Telepathy Could Be Real. Are We Ready?

Mary Lou Jepsen is inventing the future of seeing inside your head.

Mary Lou Jepsen was an executive at Oculus, led “moonshots” at Google, founded the low-power computer display company Pixel Qi, and co-founded One Laptop Per Child. But the company she launched last year, Openwater, is her most ambitious project yet. The plan is to use optoelectronics and LCDs to create an affordable MRI alternative. Among the technology’s manifold possibilities is a provocative goal: mind reading. If you are alarmed by this prospect, Jepsen welcomes this feedback. Rather than cloaking Openwater’s research in mystery, she is establishing a conversation around the ethics before that moonshot lands.

“Wearables” seems insufficient to describe Openwater. I know there are buzzwords like neurotech and BCI. How do you talk about your company?

Mary Lou Jepsen: What we’re talking about is diagnostics for the body to replace MRI into a wearable or pad or CT, and also telepathy — communicating with thought—lowering drug development costs, lowering all kinds of diagnostic costs that relate to digging into your body.

The reason I started this company was that I figured out how optically to make your body completely transparent so it doesn’t scatter, so you can get really crisp images of any kind of features inside your body. The pixel size of camera chips is now…