This article has been bouncing around the nerdosphere, so I thought I'd give it my two cents. There's definitely a creepy "Minority Report" vibe with this technology, but I think it speaks to really interesting and more positive trend. For centuries, we've been using machines to augment our senses--spectacles, telescopes, earhorns, microphones, electon microscopes, etc. In fact, it can be said that the advent of literacy and mathematics were among the first cases of technological augmentations to our cognitive abilities--extending our memory and logical capacity beyond what we can process from moment to moment or over the course of a lifetime.

The DARPA project takes the next logical step, culling our brain activity to find the patterns that will aid image recognition. Imagine, in the near future, getting an instant read out of an object or person you're looking at before you actually "know" what you've seen. What will that do to us as humans and as a society? I haven't the slightest idea. Will it help us become ultra-sensitive to our environment? Will it be information overload (or is there even such a thing, given how malleable we keep proving to be)? Will it have a negative effect, reducing the amount of actual memorization we do and "softening" our brains? Or is human memory no great shakes to begin with and, like the invention of writing, will "precog" computer-aided senses expand our abilities to point we can not yet even imagine?

I feel like I say this all the time: I have no idea where we're going or if I'm going to like being there, but it's coming, and I'm excited to see how it all plays out.