News You Can't Use: Robots Could Soon Read Your Mind

It's very important that we somehow gain access to those sweet cranial electrical storms for the purpose of selling you products and not otherwise specified evil. In the past it wasn't easy and we had to rely on sharpened rocks and the like to get at the old head mush. The end result was barely worth the effort. Fortunately you and I are living in the best moment in all of human history (tomorrow will be even better!) and the technology for stamping out day dreaming, gaining easier thought crime convictions and selling, selling, selling based on frontal lobe invasion is near at hand.  And it's going to be robots! The future! I can barely believe it, honest.

Robots could soon be able to read your mind - and we won't be able to stop them because there are no laws against it, experts claim.

If only there were laws, that would stop it. Just like how they wiped out marijuana abuse and jaywalking. Please, elected officials, pass more laws and save us from the mind-reader bots. If you don't we'll be stuck with having to try to constantly think "Down with Big Robot!" as a pathetic and impotent final act of defiance.

If expert predictions come true, by 2030 smartphones, tablets and computers will be able to examine our brain activity to see what we are thinking.

Nice to see the "Flying car by 1965!" brigade hasn't lost any of their optimism for a high tech nightmare world.

Initially this will be used for security as a kind of 'pass thought' - the user thinks of a specific song or thought which the device recognises and then unlocks itself.

Hold on, let me concentrate on this highly detailed sexual/violence fantasy that unlocks my device so I can play some Angry Birds go to Brazil.

But a panel at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, warned of the terrifying possibility of hackers reading people's innermost thoughts.

Have you even considered the horrors this will unleash? Horrors like poorly written and completely unengaging "dystopia" novels about this possibility. Can we still love and chase nihilistic individuality in a world with hackers reading our thoughts? Find out next year in the artistically important new release "Summer of 1987."

"It turns out every person thinks quite differently about the same thing.

Your pathetic human minds full of stupidity and worthless non-collectivism. Prepare to be absorbed.

"So you could think like a song or a little ditty in your head while you are wearing a consumer based EEG device and then that, which has a unique neural signature, can be used as your pass code.

I guess you could just type in a word or whatever, but come on, future! Put these electrodes on, dawg.

"It turns out that's an incredibly effective, incredibly safe and almost impossible to replicate pass code, so there is discussion about using pass thoughts."

No one else could ever correctly visual the music video for "Last Christmas." No way.

She added: "Then you've got to really think about privacy."

Thinking about my love of privacy is my new pass thought.

But she warned once out there, "not good Samaritans" could access the data. 

I am aware of reality, at least in a highly abstract fashion.

One of these in every house.

"The idea that law is going to help us is not likely." 

There's some refreshing cynicism.

"There are no legal protections from having your mind involuntarily read," she added.

I'm pretty sure the Witchcraft and Devilry Act of 1691 covers at least some of that territory, actually.

Robot teaching assistants were also predicted at during the panel discussion.

Just when you thought that Geology 103: Rocks for Jocks lab session couldn't be any more half-assed.

"So I am imagining a world where we all have a bunch of cognitive assistants helping us."

We used to call them "family and friends" but let's get with the times.

Full Story. 

Aaron Zehner is the author of "The Foolchild Invention" available in paperback and e-book format. Read free excerpts here and here.