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Well I guess you could link brain patterns to thoughts, but how do you gonna read them without a 5 ton MRI machine?

Who's to say a MRI machine has to weigh 5 tons 5 years from now? I imagine people once said "Sure it's great to store your recipes in a computer, but who wants to do that on a room sized computer?"

Gauss and Maxwell say.

They do and they don't. Yes, it is true that MRI machines weigh 5 tons because of the magnetic fields generated and the amount of hardware required to constrain those fields.

But you could imagine an MRI machine that works with lower strength fields and better sensor technology. Imagining one is a far cry from being able to build one though and I don't see this happening in the near future (if at all).

I think this prediction (like most of IBM's predictions about the future) is strong on marketing and very weak on science.

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