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Mind reading and thought control becoming alarmingly plausible with new technologies
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| josh4 |
| quote: | The brain scan that can read people's intentions
Call for ethical debate over possible use of new technology in interrogation
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday February 9, 2007
Guardian
A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act.
The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists' ability to probe people's minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future.
The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way.
"Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there's no way you could possibly tell is in there. It's like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall," said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University.
The research builds on a series of recent studies in which brain imaging has been used to identify tell-tale activity linked to lying, violent behaviour and racial prejudice.
The latest work reveals the dramatic pace at which neuroscience is progressing, prompting the researchers to call for an urgent debate into the ethical issues surrounding future uses for the technology. If brain-reading can be refined, it could quickly be adopted to assist interrogations of criminals and terrorists, and even usher in a "Minority Report" era (as portrayed in the Steven Spielberg science fiction film of that name), where judgments are handed down before the law is broken on the strength of an incriminating brain scan.
"These techniques are emerging and we need an ethical debate about the implications, so that one day we're not surprised and overwhelmed and caught on the wrong foot by what they can do. These things are going to come to us in the next few years and we should really be prepared," Professor Haynes told the Guardian.
The use of brain scanners to judge whether people are likely to commit crimes is a contentious issue that society should tackle now, according to Prof Haynes. "We see the danger that this might become compulsory one day, but we have to be aware that if we prohibit it, we are also denying people who aren't going to commit any crime the possibility of proving their innocence."
During the study, the researchers asked volunteers to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers they were later shown on a screen.
Before the numbers flashed up, they were given a brain scan using a technique called functional magnetic imaging resonance. The researchers then used a software that had been designed to spot subtle differences in brain activity to predict the person's intentions with 70% accuracy.
The study revealed signatures of activity in a marble-sized part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex that changed when a person intended to add the numbers or subtract them.
Because brains differ so much, the scientists need a good idea of what a person's brain activity looks like when they are thinking something to be able to spot it in a scan, but researchers are already devising ways of deducing what patterns are associated with different thoughts.
Barbara Sahakian, a professor of neuro-psychology at Cambridge University, said the rapid advances in neuroscience had forced scientists in the field to set up their own neuroethics society late last year to consider the ramifications of their research.
"Do we want to become a 'Minority Report' society where we're preventing crimes that might not happen?," she asked. "For some of these techniques, it's just a matter of time. It is just another new technology that society has to come to terms with and use for the good, but we should discuss and debate it now because what we don't want is for it to leak into use in court willy nilly without people having thought about the consequences.
"A lot of neuroscientists in the field are very cautious and say we can't talk about reading individuals' minds, and right now that is very true, but we're moving ahead so rapidly, it's not going to be that long before we will be able to tell whether someone's making up a story, or whether someone intended to do a crime with a certain degree of certainty."
Professor Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist and director of the Medical Research Council, said: "We shouldn't go overboard about the power of these techniques at the moment, but what you can be absolutely sure of is that these will continue to roll out and we will have more and more ability to probe people's intentions, minds, background thoughts, hopes and emotions.
"Some of that is extremely desirable, because it will help with diagnosis, education and so on, but we need to be thinking the ethical issues through. It adds a whole new gloss to personal medical data and how it might be used."
The technology could also drive advances in brain-controlled computers and machinery to boost the quality of life for disabled people. Being able to read thoughts as they arise in a person's mind could lead to computers that allow people to operate email and the internet using thought alone, and write with word processors that can predict which word or sentence you want to type . The technology is also expected to lead to improvements in thought-controlled wheelchairs and artificial limbs that respond when a person imagines moving.
"You can imagine how tedious it is if you want to write a letter by using a cursor to pick out letters on a screen," said Prof Haynes. "It would be much better if you thought, 'I want to reply to this email', or, 'I'm thinking this word', and the computer can read that and understand what you want to do."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage...2009229,00.html
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Its like this that scares the out of me. Why? Because I have little confidence in the human race to use such technologies responsibly. |
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| Magnetonium |
People are dumb. They work hard to invent technologies that would do more harm than good. Just like the idiots who worked on the Manhattan Project. |
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| Magnetonium |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lilith
Kind of ironic |
Did Russians do the Manhattan Project? Does USA want to disarm? No no and no. No irony here. You cant expect Russia to disarm and expect the rest of the world to follow. Its the technology like Manhattan Project and this one that causes a whole bunch of problems, unnecessary costs and in the end does not solve the problems. |
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| Lilith |
The USSR had plenty to do with the manhatten project.
http://www.mbe.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/espionage.htm
They had a lot of spies in there under codename ENORMOZ gathering information and working on it.
But essentially, the military R&D produces stuff which is mostly bad for humanity in general, sometimes you do get a few spin offs like radar, communications and medicine which we use in day to day life. After all, the internet was originally a military communications system which was designed to withstand nuclear attacks.
So, there will be some bad things from this and maybe if we're lucky, some good could come of it. |
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| venomX |
| This is not going to happen in the near future. What the paper doesn't tell is that these things only let you know of 'violent behaviour' or 'lying' in the broadest and vaguest definition of the activity. It doesn't indicate what is it that your concealing if you're lying, it doesn't indicate actual initiation of violence. Given you can read the pre-signaling patterns associated with movement and the patterns associated with the exalted state that would lead to violence but then you would loose the image if the person actually moved. I mean seriously, you have to be so still for current brain imaging techniques to work that this at this particular moment in time won't work. I believe that even if we're moving fast right now we will hit a plateau just due to limitations in our understanding of brain function, specially complex functions like deciding to commit a crime or not. |
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| Magnetonium |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lilith
The USSR had plenty to do with the manhatten project.
http://www.mbe.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/espionage.htm
They had a lot of spies in there under codename ENORMOZ gathering information and working on it.
But essentially, the military R&D produces stuff which is mostly bad for humanity in general, sometimes you do get a few spin offs like radar, communications and medicine which we use in day to day life. After all, the internet was originally a military communications system which was designed to withstand nuclear attacks.
So, there will be some bad things from this and maybe if we're lucky, some good could come of it. |
Manhattan Project was a whole different project, not same as radar, communications. Its goal was to build an annihilating weapon capable of killing many people - clear and simple. True, some scientists were communist sympathizers - so what? They weren't the ones who decided and organized the project. It would have been a lot easier and cheaper and safer in the long run to protect against the development of these terrible weapons which have us today at the brink of extinction of they fall in the wrong hands. I feel much safer, finding out year after year about new countries with nuclear capabilities. It will only be a matter of time before someone launches them. The danger of nuclear technology outweighs its benefits by a margin. |
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| Lilith |
You're the only one here who started talking about the nuclear weapons program, most everyone else was just debating the uses of military research pro's and con's. Stop trying to twist it into some kind of nuke debate which it isnt, start a new topic on nukes if you want.
Heres a quick re-wrap of the debate
Pro's- could help the handicapped
Con's- could be used by governments for civil rights violations under the pervue of security |
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| Fir3start3r |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lilith
You're the only one here who started talking about the nuclear weapons program, most everyone else was just debating the uses of military research pro's and con's. Stop trying to twist it into some kind of nuke debate which it isnt, start a new topic on nukes if you want.
Heres a quick re-wrap of the debate
Pro's- could help the handicapped
Con's- could be used by governments for civil rights violations under the pervue of security |
But that's the way he argues Lilith, red herrings...
there, I actually got to use that.....red herring.... :p |
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| MrSquirrel |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fir3start3r
But that's the way he argues Lilith, red herrings...
there, I actually got to use that.....red herring.... :p |
:D
MrS |
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| Zild |
| I think the military has had their fingers in this for quite some time now. Not that I blame them, they are the military and it is their responsibility to stay on the cutting edge. |
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