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Apparently, teaching artificial intelligence to read our innermost thoughts or turning them into terrifying psychopaths isn't enough - now researchers are teaching AI systems to predict what humans will do in the future (and how long you'll be doing it) "minutes or even hours" before we decide to do it.

It's fine when Google finishes your sentences when typing into a search bar, but this new technology might be able to recognize patterns in human behavior and perform tasks before you've even thought about asking.

Like most tasks performed by artificial intelligence, this ability is tied to machine learning and neural networks.

In the course of their research, a team from the University of Bonn in Germany tried out two models for their networks: one that made predictions and "reflected" before making new more, and one that was based on a matrix structure.

Both networks were shown videos of people making relatively simple food dishes (especially breakfasts and salad) with the goal of teaching them to predict what the chef was going to do next.

Since most cooking is based on performing certain actions in order, it follows that it'd be relatively easy to predict what the next step is going to be.


However, when shown a new, never-before-seen video of someone cooking, the neural networks had some trouble, especially with predicting actions farther in the future.

According to Jürgen Gall, the leader of the research team:
"Accuracy was over 40 percent for short forecasting periods, but then declined the more the algorithm needed to look into the future."
Both networks could predict actions a few seconds ahead of time, but when trying to make predictions that were three minutes out, their accuracy dropped to around 15 percent.

This kind of predictive technology is still in its early stages, but if YouTube's Recommended videos algorithm is any indication, it'll be able to pick up on human habits and patterns even better than we can.