Food for thought

The year is 2043. You get into your car, which scans your brain and detects that you want to go home. When you arrive at your front door, your house immediately senses what you want to eat and puts in an order at a local takeaway.

That is the future that some are predicting after a recent study found AIA computer programme that has been designed to think.  may be capable of reading our thoughts.

In the study, a group of people was presented with a series of simple images. An fMRIFunctional magnetic resonance imaging measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. Blood flow is linked to the activity of neurons.  machine was used to scan their brains, and an AI programme was able to use these scans to construct an image that resembled the one they were thinking of.

Being able to read people's brains could have huge benefits. For example, thought-reading AI could detect depressive thoughts and recommend mental health treatment.

It also offers a way of talking to people in a "vegetative state", where a patient cannot speak or move. It is estimated that around one in five people in a vegetative state still have fully functioning brains.¹ Programmes like this one would give them a way of communicating.

But others think the risks outweigh the advantages. They say we have the right to keep our thoughts private.

Still, it might be too soon to worry. Some experts think this is just a magic trick.

The researchers used a programme called Stable DiffusionA deep-learning, text-to-image tool released in 2022. It can create images based on text descriptions. , which is based on a vast database of images pulled from the internet. Because of this, the programme almost certainly already had access to the pictures that the subjects of this study were shown.

That means it does not really have to read our thoughts: it just has to figure out broadly what we are thinking about, and then match this to the images it already has.

It would not be able to detect an original thought or image that we had generated within our own minds.

Yes: Being able to detect unhappy, negative thoughts could make people's lives better. And if all our thoughts were known to others, we would have no choice to be honest with them. 

No: There are all kinds of good reasons why we might choose to hide our true thoughts. We should always have the choice as to whether or not we let other people know what we are thinking.

Or... It is impossible to know what someone is "really" thinking anyway. We do not even know all of our own thoughts. No programme will ever be capable of making our thoughts known to others.