All Your Brain Are Belong To Us

EPOCH neuroheadset

In light of a slew of articles all mashed up together, I can't help but think about our future of crowdsourcing and citizen science...

Here is a glimpse of some of the work being done, the goal in this instance is to make more visually-intelligent the automaton robots that will soon-enough be taking over many of the jobs that we currently do:

Scanning Your Home With Kinect Could Improve 3-D Robot Vision
By Dave Mosher - August 28, 2012

Seeking a way to crowdsource better computer vision, roboticists have launched a website that allows users to record pieces of their environments in 3-D with a Kinect camera.

Helper robots must be able to distinguish a refrigerator from an oven, for example, and open these labyrinthine 3-D objects to cook a casserole or deliver a cold beer to beckoning human owners.

“If you can get real-world 3-D data for 5,000 refrigerators, you can develop an algorithm to generalize a refrigerator and then test a robot’s ability to generalize them,” said Alper Aydemir of the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/kinect-home-computer-vision/

Here is an article that (panic aside, please) reminds us that brain-controlled computing has actually been available at the consumer level for a couple of years now:

Researchers Hack Brainwaves to Reveal PINs, Other Personal Data
BY GEETA DAYAL 08.29.12
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/brainwave-hacking/

Directly to the manufacturer:

Emotiv
"You think, therefore you can"
Based on the latest developments in neuro-technology, Emotiv has developed a revolutionary new personal interface for human computer interaction. The Emotiv EPOC is a high resolution, neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset.
http://emotiv.com/

And so finally - Emotiv sells an EEG neuroheadset for $500. Soon it will be less expensive. Having recently watched a video about the socio-political and legal barriers to psychedelic-based neurological research, I wonder:
How long before citizens bypass the laws that (for good reason) hinder psychedelic science?
In about five years, a lot of people are going to be taking drugs, slapping this brain-reader on their head, and uploading their data. For better or for worse...

Post Script:
Open Your Mind to the New Psychedelic Science
GREG MILLER 04.26.13
tl;dr
Scientists are, somewhat successfully, trying to do psychedelic science again.