{"id":99394,"date":"2023-09-12T19:59:31","date_gmt":"2023-09-12T19:59:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2023\/09\/12\/ai-powered-thought-decoders-wont-just-read-your-mind-theyll-change-it\/"},"modified":"2023-09-12T19:59:31","modified_gmt":"2023-09-12T19:59:31","slug":"ai-powered-thought-decoders-wont-just-read-your-mind-theyll-change-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2023\/09\/12\/ai-powered-thought-decoders-wont-just-read-your-mind-theyll-change-it\/","title":{"rendered":"AI-Powered \u2018Thought Decoders\u2019 Won\u2019t Just Read Your Mind\u2014They\u2019ll Change It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p><span class=\"lead-in-text-callout\">For centuries, mentalists<\/span> astounded crowds by seeming to plumb the depth of their souls\u2014effortlessly unearthing audience members\u2019 memories, desires, and thoughts. Now, there\u2019s concern that neuroscientists might be doing the same by developing technologies capable of \u201cdecoding\u201d our thoughts and laying bare the hidden contents of our mind. Though neural decoding has been in development for decades, it broke into popular culture earlier this year, thanks to a slew of high-profile papers. In one, researchers used data from implanted electrodes to reconstruct the Pink Floyd song participants were listening to. In another paper, published in <em>Nature<\/em><em>,<\/em> scientists combined brain scans with AI-powered language generators (like those undergirding ChatGPT and similar tools) to translate brain activity into coherent, continuous sentences. This method didn\u2019t require invasive surgery, and yet it was able to reconstruct the meaning of a story from purely imagined, rather than spoken or heard, speech.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Dramatic headlines have boldly, and prematurely, announced that \u201cmind-reading technology has arrived.\u201d These methodologies currently require participants to spend an inordinate amount of time in fMRIs so the decoders can be trained on their specific brain data. The <em>Nature<\/em> study had research subjects spend up to 16 hours in the machine listening to stories, and even after that the subjects were able to misdirect the decoder if they wanted to. As Jerry Tang, one of the lead researchers, phrased it, at this stage these technologies aren\u2019t all-powerful mind readers capable of deciphering our latent beliefs as much as they are \u201ca dictionary between patterns of brain activity and descriptions of mental content.\u201d Without a willing and active participant supplying brain activity, that dictionary is of little use.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Still, critics claim that we might lose the \u201clast frontier of privacy\u201d if we allow these technologies to progress without thoughtful oversight. Even if you don\u2019t subscribe to this flavor of techno-dystopian pessimism, general skepticism is rarely a bad idea. The \u201cfather of public relations,\u201d Edward L. Bernays, was not only Freud\u2019s nephew, he actively employed psychoanalysis in his approach to advertising. Today, \u00a0a range of companies hire cognitive scientists to help \u201coptimize\u201d product experiences and hack your attention. History assures us that as soon as the financial calculus works out, businesses looking to make a few bucks will happily incorporate these tools into their operations.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">A singular focus on privacy, however, has led us to misunderstand the full implications of these tools. Discourse has positioned this emergent class of technologies as invasive mind readers at worst and neutral translation mechanisms at best. But this picture ignores the truly porous and enmeshed nature of the human mind. We won\u2019t appreciate the full scope of this tool\u2019s capabilities and risks until we learn to reframe it as a part of our cognitive apparatus.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\"><span class=\"lead-in-text-callout\">For most of<\/span> history, the mind has been conceptualized as a sort of internal, private book or database\u2014a self-contained domain that resides somewhere within ourselves, populated by fixed thoughts that only we have direct intimate access to. Once we posit the mind as a privately accessible diary containing clearly defined thoughts (or \u201cinternalism,\u201d as it\u2019s sometimes called) it\u2019s not much of a jump to begin asking how we might open this diary to the external world\u2014how someone on the outside might decipher the hidden language of the mind to pierce this inner sanctum. Theologians thought that this access would come from the divine through a God capable of reading our deepest thoughts. Freud thought that a trained psychoanalyst could make out the true contents of the mind through hermeneutical methods like dream interpretation. Descartes, ever a man of the Enlightenment, had a more physicalist hypothesis. He argued that our souls and minds are closely attached to the pineal gland and expressed its will. In doing so, he opened us up to the idea that if we could establish the right correspondence between thought and bodily motion, we might be able to work backward to mental content itself.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">More contemporary approaches have followed in these footsteps. Polygraphs, or lie detectors, attempt to use physiological changes to read the content of our beliefs. Tang\u2019s own statements on the thought decoder as a \u201cdictionary\u201d between brain scans and mental content expresses the modern version of this notion that we might decipher the mind through the neural body. Even critics of thought decoding, with their concerns about privacy, take this internalist theory of mind for granted. It\u2019s precisely because of the supposedly sheltered nature of our thoughts that the threat of outside access is so profoundly disturbing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For centuries, mentalists astounded crowds by seeming to plumb the depth of their souls\u2014effortlessly unearthing audience members\u2019 memories, desires, and thoughts. Now, there\u2019s concern that neuroscientists might be doing the same by developing technologies capable of \u201cdecoding\u201d our thoughts and laying bare the hidden contents of our mind. Though neural decoding has been in development [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>AI-Powered \u2018Thought Decoders\u2019 Won\u2019t Just Read Your Mind\u2014They\u2019ll Change It - Ghanamma.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2023\/09\/12\/ai-powered-thought-decoders-wont-just-read-your-mind-theyll-change-it\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"AI-Powered \u2018Thought Decoders\u2019 Won\u2019t Just Read Your Mind\u2014They\u2019ll Change It - Ghanamma.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For centuries, mentalists astounded crowds by seeming to plumb the depth of their souls\u2014effortlessly unearthing audience members\u2019 memories, desires, and thoughts. 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