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Brain Privacy
sleepyrobot writes "As neuroscience advances and brain scans become more sophisticated, the Boston Globe points out that some privacy advocates are concerned about brain privacy. Could employees be scanned for violent or depressive impulses? Could soldiers be screened for homosexuality? It sounds like a Philip K. Dick vision of the future, but some predict this will be a bigger ethical issue than genetics."
The part that makes this the most frightening is that we've seen recently how far people are willing to go if they think that security is at hand. The Patriot Act and Patriot II (return of the civil liberty abuses), both passed with widespread support, just because people were scared. With the right amount of fear, this technology will not only be allowed, but mandated in usage to screen for "potential security risks"
Could soldiers be screened for homosexuality?
I always find it ironic that technologies created by open-mindedness have to ability to empower the narrow-minded.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
isn't that someone is invading your precious privacy. What you are afraid of is that someone can peer into your mind and see what a twisted demented fuck you really are inside, Michael.
People are afraid of the truth...if people couldn't hide from their own thoughts, they'd be faced to deal with the lies they live, and perhaps actually have to consider change.
to figure out what is going on in someone's head by looking at the things that the person does or say, the external manifestations of a person's thoughts. If you are concerned about your "brain privacy", just don't talk to people, post on Slashdot or a personal blog, don't write letters or emails, etc.
There's a major difference between a drug screen and having your brain scanned as a condition of employment. A drug screen is meant to pick up illegal activity which poses a tangible safety and liability issue to a potential employer. There's nothing illegal about thinking anything (at least in the developed democracies), so I don't see brain scans becoming accepted practice during my lifetime (knock on wood).
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
You want to test my blood/urine/etc... for drugs? Get a search warrant or get the hell out. My body is more private than my house. People put up with random/compulsery drug tests because they have been brainwashed by the whole "War on Drugs" debacle that it is a Good Thing to test people with no Probable Cause whatsoever.
Brain scanning like this, combined with genetic testing will create a tiered populous with those deemd "fit" (and deemed by who, exactly?) at the top, and the great unwashed masses at the bottom.
It seems almost inevitable that humanity keeps trying to organize itself into the lords and the serfs.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
You know what's really funny about this? The most feared army in Greek times, the Spartans, were all gay. Many of them fighting shoulder to shoulder with their lovers.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
That makes sense. I expect that your brain is much more likely than your DNA to determine your behavior. However, DNA can be fully sequenced right now. I would bet we're a long way off from being able to fully map a human brain.
Also, I think that much of the expectation of the privacy of one's thoughts is founded on the fact that today nobody else can be sure what those thoughts are. The examples in the article are fairly crude tools related to activity in a certain area of the brain. Care certainly will need to be taken with any potential use of these tools. Taking it to the extreme of real-time mind-reading will be a different thing entirely.
Well, hey, I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.
We are the techno-elite, right?
Technology may be our plaything, but the technologies we do not own will own us.
There is always a window of opportunity for the early adopters to acquire mastery over those who would use a technology to oppress. Plus, brain hacking might just be the ultimate in geek fun.
While not everyone can afford to use their own MRI to do neuro-feedback hacking, there are tools that can be had right now that will let you do some serious tweaking of your own skull pudding. One such device is made by IBVA Technologies
IBVA has been at the forefront for the past few decades in building devices that allows one to view in real-time their own brain activity on Macs and PCs. They soon will be releasing a Linux version of their software.
Hopefully, we'll stay ahead of the curve on this folks, because the dark side of this tech is pretty fucking dark.
The most conservative view of the brain's power say that it's a computer program. The most elaborate theories also envision that there are other structures like souls that can't be 'caught on tape'. Strangely, I'd be the hardcore conservatives wanting to use this technology are statistically more likely to be those who say we have unmeasurable souls. Just a guess. But if it's so, I wonder how they rationalize that.
But let's take the conservative view--that the brain is just a computer program that is trillions or quadrillions of times more complex than your average programming project for work. Now we're talking about hooking us up to a machine that has no idea what a single line of source looks like, no idea what data has been preloaded, and is just going to watch the approximate equivalent of the blinking lights on the console and tell me if my program is not only functioning correctly now, but whether it's predicted to function correctly in the future?
Geez, forget core dumps, stack debuggers, tracing tools, and all that. I just want one of these cool push-button debugging tools for writing programs!! People pay enormous amounts for teams of people to pour over source code for days or weeks or more on projects so trivial as today's... and it's apparently all wasted. We could have solved the whole Y2K problem by just letting this machine watch the blinky lights on the front of some COBOL boxes and tell us that the planes wouldn't crash and the elevators wouldn't stop. Why didn't we rush them into production if they were this close to ready?
Or is it possible that the effectiveness is slightly oversold?
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
My wife is a behavioural neuroscientist and let me say that Neuroscience hasn't advanced that much. They only have rather vague ideas about which brain regions are involved in, not responsible for, certain general classes of behaviour. Don't mix up correlation with causation. Brain sciences are pretty much still in the "look for correlation" phase, and are FAR, FAR, away from any predictive value, expect certain specialized clinical areas. The brain is so complex that we may be incapable of understanding it. It's like peeling an onion.
I have to disagree with you. People need privacy. There is no reason for anyone to know everything about what I say, think, or do.
I have nothing to hide, but my privacy is my own.
Am I gay? No.
Am I a criminal (Caught or not)? No.
Am I trying to hide something? No.
But, if I look at a woman and think to myself, "Boy I'd sure Like to F*** her!" That thought is my own and not something that anyone has the right to know about me. Thinking that doesn't make me a rapist nor someone to fear or "keep tabs" on.
Much like if I thought to myself, "Boy, the President is a dumb sonofabitch." That too is not something that I feel is something that should be public knowledge nor held against me. Just because I might think something doesn't make me guilty of anything.
Much like this discussion, it's my opinion and I should be the one to choose if and when I want to share it.
Everyone has a right to their own personal privacy. Just because someone enjoys their privacy, it doesn't make them a criminal. Did you ever think that it might protect you FROM the criminals? What would happen if everyone could know if you were scared of them. Wouldn't that make you a target of those that would exploit that fear?
Any kind of brain scanning that invades my privacy, or makes public my privacy is wrong.
That's my two bits on the matter.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
self-serving sleazy politicians will make sure than brain scanners are *extremely* illegal
Only when used on politicians. Um, national security, that's it. It's okay on ordinary citizens, though.
You're talking about some seriously deranged individuals here, and it's been known for decades that serial killers do fit some rather general profiles. What's the surprise here?
I think the problem the original poster was talking about was not that serial killers were assumed to be wierd, but that wierd people were assumed to be serial killers. What if you were a person with 'odd' tastes, who got fingered by the police for murder just because you fit some 'profile' made up by some dude in a office who's never met you? Like, say, someone that pretends to be an hunchbacked cave-dweller from outer space *must* be the murderer... As for the past being worse, things have been getting better with respect to being an 'outlier' of society for some time, and this technology seems to be a step in the wrong direction.
"Could soldiers be screened for homosexuality?"
No, because that violates the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" regulation. Half of that policy is "Don't Ask."
Of course, screening someone's brain with that kind of precision will probably tell you that homosexuality has little impact in one's ability to serve in the military.
self-serving sleazy politicians will make sure that brain scanners are *extremely* illegal
This is a fine point, and I don't dispute it.
However, politicians have other defenses as well. One such defense is changing the form of the question. Remember they are always at risk of having anything they say proven wrong, so they try not to say anything with interesting truth value at all.
One common politician trick is to make sure all questions about what they support are single-place predicates ("Do you favor lower taxes?") and not two-place predicates ("Do you think it's more important to have lower taxes or better schools?"). By doing this, they can be in favor of everything good but omit the critical bit--how much they're in favor of each thing, and therefore what their actual priorities are. I'm sure this is not the only trick they use.
(Incidentally, I've noticed a surprising similarity between the problem of detecting whether a politician is someone you should trust and the Turing Test. Or maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Maybe the essential question is the same--"is this person for real?")
Furthermore, I've been fascinated for a long time by an analysis of the late HP Grice called The Rules of Conversational Implicature, which basically assert that the relevance of speech is often not carried in its propositional, or per se, truth value, but rather in what is written between the lines. (Grice offers techniques for making this more concrete than you might expect.) I've often thought it would be interesting to see some implementation of Grice's rules applied to the various legal arenas involving speech acts (slander, fraud, perjury, etc.) I don't think it's practical (yet), but if it could be, it would yield fascinatingly different results than what we get now. Poking about in Google reveals at least one good writeup of Grice's position, though there must surely be others.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer