A new device can hear your thoughts

Rachel Slade, Medium:

Improbably, AlterEgo, the soundless, voiceless, earbud-less device he’d been working on for the last two years had become adept enough at reading his thoughts that he could use it to order an Uber without saying a word.

And:

Kapur wants to perfect a device that allows users to communicate with A.I. as effortlessly as one’s left brain talks to one’s right brain, so that humans can integrate the power of the Internet into their thinking at every level.

And:

One night, Kapur and his brother were testing the device in their Cambridge apartment. Kapur was wearing the device and Shreyas was monitoring the computer screen. They’d rigged the device to track signals in real time so that Shreyas could note the exact moment it picked up something, if anything.

It was getting late. Kapur had been speaking silently into the device for a couple of hours — having programmed it to understand just two words: yes and no — without any meaningful results.

Then Shreyas thought he saw something. A blip on the screen.

To me, this is the sort of device that Big Tech ought to be building, something that allows you to interface with your personal AI and with the world it connects to, all without saying a word, by purposeful thinking.

There are dangers, of course, as those ad companies do their level best to connect directly with your brain. But still, I find this fascinating.