Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), Meta showcases an AI system capable of decoding the unfolding of visual representations in the brain with an unprecedented temporal resolution.
Interesting. Terrifying, but interesting. They are obviously working on a reverse of this to force ads into our heads on the street without our permission.
The R&D team at Facebook isn’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, they have a mission statement at the start of every project before it gets funded, and it doesn’t get funded unless it is going to produce future revenue.
Authors address the ethical implications of their research
Ethical implications. While the decoding of brain activity promises to help a variety of brainlesioned patients (Metzger et al., 2023; Moses et al., 2021; Defossez et al., 2022; Liu et al., 2023; ´
Willett et al., 2023), the rapid advances of this technology raise several ethical considerations, and
most notably, the necessity to preserve mental privacy. Several empirical findings are relevant to this
issue. Firstly, the decoding performance obtained with non-invasive recordings is only high for perceptual tasks. By contrast, decoding accuracy considerably diminishes when individuals are tasked
to imagine representations (Horikawa & Kamitani, 2017; Tang et al., 2023). Second, decoding performance seems to be severely compromised when participants are engaged in disruptive tasks, such as counting backward (Tang et al., 2023). In other words, the subjects’ consent is not only a legal but
also and primarily a technical requirement for brain decoding. To delve into these issues effectively,
we endorse the open and peer-reviewed research standards.>