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Have you ever dreamt of voicing a question in your head and hearing the answer without anyone around you noticing it?
Researchers are working on Brain Computer Interfaces, BCI, but so far this requires bulky settings, wires connecting your head with a computer. Not exactly meeting the requirement of “unnoticed”.
Apparently a team of researchers at MIT have discovered a shortcut to connect our thoughts to the Internet and sending back the answer to our queries to our brain.
They have developed a wearable device (visible) that is worn in contact to the jaw. It contains sensors able to detect micro muscular movements, invisible to our eyes, that are activated in response to our thoughts. The device converts those micro movements in words used as questions to get answer from the internet. The return channel, that is communicating the answer to the brain is sort of easy. The device converts the answer into a set of vibrations transmitted by bone conduction headphones that are interpreted as sound by our ears.
Now, don’t get too excited. The system is able to capture simple thoughts, actually it is not capturing real thoughts but unfinished verbalisation, a word you thought and never uttered. Something like: “time?” – and the device asks for the exact time and get the hour from the internet: “17:52” and uses bone conduction headphones to get the virtual sound into the inner ear (watch the clip).
We are very very far from a real silent communication with the web, I would consider this more like a gadget than a real prosthetics. Yet it makes a dream concrete.
The system is called AlterEgo and uses neural networks, artificial intelligence, to convert the micro movements of face muscles stimulated by thoughts into words.
Even though, as I said, I would place this in the “gadget” area, I recognise the importance and the technology prowess it required. What has pushed me to post this news is what they say in their presentation of the project on the Media Lab website:
“AlterEgo aims to combine humans and computers—such that computing, the internet, and AI would weave into human personality as a “second self” and augment human cognition and abilities.”
This is clearly in line with the vision of the IEEE FDC Symbiotic Autonomous Systems -SAS- Initiative: our future as human race will see a fusion, symbioses, with our machines, particularly with soft machines (today represented in the cyberspace, tomorrow, may be, in a pervasive knowledge fabric). Out of this symbioses we will experience a the emergence of a global intelligence.
It will be something to discuss at the coming Technology Time Machine and the associated SAS workshop in San Diego October 30th to November 1st.
