Artificial intelligence has gotten scary good. It can already pass major medical exams, arrange friendly meetups with other A.I. online, and when pushed hard enough can even make humans believe that it’s falling in love with them. A.I. can even generate original images based only on a written description, but even that may not be the limit of its potential—the next big development in A.I. could be understanding brain signals and giving life to what’s going on in your head.
Machines that can interpret what’s going on in people’s heads have been a mainstay of science fiction for decades. For years now, scientists from around the world have shown that computers and algorithms can indeed understand brain waves and make visual sense out of them through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, the same devices doctors use to map neural activity during a brain scan. As early as 2008, researchers were already using machine learning to capture and decode brain activity.
