It might sound too good to be true, but Chinese researchers from the Nankai University of Tianjin have invented a mind-controlled car. The past few years have truly been revolutionary for the field of brain-reading and brain-stimulating gadgets. From headsets that pick up brain activity during meditation, to those that stimulate the brain to induce a calm mood, mind/brain gadgets are being developed at an unprecedented pace. The mind-controlled car is part of the series of brain-reading devices, but it stands above the crowd. Why? Well, because you can literally move an actual car, and lock or unlock its doors, by simply intending to do so. And that’s just incredible.
Or maybe not. Just like headsets use electroencephalography (EEG) technology in order to read brain activity, the mind-controlled car uses EEG as well. A total of 16 sensors placed on a brain cap pick up EEG signals from the driver’s brain. These get transmitted to a computer, which has a program specifically designed for picking up the person’s intentions from the raw EEG signals. Basically, the program associates a pattern of EEG signals elicited during specific intentions (“move car forward”, “lock door”, etc) with those same intentions. It then translates the message into the correct actions—moving the car forward or backward, and locking or unlocking its doors.
At this point, you may be worried that you’ll crash your mind-controlled car if you lose focus for a split second. But that’s an unfounded worry, according to Associate Professor Duan Feng from the Nankai University of Tianjin. You only need to be concentrated when you want to change the vehicle’s course of movement—say, when you want to reverse instead of continuing to go forward, changing lanes, etc. Otherwise, the car moves itself, and there’s no need for you to be super vigilant at all times. Think of the car as being on auto pilot—you only need to intervene when necessary.
The car was originally designed to help disabled people who are physically unable to drive. But in the words of a researcher who worked on the project, the second aim of the project is “to provide healthy people with a new and more intellectualized driving mode.” But what does this mean, really, and why should we think it offers any more of an intellectualized driving mode than, say, a speech-controlled car? In a recent Forbes piece, Federico Guerrini brings up this point, arguing that the benefits of a mind-controlled car are not so clear, especially given the fact that speech-controlled cars, and cars preprogrammed to follow a certain route, are being developed at MIT Labs in Singapore.
And it’s difficult to see how the mind-controlled car can complete with these two alternatives. For one thing, the intentions that can be picked up by the computer program are currently severely limited, and so the movements one can initiate are quite basic. But even if this problem is solved, it just seems easier to speak to the car than to think about what it is that you want to do, and even easier if you preprogram your car to go to x destination while you sit back and relax.
According to Duan Feng, the mind-controlled car should not be seen as competing with the driverless car (such as the Google Self Driving Car), but as complementing it. “In the end,” he says, “cars, whether driverless or not, and machines are serving for people. Under such circumstances, people’s intentions must be recognized. In our project, it makes the cars better serve human beings.” That’s probably true, but a speech-controlled or preprogrammed car can just as well read a person’s intentions.
So what advantages does the mind-controlled car have over these two alternatives? Not much, at least not yet.
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