By Aaron Kesel
Facebook-backed research on brain reading has transmitted thoughts to speech, as we take a step towards pre-crime becoming a reality. Meanwhile, in an unrelated development, the FBI has demanded a “social media early alerting tool” that will help monitor terrorist groups, foreign intelligence services, criminal organizations and other domestic threats before they act. In other words, thought crimes and pre-crime -- something that Facebook no doubt can help with its new brain-reading technology.
Two years ago in 2017, Facebook announced that it was working on a brain-computer interface (BCI) with 60 people on the project, The Guardian reported. The BCI is designed to let users type by simply thinking their words. The company has now revealed for the first time how far it’s come to make such a device a reality.
“Imagine a world where all the knowledge, fun, and utility of today’s smartphones were instantly accessible and completely hands-free,” reads a Facebook blog post from today. “Where you could connect with others in a meaningful way, regardless of external distractions, geographic constraints, and even physical disabilities and limitations.”
A research partnership between scientists at the University of California San Francisco, who want to help disabled people speak again, and Facebook, which seeks to enable typing with one's mind, has achieved the feat of decoding thoughts to text.
This builds on previous research by the researchers where they developed a brain implant that could turn signals into synthesized speech, New Atlas reported. The study involved three human volunteers who had a small patch of electrodes implanted on the surface of their brains (exactly like the CIA's MKUltra programs.) The team posed a series of nine questions to the volunteers, while using the newly developed machine learning algorithms to turn their brain signals into translated speech. The results were instantaneous and in real time, something that science hasn't been able to accomplish until now.
The applicable use of helping disabled people speak again is a good cause. The latter involving Facebook having the ability to read thoughts and then decode that to text so its users can use the sanctity of their own minds to post on the social media platform is a scary prospect. Especially given that Facebook has had data scandal after data scandal abusing users' data.
Does anyone seriously want to allow Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook inside their private and intimate thoughts? If you do please feel inclined to write, "I love you Mark, have my data and my thoughts," in orange sharpie on your forehead and make yourself visible during Congress' next open hearing on Facebook.
Activist Post previously reported that Facebook wants a robot that has five senses which can read human emotions. Facebook wants “emotionally sensitive” robots that can explore the world, identify objects and people and enable its users to make more friends. Imagine Facebook's pitch for wanting to be inside your head and read your thoughts. It will probably go something like this, "Facebook wants to use your thoughts to enable you to meet more liked minds and allow you the user to post your thoughts in real time just by thinking up a post."
I am not sure why anyone would trust Facebook with data ever again, let alone biometric data and their thoughts, after all the numerous scandals Activist Post has documented including data mining. But to each their own I guess.
Facebook isn't the only company that wants to read your thoughts, Activist Post reported just two years ago in 2017, that a former Google[x] exec Mary Lou Jepsen wanted to enable telepathy with a ski hat.
“I figured out how to put basically the functionality of an M.R.I. machine — a multimillion-dollar M.R.I. machine — into a wearable in the form of a ski hat,” Jepson told CNBC.
Current M.R.I. technology can already see your thoughts: “If I threw you into an M.R.I. machine right now … I can tell you what words you’re about to say, what images are in your head. I can tell you what music you’re thinking of,” Jepsen previously said. “That’s today, and I’m talking about just shrinking that down,” she added.
Jepsen isn’t the only Silicon valley technocrat trying to push mind-reading technology.
Earlier this year, Elon Musk launched Neuralink, a company with a trans-humanist agenda whose aim is to merge our brains with computers.
“Elon Musk is talking about silicon nanoparticles pulsing through our veins to make us sort of semi-cyborg computers,” Jepsen said. But why not take a noninvasive approach? “I’ve been working and trying to think and invent a way to do this for a number of years and finally happened upon it and left Facebook to do it,” Jepsen continues.
For years, this type of technology has been successfully tested starting with the CIA testing electrodes to read thoughts during MKUltra, the “Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab” or PEAR for short and MIT.
From 1953 to 1973, the CIA was involved with all sorts of projects including — mind control, and reading, remote viewing and other experiments allegedly to target the Soviets and politicians. However, the experiments were done on non-consenting test subjects. And the official number of those tested is unknown since CIA Director Richard Helms destroyed all the records pertaining to the project.
In 2010, it was first announced that Intel had created technology to dictate letters and search the Internet simply by interpreting words as they are thought, according to researchers, Telegraph.co.uk reported.
That same year, researchers at Utah University were able to translate brain signals into speech using sensors attached to the surface of the brain for the first time with an accuracy of 90 percent, a now-deleted article by Telegraph stated. (archived.)
One year later in 2011, scientists decoded brain signals related to vision expanding on the capabilities that were possible before with an article by Dailymail entitled: "Could a mind-reading machine soon be a reality? Scientists 'decode' human brainwaves."
In 2012, security researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Oxford and the University of Geneva successfully created a custom program to interface with brain-computer interface (BCI) devices and steal personal information from unsuspecting victims. The researchers had discovered findings that were nothing short of disturbing. They found “that this upcoming technology could be turned against users to reveal their private and secret information.”
Two years later, scientists first declared a successful brain-to-brain data transfer from country to country, between a person sitting in India to a receiving person in France in 2014.
Journal PLOSone reported that the first brain-to-brain interface was achieved, and that “brain stimulation techniques are now available for the realization of non-invasive computer-brain interfaces.” They summarize the history of this research as follows:
The evolution of civilization points to a progressive increase of the interrelations between human minds, where by “mind” we mean a set of processes carried out by the brain [1]. Until recently, the exchange of communication between minds or brains of different individuals has been supported and constrained by the sensorial and motor arsenals of our body. However, there is now the possibility of a new era in which brains will dialogue in a more direct way [2]. … Pioneering research in the 60’s using non-invasive means already demonstrated the voluntary control of alpha rhythm de-synchronization to send messages based on Morse code [11]. Over the last 15 years, technologies for non-invasive transmission of information from brains to computers have developed considerably, and today brain-computer interfaces embody a well-established, innovative field of study with many potential applications [12]–[16]. Recent work has demonstrated fully non-invasive human to rat B2B communication by combining motor imagery driven EEG in humans on the BCI side with ultrasound brain stimulation on the CBI-rat side [17]. … Here we show how to link two human minds directly by integrating two neurotechnologies – BCI and CBI –, fulfilling three important conditions, namely a) being non-invasive, b) cortically based, and c) consciously driven (Fig. 1). In this framework we provide the first demonstration of non-invasive direct communication between human minds. (emphasis added)The method used was Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, which has shown the most promise in directly accessing the brain and “thought.”
The U.S. military also sought the ability to brain scan troops for signs of betrayal during that same year in 2014 using a system called HandShake as Activist Post reported.
Recently, in 2016, researchers at the University of Oregon, were said to have developed a system that could read people’s thoughts via brain scans, and rebuild the faces they were visualizing in their heads.
Now the technology used for “intracranial recording” is being commercialized and has evolved from being electrodes implanted into one's brain, to soon to be packaged in small products.
What’s even scarier is that the ability to transcribe thoughts into speech or written form could be used by government authorities to create an Orwellian Society of surveillance like that out of George Orwell’s 1984 where we are monitored for thought crimes. Ironically, this is something that the FBI, Pentagon and DARPA wants; while one wants the ability to monitor social media users posts and thoughts before a potential criminals acts, which will no doubt be easier with this technology, the other wants mind-controlled soldiers using technology such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
Further, during the DAVOS meeting in 2016, Truthstream Media’s Melissa Dykes warned that elite were talking about implementing brain decoding technology without your consent into the legal system.
Technology is about to openly bring us an era where government authorities can read people’s minds without their permission and use it against them including in court, pre-crime, thought police/thought crime and labeling people including children as potential criminals based on their brainwaves.
As we move forward into our future, we are allowing an Orwellian society to be created for us by Silicon Valley that is backed by the CIA. Sooner rather than later, pre-crime seen in movies like the Minority Report could become a reality.
The military is the guinea pig testing ground for what will eventually trickle down to the rest of us. Everything from drugs to erase traumatic memories, to transcranial ultrasonic helmets, to complete computer-brain interfacing.
“To me the brain is the one safe place for freedom of thought, of fantasies, and for dissent,” Nita Farahany, a professor at Duke University who specializes in neuro-ethics, told MIT Technology Review. “We’re getting close to crossing the final frontier of privacy in the absence of any protections whatsoever.”
It’s not a matter of will this technology be abused, it’s a matter of when it will be abused. Everyone deserves their own safe space inside their head free from outside criticism. Not to mention implementing a technology like this where hackers will seek to exploit the technology, creating a dangerous situation for the users who knows what is capable. While worst of all this technology will be used for pre-crimes, giving DAVOS elitists and the FBI exactly what they want: the ability to police people's thoughts.
Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post. Support us at Patreon. Follow us on Minds, Steemit, SoMee, BitChute, Facebook and Twitter.
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