Facebook Takes First Steps In Creating Mind-Reading Technology

Still use Facebook even after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Libra, and more privacy and ethics violations than you and your extended family can count on their fingers and toes? Then you should have no ethical concerns over the computer-brain interface the company began developing two years ago. Now, the first fruit of its labor has arrived.

- Adam Dachis

A Facebook-sponsored experiment at the University of California, San Francisco has successfully created an interface that translates brain signals into dialogue; results were published in Nature Communication. The software determines what you’ve heard and said in reply without access to any audio of the conversation. It uses high-density electrocorticography (ECoG), which requires sensors implanted in the brain, so there is no immediate concern for any non-consensual mind reading on Facebook’s part. It’s clear from the published research that the technology still has a long road ahead before it achieves both a natural and practical usefulness: