Is there a case for non-dystopian applications for such a project, should it succeed?
I get that we're all driven by curiosity, and the brain is very mysterious, but at some point I really wonder when scientists will start to taboo projects like this for ethical reasons, just like they currently taboo human cloning.
Methods like MVPA (decoding among finite sets of cognitive state classes) are actually widely used for insight in cognitive neuroscience.
Ethical concerns are discussed within the field; most papers had explicit ethics sections and discussions long before AI conferences required them for all submissions. In practice these experiments require a participant lying motionless (≈1-2 mm range) in an MRI scanner with controlled gaze and attention for many hours, and even then zero-shot reconstruction is not really possible; the SNR requires many repetitions.
I get that we're all driven by curiosity, and the brain is very mysterious, but at some point I really wonder when scientists will start to taboo projects like this for ethical reasons, just like they currently taboo human cloning.
Here is a recent study reconstructing the inner perception of optical illusions: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/sciadv.adj3906
Methods like MVPA (decoding among finite sets of cognitive state classes) are actually widely used for insight in cognitive neuroscience.
Ethical concerns are discussed within the field; most papers had explicit ethics sections and discussions long before AI conferences required them for all submissions. In practice these experiments require a participant lying motionless (≈1-2 mm range) in an MRI scanner with controlled gaze and attention for many hours, and even then zero-shot reconstruction is not really possible; the SNR requires many repetitions.