With every passing day, life in America comes closer and closer to resembling a science fiction novel instead of reality. New devices and apps arrive everyday that make our lives easier — at least in theory — but also provide plenty of potential dangers as well. As the old adage goes, this is why we can’t have nice things. See, a new technology is currently being developed that could change the way we go about our daily lives — but it also opens up the door for all sorts of technological terrors.

Mind-reading computers are on the horizon and while that may sound exciting to you, there are some frightening implications as well. For starters, some of our thoughts should remain private. We don’t need everything out in the open. So how exactly would this work? A system called electrocorticography uses a brain-to-text system in order to predict what people are going to say. Surprisingly, it’s quite accurate and is only getting more advanced.

Abigail Beall of Daily Mail reports, “Earlier this year researchers at the University of Rochester revealed a computer program that searches for the brain activity related to certain words and then use this to predict a sentence being thought, even it hasn’t seen it before. They said the system is able to get the predictions right around 70 per cent of the time.”

If this device were only used for good deeds, then there wouldn’t be anything to worry about. But as we are reminded of every day in 2016, whenever people have the opportunity to commit evils, they most definitely will. There’s so much corruption and hatred in the world today that it never comes as much of a surprise when people do horrible things. Advancements in technology have made committing many of these things even easier. When you have the power to read people’s minds, do we really expect the public at large to use it responsibly?

Scientists continue to explore new plains in regards to technology, but very few people are questioning whether or not this is a good idea. While it is easy to say that we should always continue the search for new knowledge, there comes a time when it is clear that nothing good will come out of these discoveries. As Dr. Ian Malcolm states in Jurassic Park, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Sources:

MedicalXpress.com

DailyMail.co.uk

ScienceDaily.com