Would You Let An AI Read Your Mind?

The 38 years old Finnish science fiction author, along with data scientist friend Samuel Halliday, got his hands on a simple wearable brain scanner and started wondering how he could use the technology to tell more engaging stories. So in 2012, they came up with a story that could be read wearing the wireless headset, and branch and change depending on whether the reader showed more affinity for life or death imagery. Think of it as a modern version of the text-only interactive games of the late 70's, or a Choose Your Own Adventure eBook, but where your brain's electrical activity determines the choices. The project has been open-sourced to encourage innovation, meaning with a $400 piece of hardware, some machine learning and writing skills, everyone can venture into the depths of the design space created by emerging brain-computer interface technologies. While there is a lot of fuss these days around whether we can make artificial intelligence (or AI) truly intelligent, giving'brains' to machines might not always be enough.