Startling results: ‘Brain-computer interface’ allows user to move objects with mind (VIDEO)

VRT journalist Tim Verheyden said his “hair stood on end” when he was able to move a little ball with his brain. Verheyden was wearing a “brain computer interface” being developed at the famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.

Flemish scientist Pattie Maes is the director of MIT’s Fluid Interfaces research group. The interface looks like a normal  pair of glasses. “They have sensors built in that can read your brain wave activity using EEG as well as determine your eye movements,” explains professor Maes. “From there, we can detect a lot of information about the brain, like how tired you are or how focused you are.”

Using them to determine how attentive a person is could help with the treatment of ADHD and other attention-deficit disorders, she says. “Through the brain waves, the device can tell if someone is actually listening to someone else at a given moment. The system can provide feedback if you appear to be drifting off thinking of other things.”

More spectacularly, the technology could help people with advanced ALS to communicate. While these patients cannot speak or blink their eyes, they could use their brains – which function normally. Coupling the technology with an app could allow them to look at letters and spell out words and sentences. Their words would be spoken by the app.

Maes earned her doctorate in AI at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in the 1980s, long before the public was using the term. She is a pioneer in the theory of Human Augmentation, preferring it over developing smart machines.

“Companies like Open AI, Google and Microsoft are working on smart machines,” she says. “Not really robots yet, but they try to give them physical forms so that they can manipulate things in real life. OpenAI promises that this will improve our lives. There’s nothing wrong wiht that, but I think we would do better to focus on augumented intelligence in human beings, to help us become super intelligent.”

Maes says that augmented intelligence, through as the use of tools like brain computer interface, can help people to do and achieve what they currently cannot do and achieve. Others “want to recreate intelligence in machines and essentially surpass human intelligence,” she says. “The whole goal is to take over from us. But I like to work. I don’t want a universal basic income while an AI system does my job because it is so much more intelligent than me.”

She realised 30 years ago, she says, “that there is actually a second direction in computer science, and that’s human augmentation – using technology to augment human capabilities so that we can all become superhumans. I’ve always found that vision a lot more compelling.”