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PK: From IoT to IoH, ahem, Humans?

The movie is out and is getting rave reviews as expected but did you spot one key take-away apart from non-stop giggles and non-stop heart-touching tears

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Pratima Harigunani
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PK Movie

INDIA: Rajkumar Hirani and Aamir Khan have done their magic yet again, this time leaving us with a lot more Tiramisu for thought and action in our usually harried, shallow, myopic lives.

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Without spoiling the plot for those of you who are still looking forward to catching a whiff of that hypnotic stuff this weekend, we would leave you with a question to tug along with some popcorns as you enter or step out of the movie.

Have you ever wondered whether it would be indeed a good thing if humans could read each other’s minds in ‘precise’ terms, with no scope for that ‘ambiguity’ or that generous (intangible) grammar of vague spaces that allow us to live our lives comfortably.

Would it really poke a big needle in the bubble of convenience that all our languages, including computer ones and coding scripts, have manufactured so far? Would we really like it if a language or intelligent tool would steal from us the ability to spare the exact words and feelings we are nursing inside, while expressing something else?

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This year has been a lot about Internet of Things. The notion of Internet of Humans though, would be a phenomenon altogether, if ever accomplished.

This debate, said and unsaid, continues even as attempts have been on through this decade and beyond in chasing the elusive recipe of letting one mind connect to another.

We have heard of military mind-reading binoculars, scary brain-hacking missions, brain scan softwares that read your thoughts and what not. From efforts like the FaceSense project to MIT's Mind Reading Helmet, a number of hours, bucks and volunteer minds have been spent and both apron-wearers and suits have striven indefatigably to penetrate the mystery of the ultimate form of communication between brains.

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Their applications and purported goals also vary from espionage to daily lifestyle improvement to bigger humanitarian targets.

For instance, the Emotional Social Intelligence Prosthetic was a device being made to help people with autism learn to better read the social cues of others, using subconscious notice and analysis of nonverbal cues, facial expressions and head movements that are regularly used by humans to grasp the emotional states of others.

The pursuit across labs and desks and drawing boards has traversed prototypes, artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, multilevel, probabilistic architecture, Dynamic Bayesian Networks and hierarchical models, mechanisms to people perceive facial and other human behavior, modelling for digging into uncertainty inherent in the process of attributing mental states to others, matrix of probabilities and more.

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Arlene Ducao’s wearable mind-reading device went towards the idea of a bicycle helmet with an EEG sensor that displayed the wearer's stress levels, indicated mental state by flashing a visual vocabulary of traffic lights and used a NeuroSky MindSet, picking up ten types of brainwaves that signal emotions like concentration, fear and anxiety. Its next set of goals was expanding the range of mental states detected, like mood, road rage and the whole enchilada.

Many systems have been designed to make humans more interactive with computers too, and examples like software that use brain scans to determine what items people are thinking through functional MRI scans that trace the parts of a person's brain being activated as he or she thinks; have been notable milestones.

There have been technologies on the path of helping the severely physically disabled to communicate and also experiments that enable humans to control technology with our minds.

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Interaxon, an Ontario-based startup was a good instance of thought-controlled computing, with work devoted on a brainwave-reading headband. May be one day like the fitness wearables already strewn across the industry this year, we will have accessories that sync with apps on tablets and smartphones for recording a user’s emotions, mood, level of concentration and memory .

Rana el Kaliouby's doctoral research illustrates how academic work has been equally attracted to this field as adrenaline-pumped start-ups and labs have been. The work presented a computational model of mind reading as a framework for machine perception and mental state recognition well enough.

Some years back, in an interview with CIOL, Cyborg and Cybernetics expert and computer wizard Kevin Warwick had stressed his strong belief on the possibility of transmitting signals directly between two (or more) human brains. As he quipped, “As long as the signals are learnt then I cannot see that we will need words any more – but it really will open up the possibility of communicating more abstract concepts, feelings, ideas, colours, images etc.”

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He often wonders that humans have limited capabilities and humans sense the world in a restricted way, vision being the best of the senses. Humans understand the world in only three dimensions and communicate in a very slow, serial fashion called speech. But can this be improved on? Can we use technology to upgrade humans? There are more questions he continues asking in books like ‘I, Cyborg’ where he narrates first-hand accounts of becoming a Cyborg.

As he describes it – it is an astounding and unique story that takes in top scientists from around the globe and seriously questions human morals, values and ethics.

Yet we are tempted to remind you of one thing here. Kevin had started this mysterious quest in August 1998 got a surgically implanted silicon chip transponder in his forearm and then in March 2002 but what he had summed up as his key experience was the one of communicating in a new way with his wife. He had emotionally underlined, “It brought us even closer together – it’s not a bad thing to do for a relationship – much better than buying flowers or a ring!”

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Now, PK may have some superhuman qualities of reading a brain and its entire cognitive, emotional repertoire in a few minutes. But even for that he needs to hold hands.

Isn’t it ironic that of all the technologies the universe is littered with, what stays as a lasting memory is that of a poetic Transistor on PK’s shoulders?

Need we say more?

Mind-reading can sound preternatural but optimizing what our hearts hold is a much more intimidating and significant mission?

Was it Einstein who said “If we are capable of using only ten percent of human brains, what about our hearts?”

Think over and enjoy the fresh and delightful signal from Hirani’s Universe - PK.

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