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Who controls your mind? With mind-reading technology already showing incredible accuracy, is it time to ask who owns our thoughts?

Produced by Jeff Sandhu for BFM

Episode Excerpt:

You’re already making us sound like machines…
•We are machines.
•But we’re thinking, feeling, sensing and self-determining machines.
•We’re conscious.
•You can press a button or issue a command that will wake Siri or Alexa, but the best those devices are is a one-dimensional representation of who and what we are.
•We haven’t found a way to mimic or replicates that consciousness.
•Yet.

And now we can? This is another one of your killer AI shows?
•There will be plenty of AI.
•It’s weird, isn’t it?
•I talk about 3-D printing twice in a year and I have an obsession.
•We could literally rename this show Matt and Jeff talk about AI and nobody would bat an eyelid.

Or pulse a chip?
•Precisely. To answer your previous question, no we don’t have conscious AI.
•But strangely, and I expect somewhat creepily to some of our listeners, we can use AI in various ways to unlock the secrets of our brains.

Is this like tweaking your DNA in a garage? Something you can do because you can?
•One of the reasons we’ve been so preoccupied with creating humanoid robots is precisely because we have so little understanding of what makes us conscious.
•I’m going to stick with technology rather than philosophy today, mainly because my philosophy knowledge is probably equivalent of a 16-year-old who study selfies rather than philosophy.
•And at least with technology I can lie and makes things up and nobody will find out till later.
•Understanding the brain is a bit like decoding our personality or our sense of self.

The last frontier of medicine?
•I wouldn’t go quite that far.
•Our bodies still contain plenty of mystery.
•Like the appendix. Its only purpose seems to be to create excruciating pain and ruin family holidays.
•We’ve certainly become much better at the routine mechanical parts of medicine.
•If your car gets in an accident you can just pop down to the junkyard and that some panels off another wreck and you’re as good as new.
•Same with people. We can replace arms, legs and the wiggly bits that attach to them.

We can turn our insides into bak kut teh our insides.
•For those listeners who don’t know what bak kut teh is, honestly, don’t Google it you’re better off not knowing.
•It really stretches the definition of what food is and should be.
•Yes you make a valid point we can replace organs.
•We can even perform face transplants, which is incredible, odd and slightly frightening.
•When it comes to our brains were bit like mountaineers attempting to scale at peak for the first time.
•We’ve got maps that take us some of the way, but, on the whole it’s a maddening game of trial and error

All of which is taking us further away from machines that can read our thoughts…
•I’m Setting the scene, and that’s all.
•On Geeks we have to race through the stories. Here we can give them room to breathe.