Today in the best worst ideas ever:

Yeah, the electric meat pudding-
wait, do you not call it that?

Hey, who doesn't love some existential dread? So, couple of things. Computers will soon be able to read our minds soon be able to read our minds, and we might experience some heretofore undescribed form of consciousness just before we die. Which do you want first? Telepathic AI? Great. So just in case you thought you could shield the location of the human resistance or just pretend to serve our cruel robot overlords, along comes the technology to pluck our deepest secrets from the electric meat pudding we call our human brains. 

Good news, researchers are also working
on liquid metal robots. So we'll have
 that to look forward to as well.

Of course, this is science, so we're going to walk that back a bit. Computers aren't reading our minds so much as they are being used by researchers in conjunction with an MRI machine to analyze and interpret the electrical signals in our brains. And rather than sentient AI's using the technology to rule humanity with an iron, or more likely memetic polyalloy, the useful applications include things like diagnosing and treating mental illness and helping people who are unable to speak communicate. 

Because science is actually quite
complicated and nuanced despite what
this dumb idiot would have you believe.

But before you get too comfortable, just know that AI is involved. Decoding the signals into something intelligible is apparently super-complicated, because of course it is. It's mind-reading. But in order to parse the information into something like speech the researchers from he University of Texas, Austin, use a form of the same technology behind ChatGPT. And while I for one welcome our machine overlords and their benevolent, Asmovian rule, the scientists admit that it could be misused.

Which, I mean, sure. At the moment you need to be hooked into an MRI machine, but who knows where this will be in thirty or forty years time? Remember the first cell phones?

Above: Inventor Martin Cooper, seen here with an example of how doomed we are.

It's basically Flatliners with fewer
ethical issues and no Kevin Bacon.

Ok so file that away and turn your attention to what the brain experiences just before death. Some dying patients who were hooked up to EEG machines by researchers from the University of Michigan. Don't worry, this isn't hospice nurses just screwing around, this was all done with the families' permission, which I guess makes it better? Anyway, when the terminal patients were removed from life support, the EEG in a couple of them registers activity similar to conscious thought, begging the question: whaaa...?

Huh, all that and they could have just
read this billboard. Pfft...science...

The afterlife? Random impulses before the unknowable nothingness sets in? Who can say? It didn't happen with everyone. Of the four patients studied, only two of them registered on the machine. Jim Borjigin, who was in charge of the study, speculated that this might be the brain remembering things. Like life flashing before one's eyes? But obviously there's no way to know. Or is there? Yeah, are you thinking what I'm thinking? That the researchers from Austin and the ones from Michigan should maybe sit down and have a chat?

Or maybe that's the worst idea. Maybe the last thing we need is an instance of ChatbotGPT plugged into an EEG, hooked up to a dying person typing out "there is no God!" or worse yet, "there is a God and you're in deep trouble..." 

Of course, this shot of a naturally occurring ice dick taken by photographer Kenneth Pretty
of--I kid you not--Dildo, Newfoundland, points to at least the possibility of some cosmic
intelligence with sense of humor. Oh, and the alarming increase in the loss of arctic ice.