Ever since humans have made progress in the field of AI, there has been skepticism surrounding the whole idea of giving machines an intelligence. Even futurists like Elon Musk made it clear that he is not in for the whole AI dependent future.

Despite the criticism world over, a group of Japanese computer scientists developed a new AI system that can visualize human thoughts.

Yes! We are talking about a technology that can see the human thought or convert them into pictures. It’s always frightening to know that another person can read your thoughts. Imagine the case where technology can see what you are thinking!

How Does it Work?

At the core of this technology lies the ability to scan the human brain. The scientists made use fMRI or Functional MRI to scan the brain over traditional MRI scan that can only monitor brain activity. fMRI, on the contrary, can track blood flow in the brain and even brain waves.

The system uses this data obtained from the scan to decide what the subject has been thinking. The resultant data is converted to image format, which is made possible by sending the data through a complex neural network that does the actual decoding.

But this technology couldn't just grasp everything from the get-go. The machine has to be trained first to learn how the human brain works. It has to get used to tracking the blood flow.

Once the machine gets hold of the process, it begins projecting images that have a stark resemblance to what the subject was thinking. This was made possible only through employing multiple layers of DNN or Deep neural networks.

When DNN is tasked with processing the images, a DGN or Deep Generator Network is used to create images with more precision and accuracy. The differences in image creation with and without the DGN are vastly different.

The method of testing involves two steps. Firstly, the subject is shown an image, and then, the AI is made to recreate the images. The next part of the procedure makes the subject to visualize images in his/her mind. After which, AI system recreates the images in real time.

The Future Applications of This Technology

The future application of this technology is vast and in many ways scary. Imagine if your thoughts at any given time get displayed on a board. Of course for this to work, the machine must record the brain waves and activity wirelessly. This is currently not possible.

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With time, this technology may be developed where it can remotely see our thoughts. Also, the imaging technology will certainly become more accurate in the coming years.

Again, it's difficult to ignore the advantages of this system as primarily it is designed to help people. Imagine a world where convicts and criminals can be scanned for images of their past rather than making them talk about their crimes.

Certainly, we are yet to see what this technology can do!