Comment by ben_w

Close; at least with a machine you can poke around inside the activations and see what it's thinking. Closest with a human is an fMRI (which is much lower resolution, though to me still bordering on the miraculous) or an implant (each chip is limited a very small number of cells, and in general they can only be put in certain parts of the brain).

On the other hand, there's a more fundamental problem is we don't really know what "nice" even means, and even with machines whose inner states we can see relatively easily, we don't know how to interpret those inner states well enough to tell if we're looking at superficial or deep motivations, the difference between "be nice today" and actually being motivated about your best interest.