Conversations with creators and thinkers who are charting the way forward in a tech-saturated society. Tech, community, video games, and whatever else is next.

May 8, 2023: Nita Farahany, author, "The Battle for Your Brain"

Listen to this show: MP3 - 128K |  Pop-up player!

Today: Nita Farahany, author, “The Battle for Your Brain”

• The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

• nitafarahany.com, Nita’s author site

• AI makes non-invasive mind-reading possible by turning thoughts into text (The Guardian, May 1, 2023): “An AI-based decoder that can translate brain activity into a continuous stream of text has been developed, in a breakthrough that allows a person’s thoughts to be read non-invasively for the first time. The decoder could reconstruct speech with uncanny accuracy while people listened to a story – or even silently imagined one – using only fMRI scan data.”

• A Mind-Reading AI Translated People’s Brain Scans Into Words and Sentences (The Daily Beast, May 1, 2023): "the subjects told five 1-minute stories while recorded by the fMRI. They then told the stories aloud to provide reference transcripts. The study’s authors were able to identify the story that the subjects were telling after decoding their brain scans. While the decoder wasn’t perfect and could only translate broader thoughts and ideas, it still matched the accuracy of the actual transcripts more closely than if things were left to pure chance."

Sign up to get Mark’s weekly email newsletter.

PAST EPISODES: techtonic.fm lists recent Techtonic shows.

PODCAST: Subscribe to the Techtonic podcast