Dancing cheek to cheek may have been “the” way to get close to someone’s thoughts back in Fred Astaire’s day, but these days you can literally get into someone else’s head.
Matrix-style brain-to-brain internet (aka the Internet of People) is here.
Mind reading? No problem!
Japanese scientists can now de-code your thoughts into visuals that depict what you are thinking with surprising accuracy. Good luck foiling the thought police going forward.
(If you’re interested in exploring this modern-day magic further, this TED talk explains more on how mind-reading works in the real world: )
Inception? You got it.
One-way brain to machine interfaces using EEG (electroencephalography) have been around for a while. South Africa’s BraInternet project, for example, was an early pioneer of “uploading” the human brain to the internet.
Other examples of one-way brain computing include these ingenious mind-controlled gadgets:
(Jealous? You can get yourself an EEG helmet on Amazon if you want to try turn yourself into a human Alexa, $79.99 is all it costs to become a super-hero these days.)
However, that was just the first step, EEG can now facilitate two way communication.
This means a human brain can both project and receive “thoughts” from external entities – i.e. inception.
Scientists were able to get a person in India to “incept” a thought into a person in France’s mind. They successfully converted the Indian subjects’s thoughts into code, then emailed that code to France where the code was re-converted into brain waves directed into the French subject’s consciousness. (“Hola” and “ciao” were the sum-total of the conversation, incase you were wondering.)
Telepathy? Why not?
Of course, mind reading and inception is just a step along the way to developing full-on Transhuman superpowers. Telepathy is now a real thing, not the stuff of Stephen King horror novels.
For example, you can now play telepathic Tetris with a few of your closest friends:
The Moment, “Mind control movie” is another example of our coming computer-aided superpowers. Viewers wear an EEG helmet connected to the computer playing the movie which then adapts, changing music, visuals and plot action, according to the wearer’s emotions and heart rate. In theory, the movie is different every time it is viewed; like a sub-conscious choose-you-own-adventure story. You can watch the trailer here:
Ray Kurzeweil believes we will have mass-scale could connected hybrid brains – an effective human hive-mind by 2030.
Welcome to the Internet of People – or what I like to call The Consensus – because when all our brains all connected to the Internet at the same time, we all effectively become nodes in a single super-brain, sharing the same thoughts, simultaneously. This is Group Think on a level not even Orwell considered.