New AI technology in development could transform lives but also raises urgent ethical and legal questions.
For years, scientists have been trying to harness the powers of the human brain, but the concept of mind-reading has remained firmly in the realms of science fiction fantasy.
But now a research team in Singapore, using artificial intelligence and a scanning machine, are developing a basic mind-reading technique that decodes brain scans to reproduce images that a person is mentally picturing.
It could not only transform the communication skills of people with disabilities, allowing them to convey a message with their mind, but also raises urgent ethical and legal questions about how the technology could evolve and potentially be misused for corporate interests or surveillance by authoritarian powers.
Zijiao Chen, a PhD student at the National University of Singapore (NUS), is one of the lead researchers in an international team that draws its members from several countries, including the US and China.
She compared their mind-reaching technology to a “mini GPT for the brain” that – in the same way ChatGPT uses language to learn how we speak – leverages a large-scale dataset from a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI) “to learn how our brain interprets and thinks about things”.
The technique uses the brain scans of young adult participants who enter an fMRI over a period of 18 hours to look at pictures from a dataset of 160,000 images for nine seconds each. The images range from everyday buildings to sports activities like baseball or wildlife including giraffes and swans.
The signals are then put through “MinD-Vis”, an AI model, to train it to associate certain brain patterns with particular image features like colour, shape, texture and semantics.
In the final stage, it can recover unseen visual stimuli from new images that participants were shown in the fMRI, based on analysis of their brain activity.
“In other words, Mind-Vis is able to read and reconstruct images from our minds,” said Ms Chen, who said the decoded pictures were consistent. While not reproduced with 100 per cent accuracy, they are recognisable matches and significantly out-performed previous experiments of a similar nature.
“Decoding reaches vital information that plays a role in understanding how our brain processes and interprets the world around us. It helps researchers to visualise and unlock the mystery of the brain and a deeper comprehension of its complex functions,” she said.
Technology could transform life for disabled
The technology within a few years could open up a new world for people with disabilities, allowing them to interact with a more advanced machine that can better mimic human cognitive and decision-making processes in real-time.
“Say, for example, if people are not able to type then they can just imagine a sentence … a sentence that he is thinking about that we are able to decode. That’s the future goal,” she said.
Helen Zhou, an associate professor at the NUS Centre for Sleep and Cognition, predicted it could take a decade to finetune the technology to reach this goal.
For the concept to be commercialised, it would also require a shift away from unwieldy equipment like fMRI machines to a portable device, such as an EEG (electroencephalogram) headband, which uses sensors to detect brain activity, she said.
The aim would be to develop a machine capable of real-time decoding that a customer could take home, connect to WiFi, and easily tune it to their own needs. “That’s the dream,” said Ms Zhou.
But she conceded that guardrails were needed to prevent the exploitation of such technological advances.
“We really have to be very cautious about the governing of the usage of this technology and have certain guidelines and firewalls,” she said.
In its current form, it would be impossible to forcibly read someone’s mind as consent is needed for the technique to work. The person could thwart the machinery simply by disciplining their mind to think about something else rather than what is being actually perceived.
But as the science, AI and devices become more sophisticated, then the risk theoretically could rise for a machine to at least partially read someone’s mind without permission.
The Singapore-based team’s work was released in a paper in November and is part of a flurry of pioneering brain research projects, including one from the University of Texas that is using fMRI to decode language from a person’s brain activity.
Rafael Yuste, professor of neurobiology at Columbia University, said such scientific progress was “fantastic for patients” and “incredibly important for researchers trying to understand how the brain works”.
‘Brain rights’
But he warned that it could also be weaponised and used for military applications or for nefarious purposes to extract information from people.
“We are on the brink of a crisis from the point of view of mental privacy,” he said. “Humans are defined by their thoughts and their mental processes and if you can access them then that should be the sanctuary.”
Prof Yuste has become so concerned about the ethical implications of advanced neurotechnology that he co-founded the NeuroRights Foundation to promote “brain rights” as a new form of human rights.
The group advocates for safeguards to prevent the decoding of a person’s brain activity without consent, for protection of a person’s identity and free will, and for the right to fair access to mental augmentation technology.
They are currently working with the United Nations to study how human rights treaties can be brought up to speed with rapid progress in neurosciences, and raising awareness of the issues in national parliaments.
In August, the Human Rights Council in Geneva will debate whether the issues around mental privacy should be covered by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, one of the most significant human rights treaties in the world.
The gravity of the task was comparable to the development of the atomic bomb, when scientists working on atomic energy warned the UN of the need for regulation and an international control system of nuclear material to prevent the risk of a catastrophic war, said Prof Yuste.
As a result, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was created and is now based in Vienna.
“We could envision the creation of an international neurotechnology agency by the UN that would oversee the development of neurotechnology within the human rights framework,” he said.
“It’s very important that – just like the nuclear scientists – we know what you can do with this technology. We have developed it ourselves, we use it on animals, and we want to use it on patients but precisely for that reason we can see what is coming down the line.”
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