WHEN WILL COMPUTERS BE ABLE TO READ OUR MINDS ?

Technology is already enabling computers to read our minds.

Think of the possibilities that could result from technology that reads your your thoughts. How about an app that knows what your friend wants for dinner so you don’t have to ask or kows the music to play when you get home based on your thinking about it earlier in the day. Convenience and time savings would be huge and the possibilities are endless.

Elon Musk’s company Neuralink is to link the brain to a computer by installing slender electrodes. “If you can connect these signals you can solve everything from memory loss, hearing loss, blindness, paralysis depression, insomnia, extreme pain, seizures, anxiety, addiction, strokes, brain damage; these can all be solved with an implantable neural link,” Musk said at the demonstration of the technology, which also unexpectedly featured live pigs that had actually been implanted with the company’s electrodes.

It would be pretty cool and do a lot of good if Musk is right. You can watch the demo with pigs that have the technology installed here.

BCI Is Coming Soon.

Not only is Musk in on the BCI action, but researchers have shown they can translate brain activity into synthetic speech or text by recording and decoding neural signals, using AI algorithms. So yes, computers are already reading our minds in the research lab.

Guess who else is behind a lot of this research? Facebook.

Don’t tell me you are surprised.

Read more about this technology and what it might mean here .

What Will The Decade Of The 2020's Look Like ?

There are a lot of similarities between the 1920’s and the 2020’s !

I recently wrote a post in the futurists blog titled, “When Reflecting Back on The Roaring Twenties The 2020’s Should Be an Equally Interesting Decade With Great Promise and Terrifying Risk”.

Indeed there are many interesting parallels between the roaring 20’s and current times, although they may not be obvious yet. Sometimes we can forget and lose perspective about what was happening way back when after the Spanish Flu was extinguished in 1919. The history is fascinating and when put in the context of today’s rapid technological and cultural change, the hopeful end of COVID19, and its impact on people’s lives, the comparison helps create a parallel between the post Spanish Flu era and today and what may lie ahead.

As with Amazon today, more frequently anything not available in a local store in the early years of the 20th century, could be ordered by mail . The Montgomery Ward catalog was first issued in 1872, with Sears first publishing theirs in 1894. Mail-order business emerged in Europe at the end of the 19th century as well. By 1900, Sears was fulfilling 100,000 orders a day, and its catalog featured coats, furnaces, furniture, shoes, and even homes. Sears sold over 70,000 mail-order homes between 1908 and 1940. The expansion of mail order was largely enabled by the Parcel Post, which came to be in the US in 1913; Fed-Ex anyone?

Read more about the similarities between one hundred years ago and now here.