AI can read your mind and help the paralyzed walk: Should we be afraid?
The Daily Article
The Denison Forum
4.9 • 576 Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2023
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The same technology that enables AI to read our thoughts has also helped the paralyzed to walk, the mute to speak, and scientists to find potential remedies to the superbugs that kill more than a million people a year. But as the line between science fiction and science fact becomes increasingly blurred, how are we to know when we cross a threshold from which we may not be able to return?
Author: Ryan Denison, PhD
Narrator: Chris Elkins
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today is Friday, May the 26th, 2023. Welcome to the Daily Article podcast. I'm Chris Elkins with the |
| 0:09.2 | Denison Forum, narrating today's article written by Dr. Ryan Denison. Quote, think of the words |
| 0:16.0 | whirling around in your head, that tasteless joke you wisely kept to yourself at dinner, your unvoiced |
| 0:21.7 | impression of your best friend's new partner. Now, imagine that someone could listen in, end quote. |
| 0:28.8 | As Oliver Wang describes, we may not be that far away from that creepy hypothetical, |
| 0:34.8 | becoming an even more frightening reality. As researchers delve deeper and deeper |
| 0:39.8 | into the ability of artificial intelligence, AI, to interpret and understand the impulses of the |
| 0:46.9 | human brain, a new realm of possibilities opens up by measuring brain activity in fMRI scans |
| 0:53.6 | and then feeding that information into their AI systems, |
| 0:57.7 | scientists at the University of Texas, Austin, were able to decode and translate the thoughts of |
| 1:03.1 | those who agreed to take part in the study with surprising accuracy. |
| 1:07.8 | Yet the same technology that threatens to make internal monologues a thing of the past |
| 1:12.2 | has also been used to help a mute person speak and even enabled a paralyzed person to walk, |
| 1:18.2 | reminding us, once again, that the potential tradeoffs in these developments can be more |
| 1:23.5 | complicated to weigh than they appear at first glance. Gertjohn Ascombe was paralyzed from the |
| 1:29.7 | hips down in a motorcycle accident in 2011. However, after electrodes were implanted in his skull and spine, |
| 1:37.4 | he's walking once again and has regained some semblance of the freedom he had before. The innovative |
| 1:43.5 | process works by using artificial intelligence, quote, |
| 1:47.4 | to read Mr. Ascom's intentions, detectable as electrical signals in his brain, |
| 1:53.0 | and match them to muscle movements, end quote. |
| 1:56.4 | Essentially, researchers were able to help Ascombe teach the AI |
| 2:00.3 | to understand what his brain was trying |
... |
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