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Pinneo is convinced that this barely passing grade can be vastly improved. He foresees the day when computers will be able to recognize the smallest units in the English language—the 40-odd basic sounds (or phonemes) out of which all words or verbalized thoughts can be constructed. Such skills could be put to many practical uses. The pilot of a high-speed plane or spacecraft, for instance, could simply order by thought alone some vital flight information for an all-purpose cockpit display. There would be no need to search for the right dials or switches on a crowded instrument panel.
Pinneo does not worry that mind-reading computers might be abused by Big Brotherly governments or overly zealous police trying to ferret out the innermost thoughts of citizens. Rather than a menace, he says, they could be a highly civilizing influence. In the future, Pinneo speculates, technology may well be sufficiently advanced to feed information from the computer directly back into the brain. People with problems, for example, might don mind-reading helmets ("thinking caps") that let the computer help them untangle everything from complex tax returns to matrimonial messes. Adds Pinneo: "When the person takes this thing off, he might feel pretty damn dumb."
* A word coined by the late computer theorist Norbert Wiener, from the Greek kybernetes for pilot or governor, to describe the study of the brain and central nervous system as compared with computers.