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24: Choose Your Own [A.I.] Adventure
Spies, Lies and Cybercrime by Eric O’Neill

The Story That Reads You Back: How AI is Redefining Adventure
When I was a kid, I had stacks of Choose Your Own Adventure books. If you grew up in the ‘80s or ‘90s, you probably remember them too—flipping through pages, making choices, doubling back when things went south (yes, we all cheated), and imagining yourself as the hero of an unfolding adventure. Every decision changed the outcome, making you feel like you had real control over the story.
Now, imagine that experience—but instead of turning pages, you’re stepping into a fully immersive world, where the story reacts to you.
Picture this: You put on a VR headset, and the world comes alive. You’re not just watching a movie—you’re inside it. The AI senses your emotions, adjusting the narrative in real time. If your heart races in fear, the environment shifts—maybe the shadows grow deeper, maybe an AI-generated character reassures you, sensing your hesitation. If you charge forward with confidence, the world adapts, throwing new challenges in your path. The experience unfolds dynamically, changing every time you enter, unique to you.
This isn’t just a game. It’s a living, breathing story, powered by AI emotional intelligence and quantum computing. It’s storytelling at its most personal, where your choices—and even your subconscious reactions—shape the outcome.
Beyond entertainment, this could be revolutionary. Therapeutic time travel, where people with PTSD could rework traumatic memories in a safe, controlled space. Personal growth simulations, where you explore the roads not taken in life. Or just the most insanely immersive multiplayer adventure ever, where friends step into AI-generated worlds that are built around them, changing in real time.
AI won’t just tell stories. It will read you back. And it won’t be a movie you rewatch—it will be a story you live, different every single time.
The question isn’t just what adventure do you want? It’s how will AI change the way we experience stories forever? In this newsletter, I am exploring some of the wildest advances in AI that you may not know exist and how they are already changing our world.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t just about chatbots and recommendation algorithms. Beneath the surface, AI is making strides in areas that seem straight out of science fiction. Let’s dive into some of the most astonishing AI capabilities that are reshaping our world in ways you might not have imagined.
AI That Sees the Unseen
Picture this: a city skyline, bathed in the golden glow of dawn, when suddenly, an alert flashes—an earthquake will hit in 20 minutes. Sirens wail, evacuations begin, and thousands of lives are saved—all thanks to AI. By analyzing vast datasets from satellites, seismic sensors, and weather stations, AI can detect subtle patterns leading up to events like earthquakes and floods. It doesn’t just react; it predicts the future.
In the coming years, AI could evolve into an all-seeing guardian, detecting wildfires before they start, anticipating deadly storms weeks ahead, and even forecasting solar flares that could cripple our power grids.

Machines with a Sense of Smell
Imagine walking into a doctor’s office, taking a deep breath, and exhaling into a sensor. In seconds, AI-powered “noses” analyze the chemical composition of your breath and detect the early stages of cancer, long before symptoms appear. This isn’t science fiction—it’s happening now. AI is learning to identify diseases, sniff out gas leaks, and even assist in creating new perfumes by analyzing molecular structures.
One day, AI could be embedded in your smartwatch, constantly monitoring your breath for signs of illness—an early warning system for your body, catching diseases before they take hold.
Touch and Feel: AI’s Tactile Revolution
A robotic hand gently plucks a ripe raspberry from a bush, as delicately as a human. It doesn’t crush it, doesn’t miss, doesn’t hesitate. For the first time, AI is developing the ability to feel. Advanced sensors allow robotic limbs to interpret textures, pressure, and even pain, making them more human than ever. Scientists have even created brain-controlled robotic hands that allow paralyzed individuals to “feel” once more.
In the future, AI-driven prosthetics could restore full sensation to amputees, while robots with advanced touch sensitivity might perform surgeries more precise than any human doctor.

Emotional Intelligence: AI That Understands You
You’re watching a movie alone, but the AI embedded in your smart TV notices your expressions—your smile at a joke, the tear welling up in a sad scene. Instantly, it adjusts the lighting, recommends another movie to match your mood, or even suggests a call to a friend if it senses loneliness. AI is evolving beyond logic and numbers; it’s learning to understand human emotion.
Soon, AI could become the ultimate companion, reading your stress levels through micro-expressions and guiding you through your day with personalized interactions—your digital best friend, therapist, and assistant rolled into one.

Mind-Reading Machines: From Thought to Speech
A patient, unable to speak for years, suddenly hears their own voice again—not from their lips, but from a machine translating their thoughts into words. AI-powered neural interfaces are now capable of reading brain signals and turning them into speech, unlocking a world of communication for those trapped in silence.
With continued breakthroughs, AI brain interfaces could lead to direct thought-to-text communication—typing emails with a mere thought, or even downloading new skills straight into your brain.
AI Detecting the Subtle Differences in Human Brains
Envision an AI system analyzing brain scans with such precision that it discerns subtle patterns distinguishing male from female brains. Researchers have developed an AI capable of analyzing dynamic functional connectivity fMRI data, identifying sex-specific neural connections with about 90% accuracy. This advancement sheds light on the nuanced differences in brain connectivity between sexes.
In the future, this technology could revolutionize personalized medicine, tailoring treatments for neurological conditions based on an individual’s unique brain connectivity profile.
Final Thoughts: Welcome to the AI Age
We’re standing on the edge of something extraordinary. AI is no longer just a tool—it’s evolving into something more powerful, more intuitive, and more deeply integrated into our lives than ever before. From predicting disasters to reading emotions, touching, smelling, and even creating, AI is rewriting the rules of what’s possible.
The question isn’t if AI will transform the world—it’s how fast it will happen. And whether we’re ready for what comes next.
Now on to the news!
News Roundup
Quantum Computing Just Leveled Up
Microsoft just dropped the Majorana 1 chip, a quantum powerhouse that could shrink decades of computing breakthroughs into years. Powered by a mind-bending Topological Core architecture, it stabilizes qubits using exotic materials straight out of a sci-fi novel. Translation? Industrial-scale quantum computing is no longer a distant dream—it’s knocking on the door, ready to shake up cryptography, finance, and medicine. Pair this with AI, and we’re looking at a future where today’s "impossible" problems get solved before your coffee gets cold.
AI's Alien Chip Designs Outperform Human Engineers
Turns out, AI doesn’t just want to replace human engineers—it wants to outthink them. Researchers fed AI a chip design challenge, and instead of following the boring old human playbook, it created wireless chips with bizarre, unrecognizable patterns that somehow work better than anything we’ve ever built. The kicker? It did in hours what takes human engineers weeks. If this keeps up, AI-designed hardware could soon power everything from 5G networks to next-gen supercomputers, and we’ll just have to nod and pretend we understand how it works.
AI Can Tell Your Sex from an Iris Scan
Think iris scans only verify your identity? Turns out, they might also predict your race and gender—whether you like it or not. Researchers at Notre Dame developed an AI-powered system that spots similarities in irises, identifying ethnicity with 90% accuracy and gender with a not-so-great 62% success rate (apparently, eyes don’t spill all our secrets). While this could speed up biometric searches, it also raises serious privacy questions—because let’s be real, no one signed up for a retina-based ancestry test at airport security.
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Best,
Eric
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