s the era of a lot of things. Some impressive (Brady, LeBron) some tragic (COVID) and some obsessive (social media). It’s also the era of algorithms — and it seems there’s nothing they can’t solve for, from painting a Monet to minting money.
And now, algorithms are even being used to read our minds.
Case in point: Last week, Facebook previewed its latest and greatest technology advances — in this case, a wearable that can read a user’s mind and give them superpowers, liking typing on a keyboard even when there is no keyboard there.
The prototype device out of Facebook Reality Labs revealed to the media this week is reportedly capable of reading neurological signals sent from a users’ brain down to their hands. The device will theoretically be able to use signals to determine the user’s intent, either in a real or augmented reality (AR) environment.
“You actually have more of your brain dedicated to controlling your wrist than any other part of your body, probably twice as many neurons controlling your wrist and the movement of your hands than is actually dedicated to your mouth for feeding and for speech,” said Thomas Reardon, director of research science at Facebook Reality Labs.
Facebook demonstrated that this feature can be used in its “force” feature — named for the concept from the movie “Star Wars” — that would allow users to manipulate AR objects in the distance. The feature was also demonstrated to enable users to type on any hard surface as though it were a keyboard, and the sensors in the wristband would be able to register and read the wearer’s intention for letters and words.
When will Facebook’s telepathic tech be on the market? According to Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, that is a tough call, given that Facebook is still in early development on the project. “It’s hard to predict their timeline,” he said. “How these things sequence out in the market, when they show up — [those] are things I don’t have crisp answers to. What we’re focused on is hardening these technologies.”
Facebook isn’t the only player working to make smart tech that is truly mind-reading, though at present it is the only Big Tech player with such an announced product in the field. The U.S. Army is also formally interested in the telepathic possibilities of connected tech. In fact, according to reports that began circulating in late 2020, the Army’s version of this project is a whole lot more science fiction-sounding than Facebook’s.
The Army, in cooperation with researchers from the University of Southern California, UCLA Berkeley and Duke University, is providing $6.25 million in funding over the next five years to research whether algorithms and advanced mathematics provide the foundation for separating brain signals that “influence action or behavior from signals that do not.”
And if that doesn’t immediately jump out as relevant to mind-reading, experts tend to agree that being able to distinguish action-influencing brain signals from others is the first step to creating brain-interface systems.
Hamid Krim, an Army Research Office program manager, explained that initiatives based on this research might be able to create devices that will detect things like stress and fatigue signals from soldiers and transmit them to their leaders. Theoretically, it could also be used to create a channel for silent communication via a central computer while boots are on the ground.
The military’s testing, like Facebook’s, is in the very early stages, though testing on monkeys has begun. It will likely be more than a decade before any technology applicable to human beings could be conceived, Krim noted. “The next step after that is to be able to understand it,” Krim commented. “The next step after that is to break it down into words so that you can synthesize [it] in a sense, like you learn your vocabulary and your alphabet.”
It seems we’ll have a while to wait before the technology to truly read humans’ minds is actually ready for the market/battlefield. That is perhaps a comfort to people who worry about Facebook having this kind of tech, given its track record in consumer privacy.
And one can imagine a world where other players might want to build their own tech-enabled versions of the “Vulcan mind meld” that might be somewhat less intimidating than either Facebook or the armed services. How much easier would ordering on Amazon be, for example, if it knew as soon as you did that you had run out of toilet paper? How much more interesting would digital streaming be if a wearable could sense that you are bored and send that signal to Netflix to find a new show, or that HBO could just know that you really liked that coat Nicole Kidman wore in “The Undoing” and had it show up on your doorstep before the show ended?
The possibilities for telepathic tech, it seems, could be pretty dazzling — and potentially even a little bit dangerous.
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