For those of us who worry that Facebook may have serious boundary issues when it comes to the personal information of its users, Mark Zuckerberg's recent comments at Harvard should get the heart racing. Zuckerberg dropped by the university last month ostensibly as part of a year of conversations with experts about the role of technology in society, "the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties." His nearly two-hour interview with Harvard law school professor Jonathan Zittrain in front of Facebook cameras and a classroom of students centered on the company's unprecedented position as a town square for perhaps 2 billion people. To hear the young CEO tell it, Facebook was taking shots from all sides--either it was indifferent to the ethnic hatred festering on its platforms or it was a heavy-handed censor deciding whether an idea was allowed to be expressed. Zuckerberg confessed that he hadn't sought out such an awesome responsibility.

For those of us who worry that Facebook may have serious boundary issues when it comes to the personal information of its users, Mark Zuckerberg's recent comments at Harvard should get the heart racing. Zuckerberg ostensibly dropped by the university last month as part of a year of conversations with experts about the role of technology in society, "the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties." His nearly two-hour interview with the Harvard law school professor Jonathan Zittrain in front of Facebook cameras and a classroom of students centered on the company's unprecedented position as a town square for perhaps two billion people. To hear the young CEO tell it, Facebook was taking shots from all sides--either it was indifferent to the ethnic hatred festering on its platforms or it was a heavy-handed censor deciding whether an idea was allowed to be expressed. Zuckerberg confessed that he hadn't sought out such an awesome responsibility.

AI can now guess what tune you're singing in your head - without you ever uttering a sound. Scientists in California have created a mind-reading machine that reveals the song being thought about simply by studying the brain's electrical activity. The finding opens the door to strange future scenarios, such as those portrayed in the series'Black Mirror', where AI can record and playback everything you've ever seen and heard. The finding opens the door to strange future scenarios, such as those portrayed in the series'Black Mirror', where AI can record and playback everything you've ever seen and heard Researcher Brian Pasley has previously used a deep-learning algorithm trained with brain activity, to turn a person's thoughts into digital speech. His team has now improved on that earlier research and applied the findings to music to create a new AI.

Scientists have developed an astonishing mind-reading machine which can translate what you are thinking and instantly display it as text. They claim that it has an accuracy rate of 90 per cent or more and say that it works by interpreting consonants and vowels in our brains. The researchers believe that the machine could one day help patients who suffer from conditions that don't allow them to speak or move. The machine registers and analyses the combination of vowels and consonants that we use when constructing a sentence in our brains. It interprets these sentences based on neural signals and can translate them into text in real time.

Scientists have discovered a way to reconstruct the images in a person's mind. In a new study, researchers concluded that it's possible to visualize a person's memory using only an fMRI machine and some machine learning software. For the study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the researchers showed 23 participants hundreds of faces while hooked up to an fMRI machine. While they were looking at the faces, an AI program was learning to associate their perception of certain features with different brain activity. Then, once the machine has learned which activity corresponds to which feature, the participants are shown a picture of a brand-new face, and the machine reconstructs it.

If you think your mind is the only safe place left for all your secrets, think again, because scientists are making real steps towards reading your thoughts and putting them on a screen for everyone to see. A team from the University of Oregon has built a system that can read people's thoughts via brain scans, and reconstruct the faces they were visualising in their heads. As you'll soon see, the results were pretty damn creepy. "We can take someone's memory - which is typically something internal and private - and we can pull it out from their brains," one of the team, neuroscientist Brice Kuhl, told Brian Resnick at Vox. The researchers selected 23 volunteers, and compiled a set of 1,000 colour photos of random people's faces.

A team from the University of Oregon have developed a system that can read people's thoughts via brain scans, and rebuild the faces they were visualising in their heads. The study, led by Brice Kuhl and Hongmi Lee from the University of Oregon, used artificial intelligence (AI) that analysed brain activity in an attempt to reconstruct one of a series of faces that participants were seeing. It's not an exact science, but the AI did get close. "We can take someone's memory – which is typically something internal and private – and we can pull it out from their brains," Kuhl told Vox. "Some people use different definitions of mind reading, but certainly, that's getting close," Kuhl told Vox. Kuhl and his colleague Lee recently published a paper in The Journal of Neuroscience with a conclusion straight out of science fiction: Kuhl and Lee created images directly from memories using an MRI, some machine learning software, and a few hapless human guinea pigs.