Over the past several years there has been a lot of research into brain scanning technology. While this is not surprising, the capabilities we possess can be. Researchers have been working to use what they learn and have built several helpful devices such as allowing the mute to speak through thought, or allow a primate to control a robotic arm with its mind. But naturally with technology like this there are legitimate fears and concerns. The scope of what information can be extracted from a scan and the ability to scan another's brain are currently limited, but as with all technology it will only get better and cost less as time progresses. It is only a matter of time before we hear cases of different kinds of thought crimes. I am using "thought crime" in a non Orwellian sense defined as the non-consensual reading or altering of another's thoughts. It may start with some neuroscience dropouts lurking around banks discretely logging the financial thoughts of its customers, but one thing is for sure privacy as we know it may soon be non existent.
With the advent of this technology we will lose the one absolute privacy that could not be taken from us, our thoughts. Like many losses of privacy before, it will be traded voluntarily. This time largely for convenience. This should not sound petty as though we are giving up our mental privacy for a television remote. These are dramatic life altering convenience we gain. Advances that will transform man and bring him into a new age.
There were many early human hunter-gatherers who refused to give into the convenience of a settled agricultural life. However, as is the nature of man, they have died and the benefits of the division of labor allowed for a much larger population of agriculturalists to hunter-gatherers. Though it is obvious that the life in agricultural society has raised the standard of living beyond earlier man, there were some concessions in the deal. There was the destruction of thousands of years of tradition of the hunting society. One must submit himself to cultural norms to survive in a city. One no longer relied on himself and his ability to find food and he would be dependent on the farmers and the harvest, losing more control over his own life. With so many people living densely together there was an explosion is disease that would otherwise be unknown to hunter-gatherers. Not having as strong of a community as a small tribe and having the luxury of being able to secure capital, there was a rise in crime that too would be unknown to the hunters.
In the end agriculture overtook hunting and foraging because it is more productive and able to sustain a larger population. Where one hundred hunters and foragers would need two hundred square miles of land, one hundred people who farm would need only a single square mile. This is not to say that hunting and gathering died out completely, it just became relatively nonexistent. At 10,000 B.C. there were an estimated 1,000,000 people alive total. In 5,000 years that grew to 15,000,000 people. Had there not been the paradigm shift to agriculture instead of over 6 billion people, the human population would find itself around 50,000,000, Even if hunting and gathering survived to today and we gave them a population of a million, they would only comprise a meager 0.625% of the population. So while we may have given up the way of life of our ancestors for the life of the farms, not many would complain today and those that do would comprise of about 0.625% of the population.
Another development would be language. We deprive ourselves of what could be a rich tradition of oral history by having a written language. It is likely there have been many men who denounced the soulless practice of transcribing and reading what has been sacredly passed down generation to generation through ritualistic story telling. It would not be hard to imagine today's luddites in ancient life warning us of a life dependent on reading and writing; where a man can unfairly enhance his memory through the use of the technology of a written language. One also puts himself at risk by writing information down, because that act enable the information to be obtained without your consent. Had you never written it down then one must attempt to coerce the information out and could not rely on simple petty theft. The writing of information has given rise to all kinds of unforeseen crime. It would take a very talent person to explain the idea of check fraud to a group busy drawing on their cave walls. Yet even with its shortcomings and repeated abuse those who do not gamble on their security for the convenience of a written language find themselves in a similar situation to the hunter-gatherers.
The printing press ruined the tradition of monks painstakingly copying book letter for letter. By lowering the barriers to entry, some could claim that the overall quality of books has gone down since anyone can publish anything he wants. There is also the case of bad ideas being spread enabled by the printing press. Communism certainly would have had a harder time influencing people if its manifesto could not be cheaply reprinted. In the end the printing press was used for the productive purpose of more cheaply spreading ideas and information around the globe, connecting people in ways that would have been impossible before.
It is the same story for the telegraph, phonograph, radio, telephone, television, personal computer, and cellphone. The internet is the latest such developments and mixed with cellphones we can connect with over one billion other people, talk to anyone you know, send them a message, a picture. You can send a video to someone you have never met and allow them to see a glimpse of the world through your eyes. All this from something that can fit in your pocket, and its cheap. I've seen cooks and busboys with bluetooth headsets, always talking with friends and family, always connected as man was never able to in the past. The trend is ultimately towards knowledge, lowering the cost of sharing ideas and increase our storage capacity for knowledge.
The question is where will this ultimately take mankind? As several people such as Ray Kurzweil have spent their careers demonstrating, this growth is exponential. Starting with a slow linear growth, until it hits a turning point and grows rapidly towards infinity. It has been shown that our ability to store and share ideas has been slowly growing throughout history. With the advance of several technologies in the past few decades it is hard to argue against the notion that we are quickly approaching an information singularity. If you are reading this then you have access to the vast majority of total human knowledge. A physical copy of an idea is no longer needed and the copying cost of information is practically free. All while socialising and the sharing of ideas has become cheap enough anyone can afford it.
The next question is, what will an information singularity be like? Almost every barrier for communication will be removed, it would take minimal effort to transcribe a thought and then share it with those interested. Likewise in a post-information singularity world, there would be little effort required in obtaining information. There are fewer and fewer obstacle in the way of information sharing. We have a thought we want to express. We must formalize the thought into a medium of transmission, most commonly written language. Then you must find a means of persuading people to view your work. The cost of formalizing is the work of writing, singing, drawing, painting, etc... Computers have already removed any capital cost of associated with the creation of a work. All that remains is the cost of the time in creating the work. Blogs and social networking has given the people a forum to quickly and easily share thoughts, and autonomously categorize them. There is still an advertisement cost, usually the time promoting a blog, but this too is becoming easier with the onset of social bookmarking. Google has played an overt role in the development of finding information. Searching and ranking algorithms continue to improve, but their is still the cost of filtering through search results to find what you are looking for. In each of these areas technology has eliminated the need for capital in information sharing, and the only large cost left is time.
How can time cost be reduced? And with that question our tangent brings us back to our starting point of the development of brain scanning technology, and the conveniences they will give us. Already in production is a device for mute people which reads their mind and speaks for them. It has a limited vocabulary of only a couple words which is expected to expand quickly. Through further refinement this technology could replace the practice of writing and typing by interpreting your thoughts and writing them for you reducing even further the time cost of sharing knowledge. Brain interfacing will allow us to one day bypass languages for communication and grant us the ability to exchange thoughts undamaged by translation. Mixed with already existing telecommunications, we will be giving humanity long sought after telepathic abilities. No longer shall mankind face the dilemma of eating or talking on the phone.
Search engines, if given the ability to read our minds, would be invaluable. Since the search engine intimately knows the structure of the web, its weakness lies in information lost through translation. I have a vague idea of what I want to search for. In formalizing this thought I search for very general terms X and Y. I then spend the next fifteen minutes reading through pages finding what I want. A good search engine would no longer be constrained by its user's ability to pick out distinct yet descriptive words. A good search engine would be able to read your thoughts and know what you are looking for and show it to you. A good search engine would be a magic mirror on the wall.
Right now our living environments are extremely static. If a man wants something done, he will have to exert conscious effort towards his goal. An environment that could sense your moods and goals would be responsive and helpful.
As you wake up in the morning, the image of a nice hot mug of steaming coffee skims across your hazy mind. The soft lights slowly brighten as you get out of bed, soft music appropriate for early morning fades on with the lights, its the song you had stuck in your head but couldn't quite remember the name. At the thought of a shower, water begins pouring out as you step int the bathroom. Like always, its just the right temperature. While in the shower you check for any messages sent to you over night. You reply to a couple people, but everyone you want to talk to is still asleep. When you step out of the shower, the outfit you were thinking of has been prepared. In the kitchen your mug of coffee is waiting along with the french toast you decided on.
This life with the addition of brain scanning to computation, robotics, and artificial intelligence will appear as magic, providing our wants at the mere exertion of our will. These super powers do come at a price as I mentioned before, privacy. With this trade though the stakes are high, never before has man been faced with such an invasive threat to his privacy but with the stakes high so are the payoffs.
What are the potential abuses of brain interfacing technology. There is the very obvious invasion of privacy; currently anyone had they the equipment could read your thoughts as they pleased. This could lead to financial abuse if they were to sniff out thoughts of accounts and passwords. One could listen for embarrassing thoughts and use that for extortion. Governments could implement large scaling thought monitoring and institute the Orwellian thought crimes. There would be legal implications in areas like gag orders. If there is a device that speaks someone's mind and he happens to think about a case where he had been ordered silent, surely he could not be expected to never think about a case. Advertisers will turn our thoughts against us, and would be able to exploit the harvested knowledge to sell us products we're more likely to buy. In extreme cases, there is the possibility for strong suggestion and complete mind control. This is a goal our military has been reaching to for years. This will no doubt happen at some point in time. Researchers have been able to show some control over mice with neural implants. Our brains are much larger and more complex, but if you are holding out that this will be a barrier forever you are being foolish.
With the threats given, it is a lot more than those who'd be considered luddites or old-fashioned who oppose this research and would just as well never think about any of it again. In spite of their wishes, many scientists are entranced by the subject and are very aware of benefits they can bring. Much like agriculture or any other major human achievement, those who make use of the technology will benefit and be more productive compared to others. Even if as a society we abandoned all our research, the comparative advantage of technology will be shown in international markets. A ban on the research just helps to hurt oneself in the long run. This social and ethical problems carried with the science is inevitable. We must not run or turn to the same old books for simple answers to hard question. We need to recognize and rationally deal with the problems. We need to understand that a government would rather have an obedient zombie than a dissenting protester.
Once we accept that nothing will likely sweep this little issue under a rug we can begin dealing with it. Lets look back through history and try to find something similar to the privacy threat we face. The closest example that comes to mind is the dawning of the internet. As it turns out these are remarkably alike. Personal computer had become popular where most families had at least one computer in their house. These computers could do all sorts of wonderful things. They had compilers, word processors, and image editors for content creation. To "talk" to each other, or share content, the information would have to be transcribed to a portable physical medium like a floppy disk or cd. Then the internet came and we all got scared.
Suddenly there was this notion of computer privacy and security. By removing the need for a physical medium for transmission and allowing computers to talk to each other we are forced to open our computer up for attack. We understand that our files are not absolutely secure as they are if you unplug your ethernet cable, but the communication and social benefits. The answer we found is encryption, a way to black out files from prying eyes. It took three graduate students at MIT to develop RSA encryption, a secure means of communicating online. After their papers came out the internet flourished as money came in from online commerce. The difference between computer privacy and mental privacy is that plugging into the internet is voluntary. I can not control all the thoughts that come to my mind, and there is so absolute security measure I can take akin to unplugging the network line. Luckily there is no way to subtly scan a person's mind right now, but that will change, and when it does I want to be prepared. We need the formation of a brain security community and a push for security research. We also need to encourage a strong brain hacking community to keep an eye out for abusive technologies. It would be ideal to have a system of mental encryption, but with the structure of the brain it is hard to say if that would be possible any time soon enough to be of use.
Despite the inherent risk, I for one await our technological superpowers. Ignoring the flaws and walking into this with no foresight as we are apt to do will only bring ruin. However, if we stay aware of what is happening and keep a mind for reason and caution, we can harness these instruments. We can leave behind primitive brutish lives our ancestors toiled through, and look towards a bright new future culminating from thousands of years of man's logical inquiry into the world around him. And with any luck, you and I may be around to see a few thousand more.
If you happen to be among those who curse new technology, just remember one day you'll die and there will be a generation of kids who grew up not knowing a life without the technology you say is destroying mankind.
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