The things robots can do are pretty amazing, but we’ve also seen the amazing ability of prosthetic limbs to transform lives. Now, we have computers capable of doing some very low level types of mind-reading. It’s not what it seems, they can’t pick up on complete sentences or type papers from your thoughts, but just as a prosthetic limb can by manipulated by a person simply thinking about it, which is how our actual limbs are moved anyway, they are now able to identify individual letters from our thoughts and extend the ability of our movements from thought.

To see something truly amazing, watch this segment form 60 minutes. It shows how machines can read and interpret letters and even intent from thought. If you’re queasy, be aware there are a couple of very mild scenes where a restrained monkey has electrodes implanted into his brain (you can’t see that, though) and a lady who suffered a stroke has been fitted with a coupler attached directly to her skull.

But what it shows is really amazing, and keep in mind this was from 2009! Not only that, a year earlier scientists in Japan were able to determine images someone was seeing based solely on their brain activity. Truly incredible stuff.