We're cursed by our own creativity. The tech has a handful of positive use-cases, and a seemingly infinite number of nightmarish abuses that even its inventors are terrified of. But they will continue to develop the tech, or someone else will in their place. It's a huge, exciting, valuable advancement that could change the history of our species - not exactly the sort of thing anyone would want to just walk away from.

It's not the most dangerous thing that man has ever built, but it is dangerous, and it's probably the most uncomfortably personal.

The following was encouraging:

> In late 2021, the scientists began to run new experiments. First, they were curious if an algorithm trained on one person could be used on another. They found that it could not — the decoder’s efficacy depended on many hours of individualized training. Next, they tested whether the decoder could be thrown off simply by refusing to cooperate with it. Instead of focusing on the story that was playing through their headphones while inside the fMRI machine, participants were asked to complete other mental tasks, such as naming random animals, or telling a different story in their head. “Both of those rendered it completely unusable,” Huth said. “We didn’t decode the story they were listening to, and we couldn’t decode anything about what they were thinking either.”