The Promise of Mind Reading
As is my current style, I’m choosing not to fear the future and instead find promise in emerging knowledge. I think science fiction paints a traditionally morose picture of the future in a way to warn us about the dangers of using new technology unwisely. However, I don’t think we need to look into the future at all to see negative technological manifestations. What we can be sure of is that negative forces aren’t sustainable, and our species’ survival instinct will always at least try to overcome them.
One recent emerging technology is the ability to read minds, essentially. To some, this ability raises ethical questions a la Minority Report. It’s true that such use of technology is dangerously possible. But when we fear for such possibilities, we’re ignoring the more insidious ways in which we suppress human freedoms without new technology.
Consider indictment and conviction. Our legal system is imperfect at best, and imperfection promises that innocent people are put to death unjustly. Consider brainwashing. In a way, it’s a technology unto itself. Technologies that facilitate brainwashing (marketing, “news”, and religion) merely speed up and streamline the process. Brainwashing has effectively taught us to accept these systemic casualties. It has convinced us that there is a black and white answer to good vs. evil, and that if some people die unjustly in order to ensure the “real” evil is put to death, we accept that we must break human eggs to make human omelets.
So, what’s the difference? Our prison population is becoming hard to ignore in the way we’ve tried to ignore the more innocuous landfill population. Why should we be scared of a mind reading technology that might better quantify the concept of criminal justice?
I would argue, in a broader sense, that we wouldn’t focus such technology simply on convicting fellow humans. Although we consider computers to be very fast, we’re limited in how we interact with them. In order to get my thoughts into this blog, I’ve needed to speed up my typing ability to keep up with the thoughts in my brain, and alas, some of those thoughts don’t make it to the page because of what I’ve trained myself to believe is the process of (sentence, paragraph, thesis) formulation. But what about the thoughts in-between? Wouldn’t that reveal something more about what we as humans are trying to communicate with each other?
We’re concerned about mind reading, either out of embarrassment for what really goes through our minds, or out of the implications of being caught thinking something terrible. But if we’re more progressive thinkers, our awful thoughts might be the result of recognizing the atrocities inherent in our world, to the possible end of directing more energy to eradicate human suffering.
Thanks, Brandon. I’ll keep this thread going for a period of time, maybe getting a wider sense of how people feel about censorship and where to draw the line.
Also, thanks for your thoughtful replies. I’m trying to draw more traffic here so we (maybe it’s just so I) won’t feel so alone.
Yep, would definitely censor it. You’ll get a ton of those with a blog.
This type of technology is both incredibly intriguing and infinitely scary…. I know that if anybody could see some of the things I think they’d probably throw me in a cellar and throw away the key — I think that we’re all probably that way.
You mention that this would be valuable because it would allow somebody to see the thoughts that you have in between sentences, but I would argue that it wouldn’t add that much to their comprehension of your point of view. Remember that all images or thoughts are processed through every person’s own sense of context — and therefore even the images or thoughts that are running through your mind would take on a completely different meaning to any other person.
NVM. I’m new to this whole “trackback” concept.