From reading your thoughts to chatting with animals, today’s AI is making magic look mundane.Credit: Collagery, Shutterstock
Hold onto your keyboards – the AI revolution isn’t coming. It’s already here, and it’s pulling off stunts that sound more like Black Mirror episodes than real life. From reading your thoughts to chatting with animals, today’s AI is making magic look mundane. You might think ChatGPT writing your emails is impressive – but that’s barely scratching the surface. Here are four absolutely mind-bending things AI is already doing while the rest of us are still asking Siri to set a timer.
1. Reading your mind and drawing your thoughts
No, this isn’t clickbait. Scientists at Osaka University, working with Meta, have trained AI to reconstruct images from brain scans. Using fMRI data, the system can translate what a person is looking at – or even imagining – into a rough but recognisable picture.
Imagine thinking of a dog, and a computer sketching it out based on your brainwaves. That’s exactly what’s happening in the lab.
The images are blurry and not always exact, but they capture shapes, colours, and key details. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s getting close. If you’ve ever wished someone could see what’s in your head – careful what you wish for.
2. Discovering drugs and decoding disease
While Big Pharma takes years to develop treatments, AI is doing it in months. DeepMind’s AlphaFold shocked the scientific world by solving the protein folding problem – predicting the shape of nearly every protein known to science. Meanwhile, Insilico Medicine has used AI to design brand-new drug compounds from scratch.
These aren’t just computer models – some are already entering clinical trials. A machine could end up curing cancer before a human even fully understands it. The bottom line? AI might just become your future pharmacist.
3. Seeing through walls using Wi-Fi
Forget spy cams – researchers at MIT have created RF-Pose, a system that uses Wi-Fi signals to ‘see’ people through walls.
It’s not just motion sensing. This tech can detect your heartbeat, breathing patterns, and even recognise who you are based on how you move – all without a camera in sight.
It’s so sensitive it can tell when you’re anxious or calm just from the way your chest moves. So the next time your Wi-Fi’s acting weird… maybe it’s watching you. Reach for the tin foil hat.
4. Learning to speak dolphin (and bee)
If you thought Finding Nemo was a fantasy, think again. The Earth Species Project is training AI to decode animal languages – from whale song to bee dances.
By analysing hours of audio using machine learning, researchers have found patterns that look a lot like human language: repeated ‘words,’ sentence-like structures, even turn-taking in conversation.
‘We’re starting to see the building blocks of non-human language‘, according to researchers like co-founder Aza Raskin. ‘It’s not science fiction anymore.’ One day soon, you might be able to ask a whale how its day went. Just don’t expect it to be brief.
Final thought: Welcome to the weird new normal
These breakthroughs aren’t decades away. They’re happening now, quietly reshaping science, medicine, and even what it means to be human. AI has gone from novelty to necessity – and it’s only getting started.
So next time you use ChatGPT to fix your grammar, just remember: out there, somewhere, a machine is painting someone’s thoughts, building new medicine, watching people through walls, and whispering to bees.
Still think it’s just a calculator with a good memory?
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