It is important to keep in mind that the subjects had to get their brains scanned for 16 hours to train the machine learning algorithm to subsequently "decode t

It is important to keep in mind that the subjects had to get their brains scanned for 16 hours to train the machine learning algorithm to subsequently "decode their thoughts." So this cannot just be wielded on any unsuspecting person. Moreover, I'm skeptical this can be significantly improved as fMRI is quite a blunt instrument when it comes to assessing brain activity; it is a delayed and course-grained view of relatively large volumes of aggregated brain tissue.