We have this view of the big nasty surveillance state which was set by the novel 1984. But 1984’s technology was primitive: Big Brother couldn’t record, for example, so if no one was watching a monitor while you did whatever Big Brother didn’t like, you got away with it.
But Big Brother had nothing on what is coming down the line. In China, businesses are already making their employees wear caps which measure brainwaves, and they will move you about or even send you home based on your brainwaves. It’s not all bad; if an air traffic controller’s brain waves went into a pattern which showed lack of concentration ability, for example, they would remove that controller.
MIT has recently announced a headset which can read speech we didn’t actually say:
MIT researchers have developed a headset that can identify words you think of but don’t actually say, by reading signals the brain sends to the face and jaw during internal speech.
The AlterEgo headset captures the neuromuscular signals that occur when people intend to speak. It then uses a neural network to reconstruct the word.
This isn’t the same as reading thoughts, but a lot thoughts we would never say do hit that neuromuscular network, then get inhibited. We’ve all had the experience of “biting our tongue” — carefully keeping things we really want to say to ourselves.
This is still early days, and these are early and crude technologies. We know that the part of our brain which is aware and which considers us tends to be behind the times: The decision to do something is made before we are aware of it, we then back-fill with justifications for decisions we already made.
We can tell that, and in time we will be able to tell that with cheap, mobile equipment, and I am reasonably sure we will be able to tell in advance what the decisions are. We will be able to read intention, and read thoughts that don’t get to the face and jaw, even.
I trust the implications for freedom are obvious.
And this is all before we get to behavioural modification. We’re better at this than we think we are right now, through the mode of gamification, used by terribly addictive social media websites like Facebook and Twitter; but we’re terrible at it in the nitty-gritty of neurons and neurotransmitters and so on, because it’s so complicated.
Still, in time, we will be able to directly manipulate the brain and body to produce emotions and even thoughts on demand as well as to inhibit them. We’ll be able to make people like, hate, love, or fear, and do it directly.
This will have vast therapeutic value, to be sure. It could create a heaven. But such direct control over individuals will be abused, and it will almost certainly be abused at scale, over entire societies.
Because it is control, and people with power (this doesn’t just mean governments) always want more control, and always use it unless forced not to.
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different clue
Learn true total poker facing. Think stupid thoughts. Think random thought fragments randomly mixed.
Perhaps we should immerse ourselves in William S. Burroughs ” cut up” period material . . . and learn to think in ” streams of cut-up” at random times.
someofparts
I think the Matrix is 1984 updated for our times.
Jay
The Chinese are already doing it.
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2143899/forget-facebook-leak-china-mining-data-directly-workers-brains
different clue
Speaking of thinking random thoughts . . . it occurred to me to wonder whether the image of Mustapha Kemal still came up in the first line of ” Ian Welsh Images” on the yahoo.
And it didn’t. Not only it didn’t come in the first few images, it didn’t come up at all for line after line after line of images. So perhaps ” Ian Welsh Images” is now an Attaturk-free zone.
Jaggger
—–We know that the part of our brain which is aware and which consider us tends to be behind the times: the decision to do something is made before we are aware of it,—–
Consciousness and free will is a fascinating concept but beware….
——The field (neuroscience of free will) remains highly controversial. There is no consensus among researchers about the significance of findings, their meaning, or what conclusions may be drawn. The precise role of consciousness in decision making therefore remains unclear.—
For an interesting summary with competing interpretations, here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will
atcooper
I’d be very surprised if any of this went beyond big data malarkey – statistical analysis is a far cry from understanding root causes.
I’d love to see how accurate palantir driven psychometrics are, for instance. I’m starting to see all of this kind of thing as desperate last gasps for a too inbred elite.
Herman
Even if you could use this tech to make everyone happy there is the freedom issue. So even in the hands of do-gooders it is likely to be too dangerous to support. Do we really want to live in a world of Stepford Wives? Of course there is always the added risk that less kindly rulers and technocrats will take over and by that time resistance will be impossible due to the god-like powers in the elite’s hands.
Unfortunately I don’t think people value freedom much anymore. Comfort and convenience rule. When this kind of tech is pushed on people it will likely be done with a smiley face and claims about benefits that no “reasonable” person could argue against. Anyone pushing back against it will be branded a reactionary and Luddite.
EverythingsJake
There is just no quarter to be had from any meaningful direction. The economy, the environment, technology, militarism, law enforcement, government, business, banking, medicine, agriculture, education, etc. It seems that our sociopaths run the place in their own and very narrow interest with absolutely no consideration for any remotely humanistic value. If one is increasingly lucky to be of a certain high enough class interest, perhaps s/he gets some delusion of freedom and lack of consequence, but that window feels like it narrows ever more quickly and much faster than one would have thought. Ironically, the only seeming hope is that environmental disaster will significantly weaken the power of a global elite to exert an abhorrent level of control.
Ten Bears
Orwell feared those who would ban books; Huxley feared there would be no reason to ban books because nobody would want to read one.
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information and conceal the truth; Huxley feared the truth would be drown in a sea of irrelevance.
Orwell feared we would become a captive culture; Huxley feared would become a trivial culture.
In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, people are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us; Huxley feared that we will love what will ruin us.
Not 1984, a Brave New World
Hugh
I think most of the “science” behind this is bogus. The bony nature of the skull means you need multiple, good contacts, and even so the information you get back is very general. You get in time signal but localization is nonspecific and content, that is interpretation of signal, is very dicey and needs a lot of individual correlation with behavior. You also have questions like what is the error rate, the rate of false positives. How does individual variability, handedness, medical history, etc. affect results? It seems like a GIGO exercise to me.
I look at processes like google and see how poor the results often are, even with fairly straightforward queries, and yes, I know their business model of selling ads has made this much worse. Or speech recognition. Much improved but still limited and far from natural language usage/recognition. I have also recently been looking at OCR texts from internet archive and they do not appear to have improved much over the years –still having problems with even simple variables like italics.
Like so much else, this kind of neuroscience can tell you some things, even some useful things, but I think it is being severely oversold.
Webstir
Ten Bears nailed it. What is our entire “entertainment” industry but Soma?
Seriously. Think about it. Every child learns the old saw about “boring is as boring does.” So why is entertainment a trillion dollar industry? Sloth seems to me to be the true root of all evil. Would anyone care to venture a guess how many hours are wasted in front of movies, TV, video games and the like that could be more productively spent addressing the ills of our world?
One has to wonder if the American revolution would have ever happened if the British empire had had television.
Jay
@Hugh: This stuff is still pretty primitive, but so were cell phones once. They may never be able to read thoughts, but even fairly primitive tech can be abused. Worst case, the 1930s KGB (or something similar) shows you a picture of Stalin (or whoever), gets a quick like/dislike reading, and makes its decisions based on that data.
A while back a company called Advanced Neurometrics* had a gadget that could read your IQ by measuring your brain. There wasn’t a market for it in the States, but someone else might have a use for it. By 6 or so a person’s IQ is pretty stable, so there’s no technical reason you couldn’t use this thing on a group of first graders and make decisions about which ones are worth educating and which ones aren’t. Assuming you were from a culture where equality wasn’t a core value, of which there are plenty.
*This company seems to be working with or as Wearable Sensing now: http://wearablesensing.com/about_team.php
atcooper
To engage the article:
‘including fatigue and attention loss with an accuracy of more than 90 per cent’
Does this mean 90.1 %? Would any engineer consider this acceptable? Not quite 1 in 10 false positives?
The last ten percent is always the hardest, and returns are almost always on an inverse power scale.
Plenty of real world, currently deployed technologies already causing great harm. Better to focus on those.
realitychecker
Why bother reading our thoughts, when they already have so many effective tools to control how we create them?