Time To Dust Off The Tinfoil Hat

Mind reading technology is hitting the market. It puts our thoughts at risk of being stolen, and renders privacy a relic of the past. There are many examples of neurotechnology devices hitting the market. For example, Elon Musk's neuralink is developing an implantable chip so individuals can move a computer cursor with their mind. As well, Apple, Meta, and Open-AI are also hard at work on such devices.

The range of neurotechnology devices include devices that allow an individual to control computers with their mind. In many cases, people might not truly understand that their information is being shared and sold in the first place when they use these devices. And while medical research facilities must follow privacy laws, private companies have no such requirement. This despite the fact that they are among the most active collectors of brain data. 

The Neurorights Foundation, a non-profit to protect people from the misuse or abuse of neurotechnology, found in a study that two-thirds of private companies already share or sell data to third parties. Yet they do not disclose data storage practices nor security protocols.

Mind reading AI systems can also be used to target passwords, including your Bitcoin password. Mind reading is the final frontier of privacy, and humanity appears woefully unprepared for it. 

AI Mind-Reading Technology Exists Already

Mind reading technology has become so advanced that researchers have successfully reconstructed images from direct recordings of brain activity. Basically, the AI recreates images at which an individual is looking. AI reconstructed the original images with near-perfect accuracy.

One team conducted two different studies, placing volunteers inside a functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) machine, which measures blood flow changes in the brain.

Volunteers saw pictures of faces as the fMRI recorded the neural activity in the visual cortex, which was sent to the AI algorithm. The AI then reconstructed the images closely resembling the original pictures.

The second study entailed re-analyzing data from past experiments in which electrode arrays were implanted into macaque monkey’s brain to record its activity while the primate looked at AI images.

The images created from the monkey's brain activity were almost identical to the original images, since the implanted devices provided precise data on the monkey's brain activity. The AI system learned which parts of the brain on which to focus when interpreting brain signals.

Present-day mind reading technology is so advanced that it can correlate brain activity with typed characters, defeating passphrase protection such as BIP39, the way in which crypto wallets create mnemonic phrases and convert them into binary seeds.

Change Will Come Quickly

The field of neuro technology evolves quickly. Soon AI technologies will be combined with large language models. Furthermore, researchers came up with a first ever non-invasive mind-reading cap. While this technology is used for good–for instance, helping people unable to speak due to illness or injury–it at the very least poses novel privacy threats. 

Abuse of mind technology would not be unprecedented. In the 1950s and 1960s, psychiatrists at America’s top academic institutions supported CIA mind control misadventures like ARTICHOKE and MK-ULTRA, which often entailed experimenting on vulnerable populations.

In an effort to protect consumer privacy, Colorado passed the first law in the nation to include biological and brain data in the State Privacy Act, which grants consumers new rights to their personal data and places obligations on data collectors.

The Colorado law went into effect last summer, and only applies to companies which identify the people whose information they are collecting, sharing, and selling.

Once mind-reading technologies advance beyond this state and into wireless technologies capable of long distances, the whole digital world is compromised. The dystopian world of 1984 would seem utopian by comparison.

In an age when companies access, analyze, and change brains, crypto technologists have a lot of work to preserve liberty through crypto for future generations. It might take a renewed human rights movement to make it happen