Slashdot Mirror
Brain Scanner Can Read People's Intentions
Vainglorious Coward writes "Reality continues to catch up with Nineteen Eighty-Four with the announcement of the development of a brain scanner that can read a person's intentions. 'It's like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall,' said the leader of the project, Professor John-Dylan Haynes . Demonstrating his own mastery of doublethink, Haynes continued '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.'"
Not without cracking my DRM, you bastards!
Well they still have some way to go before they reach Minority Report levels.
As for interrogating people I guess it would not so much be their intentions as if whether they are telling the truth or not that is interesting.
A scanning would probably take quite some time and involve people being questioned at the same time.
Of course there are big ethical questions in this, I guess the anti-terror people in CIA and FBI would be quite interested in getting their hands on this technique, that is if they don't already use it.
One scary place this could be used was to check religious beliefs, in some countries you are prohibited to believe anything else than what the state dictates.
The intention part would also efficiently could be used for directing different robotics, as for example a fighter plane, which I seem to recall they have been working with something like this for the pilots for quite some time, to save the reaction time from the hand brain to pushing the button or whatever. I do remember some sci-fi movie about this at some point, but it is about to become reality also it seems.
You cannot prove innocence. That's why our verdicts are "guilty" and "not guilty". As much as you can prove anything about reality, you can only show that an event occured; you'll be hard pressed to show that it never did, and it's at least approaching the impossible to show that it wasn't /going to/ happen. Not to mention that intentions and actions are two very different things.
This is a scary, scary device. Props to the submitter for recognizing the professor's justification as doublethink.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
Wake me up when well have GITS-like cyberbrain interfaces. ^__^
Until then you're going to be sitting in front of a gigantic machine. MRIs aren't small portable or cheap at this moment.. and I don't see them following the computer timeline (from room sized boxen to the same power in a cell phone 30 years from now) any time soon.
Maybe I'm wrong though..
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
It's almost tempting to believe this is simply neuroscientists trolling for DHS dollars - a ruse by those socialised medicine types in Europe to get US military dollars to fund the next generation of MRI technology and practitioners. Fiendish!
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act.
If I carry out the act anyway after they read my intentions, will that make them (neuroscientists) accesories to murder (for example)?
"I've got a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel"
"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."
DA: Your Honor, we are 70% certain that the defendant was thinking about maybe shooting the president.
Judge: Guilty! Take the defendant outside and have him shot immediately!
Damn, if there ever was a time to be wearing that tin foil hat...
Guilty of intention of .... In desperate need of a thought suppressor device now! Need to scream.
There is, as of yet, no laws prohibiting thinking about commiting a crime. The potential to change this is at least as scary as anything else the government or major corporations are doing to peel off our freedoms.
I'm no tinfoil-hatter, but wow.
"we are also denying people who aren't going to commit any crime the possibility of proving their innocence."
In a country that follows the principle of "in dubito pro reo" I shouldn't have to prove anything to be regarded as innocent. In the contrary, in such a country the governments ignorance is my bliss.
I see they are already beyond the simple "lie-detector
mode" of the MRI: If you have to think hard about the
answer then obviously you're not recalling from memory
and are therefore lying or at least editing out parts.
This is very disturbing.
-"..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."
Imagine what it would be like if - like mandatory drug
testing - you were ordered into a room and attitude-checked
with a helmet? When their work on pattern recognition,
comes to fruition they could easily discover just how much
you hate the government, how much you despise them,
just how disaffected you are and how much you sorely need to
spend the rest of your now very short life in a labor
camp within the arctic circle - classified as a "security
risk" and a suspended death sentence hanging over your head.
I for one tell our MRI-toting Overlords to shove it up their asses.
From TFA:
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.
Seems like a long ways to go before it could actually recognize anything meaningful...
Doctor Tinkle: "He intends... 'to get out of this bloody MRI scannner as soon as possible'. Funny, that's exactly what the last twenty seven suspects intended as well."
Ohh c'mon people. This is interesting from a brain research perspective but it hardly provides any reason to worry about arresting people for their intentions.
We already have a much more reliable and convenient way to judge people's criminal intent, namely their body language and facial expression. Evolution has nicely provided us a way of distinguishing between your loving significant other who is absently gesturing with the knife he was using to cook and your jilted lover who is coming after you with it. Shop owners pick out people who look like their about to steal all the time. We are just sane enough not to throw people in jail for 'looking suspicious.'
Besides this machine is only set to measure what someone is currently preparing to do (as in seconds) trying to decode someone's long term plans is similar only in that both would require looking at the brain. This story shouldn't really raise anyone's estimate of the feasibility of reading someone's long term plans, or their eventual actions. It's nothing but an excuse for someone to spin a scare story.
In any case if the goal is to jail future criminals decoding their future plans seems wholly besides the point. It would be more effective to try and predict how much impulse control someone has or their resistance to temptation than to figure out if they currently have a plan to commit a criminal act.
--
As an aside I don't see what the doublethink in that comment was. It is true, if we did have a means to demonstrate a lack of intent to say blow up a plane then people who did so wouldn't need to be inconvenienced by all the crazy carry on restrictions. It might not be a compelling argument to use the technology but it isn't 'doublethink'.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
I think this is misleading.
Functional MRI measures changes in blood oxygenation, which are indicitave of changes in neural activity. However, the hemodynamic response is slow, peaking about 6 seconds after the changes in neuronal firing rates. The decisions described in the article probably happen within milliseconds. The article is short on details, but what they probably did was analyze the data from the decision moment after the fact and see if they could use it to predict the subsequent action. This is different from actually knowing what someone is going to do before they do it, which is something that is practically impossible with fMRI due to the timing issues.
Ok, I work as a post-doc in the field and actually know the work of Haynes. They are not predicting someone's actions. Their fMRI data can distinguish between their subjects' state of mind after the fact. There are several fundamental differences between this experimental set-up and real action prediction. One of them is that fMRI doesn't yield a reliable signal until 6 seconds after the decision has been made. Another one is that in this experiment the action was carried out, i.e. it was not a hidden intention. In this experiment, subjects had to hold on to their decision during a variable time; i.e., they had to wait for a signal before taking the action, but they had to perform it. So in reality, the experiment looked at the process of holding on to a certain intention, and that intention was rather artificial. And it still cannot be done without knowing the outcome of the action, i.e., a large number of samples has to be taken with the subject's cooperation before any "prediction" can be made. So I would conclude that, interesting as the outcome may be, the article is highly exaggerated.
Trust a logicnazic to come and spoil all the fun.
But I still think use of "doublethink" is justified, in the sense of "enjoying the malicious pleasure of the contrast between what one believes to be true and what one knows to be true"My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Am I the only person thinking that perhaps this could be used for reasons other than "proving innocence" or creating an Orwellian state? Here's some of the good uses I can think of, but this is off the top of my head:
-Sensing what people without means to normally communicate want to do by being provided with yes/no, outside/inside, feed/don't feed me gruel, etc.
-Fine tuning the discovery of what functions use certain brain patterns to better develop an idea of conciousness
-Strap a monkey in and do the same tests to see how similar we are processing wise.
This is just off the top of my head. Please feel free to contribute more.
If someone (say, the infamous "terrorist") walks around planning to do something bad, I'm sure in his mind it's recorded as doing something good. How is this system supposed to tell what's good and bad?
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Choose your starting equipment for the slashdot article (x) to select ()tinfoil hat ()book for a simplfied plan to making a profit, missing one step ()soviet russia scroll, that happens to read you ()Windows Vista --(hehe, sucker) ()a loyal follower wearing a red shirt ()a replacement for that loyal follower, but just some kind of strange script ()clue bat ()a +5 vorpal sword. (yes it runs linux) ()a beat up chair with the initials SB on it ()explosives (with made by sony on them) ()paper weight (drm enabled device) ()16000 pages of nothing (SCO legal briefs)
i know personally i don't know my own intentions some times, so how can a 3rd party claim to understand them?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I hope that we never reach a time where the majority of people accept the idea of "proving one's innocence." That innocence is presumed while guilt must be proven is at the very bedrock of any free society and god help us if that ever truly changes.
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
I'd like someone to read my own intentions and try to explain them to me, please. Because I have no idea how to go on with my life :). I guess I'll have to improvise, like always...
Tenser', said the Tensor; tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.
They can't read me.
These are not the droids you are looking for ...
Innocence shouldn't need to be proven. Innocence is assumed until guilt is proven.
Seriously, once you ignore the helpful details of this technology (helping disabled people, or performing real scientific studies), you're only really left with a technology that's not far separated from a lie detector (and likely to have the same success rate and ease of cheating). The results of one of these things will not be admissible in court and it will be VERY easy to cheat it.
I really look forward to seeing the results of this machine tested on clinically defined sociopaths, psychotics, and delusionals who will no doubt prove the machine incapable of accurate results on them. Once those with mental illness disprove it, most mental health spokesmen will be denouncing the technology because they believe almost all humans have varied degrees of these illnesses already.
Briefly about MR: I think there's another large separation here. Actually, a couple. First, Minority Report was only about preventing murder and rape. All other crime was untouched (and even rising). Another distinction is that Minority Report assumes the lack of lawyers and a courtroom, which might be more justified considering their technique relies on psychics, which are theoretically (in cinema) more accurate.
- Nobody would know what RTFA meant if it didn't need to be said all the time
Forget about just doing the sin/crime. Here's George Carlin's take:
"It was a sin to WANT to feel up Ellen, it was a sin to PLAN to feel up Ellen, it was a sin to take her to the place where you were gonna feel her up, it was a sin to TRY to feel up Ellen, and it was a sin to FEEL her up - there were FIVE SINS in one feel, man." - George Carlin
--
BMO
If only we could guarantee that our so-called elected servants are not without conscience, that would be revolutionary. It's not something that gets a lot of press time, but there are people who are defective, who don't feel compassion, who view others in the same way we view objects, who have no empathy. Oh to have a leader who feels that murdering children in the name of war is utterly nauseating, and won't bomb civilian sites (& fyi, there is no such thing as a smart bomb); a leader who doesn't view habeas corpus as an annoyance; a leader who will not say anything to anyone to get elected as long as the strategist says its a good idea; in short, a leader whose goal it is is to serve not win. A screening test that will eliminate the power hungry sub-humans, now that would be a godsend.
The road to hell is paved not with good intentions, but with the intentions of the soulless remorseless creatures previous cultures called vampires and we call sociopaths/narcissists. Unfortunately, they're drawn to politics like ants to honey and most people don't see it.
Whats wrong with you guys? Where are the tin-foil hat jokes?
Nope, but you're not far off.
I think it would be more along the lines of finding which parts of the brain are active as they would be if the person was (for example) employing deception. Even then, finding the deception 'signature' of activity in the current thought would probably be quite uncertain.
Thats my thoughts on how it'd work. Likely I'm wrong, but still, it wont be give a video clip or anything so clear as that.
Submitter doesn't know what doublethink is.
Heres a hint: it's not pointing out different sides of the same coin.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Can't date no girls anymore.
There, you must believe in the Holocaust.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
There are more fundamental issues with this technology than timing. The mapping of different areas of the brain to function is only accurate on a coarse level. The area of the brain that would be activated if the person was going to perform mathematics is known, but we can't differentiate what type of operation the person intended to perform. Testing for different emotions on a gross level is possible, but not the subject of those emotions. At least, not without actively flipping photos past the person. And even then, you'd tell little more than you would by simply looking at much more accessable physisiological responses available with a polygraph.
Sorry, but this is oversensationalized. My guess is that they are trolling for funding.
"It's not a lie, if you believe it"
A Brainscanner developed by male scientists, here is what they are really thinking (I used my brainscanner on them):
1) Get Brainscanner and go to pub
2) ???
3) Pleasure
Damn this itches. I wonder who gave it to me. Probably that skank who needed a ride to the gas station. Last time I do somebody a favor. Oh God they must have heard me! Oh God I can hear me! Ba, na na na na na na na na na, na na, ba ba ba ba!
Actually, you can, and there is historical precedent for this. When DNA tests became available, many people who were previously found "guilty" by the courts were able to prove their innocence with the use of a DNA test on evidence that was previously used for the conviction.
(If you want to substitute "prove their not-guiltiness", feel free.)
Hey what about reading your dreams with it! Or the other way around. Insert dreams with it!
welcome our new brain scanning overlords. sorry if already posted :)
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.
You have to prove your innocence before actually doing anything right now? Eeek...thought crime, just like in that novel. What was it called again? 2007?
Read error on /dev/brain0
Please insert a valid brain.
Quite apart from the ethical concerns this technology poses, the following tidbit is truly fascinating:
I'd like to see if the technology could be harnessed for monitoring creativity, which is in one sense "passing thoughts." Suppose you could decipher activity that amounts to what we call inspiration. Now, with a feedback loop mechanism, you could see what affective states produce your best ideas.I want one of these to play with before the Thought Police get them.
While I'm on overall a nice person and I never used physical violence or voluntarily endangered anyone since the age of 15 (and never really hurt anyone ever) but beside the intelectual "conspiracy" ("Hey! their security is so lame I would just have to do this to walk away with a lot of cash"), I have at least 5 murder urges each day (towards my boss, politicians, bad drivers, the stupid IT guy down here, smokers... so cops randomly arresting and questionning me on something I didn't do and wasting a lot of public money in the process will have a 200% chance of triggering that, even if I know it could mean life (or death) sentence.
I'm sure of that because I'm the king of person who have an almost normal blood pressure, but a lethal one when I'm half naked on a doctor's table. My brain knows I'm not in danger, but my body is overreacting to the perceived threat.
You brain's all analog. DRM doesn't apply.
"we are also denying people who aren't going to commit any crime the possibility of proving their innocence.""
That's strange, I didn't know people had to prove their innocence when they weren't going to commit any crime. In most normal countries the legal practise is, one is presumed innocent, untill proven otherwise. Some recent exeptions that are becomming aparent in USA 'justice' not withstanding, it's not necessary to prove anything about one's thoughts about something, as long as one didn't act on it.
So, I fail to see the validity of that claim in support of implementing thought-watching, unless the justice departement already went wrong and had thrown away current legal rights. And if that's the case, thought-police will only make things more totalitarian anyway.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Well, you can also read them in people's eyes, and we have done this time out of mind...
... ... ...
Oh, yeah, they use a MACHINE now.
You should talk to a Poker player.
-What if I misunderstand the question -What if I have another interpitation of the question -Guilty? Says who? Depends on how you look at it "...predict the person's intentions with 70% accuracy" 70%?? It should say 99.9%, even I can perdict 70% Anyway, if it really worked, and if he was alive, Hitler would have loved this thing.
From the submission... 'It's like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall,' said the leader of the project, Professor John-Dylan Haynes .
Now why does that remind me of the old joke about how to make a blonde's eyes light up?
[You shine a torch in her ears.]
They subject they've chosen to highlight is criminal justice.
OK, I'll bite:
In some jurisdictions, you don't prove your innocence. You establish reasonable doubt of your guilt.
Should we expect the new standard to be reversed?
For practical purposes, I think that it already has been reversed.
A trial may determine how bad you take it, but by the time it gets that far, you've already grabbed your ankles.
In some jurisdictions, you can't be compelled to be a witness against yourself.
Even assuming that someday it works as presented, what you will have is the ability to accurately determine someone's intentions.
Should we expect this standard to be removed? Or, perhaps, re-defined--where your the report of the machine is not your speech, but evidence?
To avoid citing the most inflamatory examples, I ask that you look at the privacy and search&seizure issues in the UK and the US today.
In most jurisdictions, the perception and intention of the accused is only an element of the crime, if it's considered at all.
Again, if the technology works as it's presented, there will be great incentive to simply define the crime as whatever the machine detects.
Simpler for everyone. Justice is whatever society says it is, so there's no problem here.
Again, many specific and inflamatory examples can be cited, so please let's just start with the general concepts of "security theatre", "zero tolerance", and profiling.
There are many examples of arbitrary empirical tests that have nothing to do with the actual harm caused by the accused.
But, since the tests are empirical, we don't argue with the finding--it's there for everyone to see. It's evidence, not an assertion.
It is so easy to define guilt as the finding of the test. Thing suddenly become very easy, simple, and clear. More importantly, the people making the decision to punish can no longer be held accountable for that decision.
This we can argue on the basis of our subjective sense of fairness and justice.
Such argument takes discipline, time, and attention. It's messy and loud.
It's also how morality can be defined--the coming together of a bunch of different subjective views into a collective agreement of behaviour.
Another way to define morality, of course, would be for the most powerful among us to simply force the rest to toe the line they prefer.
We don't need this technology to abandon the concept that power to rule a people should come from those people, only at the discretion of those people.
As we turn our public servants into parents and ourselves into children, the words of Bill Cosby come to mind:
Parents are not interested in justice, they want quiet!
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
This is nonsense. They can no more predict what you are going to do than a lump of cheese can.
All they have shown is that with statistical analysis of a large group 70% of people have statistically significant differences in the areas of the brain activated by thinking "I will subtract" and "I will add". It would take about 8 seconds to learn to think about something different, or even reverse your thinking, to confound this study completely.
And fMRI is mostly rubbish with individuals because the signal change is too small. You need statistics and a large group.
It really gets on my nerve when 'scientists' whore themselves to the media, lie through their teeth, just for publicity and the hope of extra funding.
The source of this nonsense (be it the scientists or journalists involved) should be reprimanded.
> One scary place this could be used was to check religious beliefs, in some countries you are
> prohibited to believe anything else than what the state dictates.
It is only really in Christianity that it is common for followers to care what other people believe. In most religions, the norm is to only care about what people actually do, not what they think. So as long as you do the rituals and stay away from the taboos, you are all right.
I can't speak to the other countries, but as to Iran, it's not illegal to be something other than Muslim. It's illegal to proselytize any religion other than Islam.
.. big deal. Scientologists have been able to assess a persons intentions for decades .. and guess what: It works!
The title of this article is extremely misleading. The researchers are NOT able to read "thoughts," in anything but the loosest of the word. The "torch" that they talk about using to "see into people's minds" is not even remotely possible, and probably won't be for decades. They can NOT "find" something being "thought" that they weren't already looking for. In this case, they are able to use fMRI (which basically measures blood flow in different brain areas -- not neural activity directly, by the way) to distinguish between a BINARY choice (i.e. whether someone will choose to add or subtract two numbers).
This sort of thing has been done before with fMRI, EEG, and iEEG -- so it's not particularly new. The idea is simply that brain activity while "thinking" of subtracting two numbers on the screen is sufficiently different from brain activity while "thinking" of adding two numbers on the screen to be able to distinguish the two states in single trials. (I say "thinking" in quotes, because in reality, researchers can't have any idea that subjects are actually doing what they want them to be doing.) In this case, they seem to be looking only at the medial prefrontal cortex. Even if they could somehow tell "everything" that was going on in medial prefrontal cortex (which this research is a far cry from), they'd still have the problem of figuring out what's happening everywhere else in the brain.
My last comment is that I am guessing that the software that "guesses people's intentions" needs to be calibrated for each individual from a bunch of trials where the researchers know what the subject is actually intending. In addition, brain-activity-measuring studies (such as fMRI) often accept only right-handed subjects, because brain activity in non-right-handed individuals is different enough that results get thrown off. In other words, take this article with a large block of salt.
(( (CRAYON) )) >
If only they'd had one of these in the oval office in 2001. We might have headed off a disaster.
Maybe the ethical question is how to get politicians to submit to a brain scan, not whether or not to do it.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
An interesting choice of words from the article. As opposed to saying "...might be used to questions suspects." The article's choice of words assumes that if you're being interrogated, you are a criminal. Which seems to be the way people are thinking these days.
User Training for Busy Programmers
This won't prevent a crime carried out by an unsuspecting third party, ie criminal sticks a bomb in an old lady's purse, old lady gets on a bus, kaboom.
The notion of having to prove one's innocence if that one is never going to do anything wrong seems proposterous and highly pessimitic, although at first glance may appear to be possible if not probable considering the nature of our judicial system. However, I choose to adhere to the more karmic notion that if you are so concerned with having to face a false accusation then it will, more likely than not, happen.
I say intentions don't count. What counts is what you did and what you did not. A toy to help clear that issue should be welcome. A toy to mess around with people supposedly intend to do something... well, let's put it this way: keep it out of my sight or you won't need it to get a clear view of my intentions.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
And they would call it the GGA. The Government Genuine Advantage.
When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Jefferson
Um, in case you didn't notice, that is already happening today. It's called the war on terrorism, and people are being locked up because of things they've said in chat rooms
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
How about "innocent until proven guilty"?
Even though this tech is very much in its infancy and it seems this whole story is very much exaggerated, let's pretend that maybe 10-20 years from now that this might be a legitimate privacy issue. I wonder how well it would work (when it is more advanced) on someone who routinely did neurofeedback and who could consciously alter their own brainwaves. I just finished building my Modular EEG, and already I can control my Beta waves to some degree (after just a few days of neurofeedback with BrainBay). If someone was able to achieve deep states (slow wave) or Alpha/SMR brainwave patterns at will (hence reducing Beta waves and conscious thought), my guess is that it would pretty much alter the brainwave patterns significantly enough to greatly complicate detection of thought patterns (since you would essential be able to reduce all thought at will). I wonder how neurofeedback would affect current lie detection technology such as polygraphs. Since biofeedback for galvanic skin response (one method used in polygraphs) already exists, I'm guessing practicing that would greatly skew current lie detection technologies (perhaps in conjunction with neurofeedback).
My wife has been reading my mind for years. Or maybe she's just telling me what to think.
The problem is, somehow they've managed to judicially smooth the path for courts to accept fMRI "mindreading". It's a done deal. I don't know what mechanism they've used, but somehow, unlike polygraphs, the industry promoting this blow-flow detector has convinced ????? that these machines work. When they stick your head into this bucket, the courts and your employer will believe what it tells them. So get busy thinking innocent thoughts, and have faith that the promoters of this brain scanner will be as reliable as the suits who told election boards that PCs make swell vote counting machines.
Does anyone else want to strangle the author of this article? It was a Philip K. Dick story adapted by Spielberg. Please give credit where credit is due.
Don't blame me -- I voted for Roslin.
I wonder if this technology might one day put Kavka's toxin puzzle to rest.
The puzzle is a thought exercise that boils down to, "Can someone INTEND to do something, knowing that they aren't actually going to have to do it?"
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
How is that news? Such devices have been known for millenia: they are called mother or wife.
-- Put crudely, the world is an extremely large problem instance. (Russel/Norvig Artificial Intelligence)
I have lots of 'intensions' driving to work every day on that damn highway but I never do anything about them - seems pretty pointless. But, even scarier is the idea of Tom Cruise busrting into my house and arresting me in an overly dramatic and campy way - ewwwwwww!
I'm just a soul whose intentions are good.
O Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood.
I think that the danger here is that, if it's perfected, this will be a easy sell for airport security. Now, we don't have to take off our shoes and take out laptops. They'll be able to scan for "incorrect thought" without physical contact. This
How soon after that before it is mounted in intersections and high ways instead of security cameras? Even thinking about speeding (and general road rage) might be illegal...
This is why innocence is presumed.
Next version of DRM. Don't even THINK about pirating our IP!
No no, you are still most definitely not free to not date no girls.
Blerg.
Considering the magnetic field strengths necessary to run a standard MR imaging system with any decent resolution--not to mention the blurring with movement and the virtual need for RF coils that lay close around the head--barring a huge advance in magnetic technology it will always be true that the person needs to be stripped of all metal objects, x-rayed to make sure there's no metal plate in their head or anything, brought to the scanner, placed inside, and more or less _totally aware_ that something is going on. They can't zap you with a beam from ten feet away and know what the blood in your head is doing.
What ever happened to "Innocent until proven guilty?" ....nevermind I am being naive.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Excuse the fuck out of me, but I don't have to prove my innocence. You have to prove my guilt.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Could you explain that joke for me? I don't get it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
70% accuracy is meaningless unless you know what the sample size is. So if they only tested 10 people, they only were able to guess 2 more than just randomly guessing '+' or '-', which doesn't say alot. Why do studies release numbers like this without mentioning the sample size? Whenever they do, it makes me highly doubt the results.
I don't know about anyone else, but there are at least two discrete personalities in my mind. Only one of them is actually expressed as my true personality to the world, but I have a little voice (perhaps what some would call a conscience) that throws up all sorts of crazy ideas for my 'real' self to then choose to implement or not.
/thinking/ about anything whatsoever as taboo, just /doing/ certain things is taboo.
/actually/ doing them.
So this little voice has told me to steer my car into oncoming traffic, maim people, and all manner of things, but because my 'real' self is pretty sane, it just ignores these stupid requests and does the 'right' thing in each situation. That doesn't mean the 'little voice' will stop coming up with ideas though. I just see this as part of being an introverted objectivist who doesn't see
If they can read our inner thoughts in future, I'd suggest we'd ALL be in jail, because I don't think I'm the only one who subconciously thinks about nasty things without ever entertaining the thought of
...why not hook up people's turn signals to a brain scanner?
Have gnu, will travel.
"we are also denying people who aren't going to commit any crime the possibility of proving their innocence.'" What happened to just being not guilty on a specific charge? Now we have to prove (if we are not denied) our innocence? Sad.
- Different types of moral questions use different areas of the brain. A study in Science (Chin, 2006) gave users specific types of scenarios and asked for their judgments on them (similar to asking what someone would admit to doing in a given situation). People's ability to describe the thought process in a given judgment varied according to whether the situation involved deliberate action or inaction, or whether the difference involved intended or unintended harm. Most participants could have a considered opinion on the first, but not on the second. Different processes are used to reach different types of decisions. To use the brain scanner effectively, at least three things must be addressed: (1) the form of questions, (2) the understanding of the thinker of those questions, and (3) the different processes the thinker's brain uses in responding to them.
- Related to (2) above, there are individual differences between thinkers to a given scenario. Using it as a lie detector, you have the issue that a person with personal associations to a situation will respond in more parts of the brain than someone with no associations. They may not be associations with the incident in question, but with the kind of incident. For example, two innocent men being scanned to see if one was a rapist might have different response if one had a close friend or family member raped, had been raped himself, or had fantasies he found morally repugnant and had never acted upon.
- Another difference is the ability to think critically, which may be, like language, something people have a window of opportunity to learn and then lose. Studies show that the majority of people do not actually think critically, but give credence to information which supports their existing opinions. Those opinions are typically based on whatever information got in "first with the most," such as parental or cultural views. Only about 5% of the population will actually change its mind or become more flexible on a topic when presented with opposing information. Those people and the others are using different processes in the brain, and so it's necessary to know what type of thinker is being scanned.
- Different types of thinkers will use different parts of the brain, just thinking about the same words. Someone who grows up with sign language uses more of the spatial portion of their brain in addition to the language portion (Sachs, 1989). Right- and left-brain differences will also appear.
These are only some of the issues to be considered, even leaving out the concepts of sociopathy, etc., mentioned here. Basically, in order to scan any given thinker, the machine will have to pre-map what different responses mean for that thinker. It's like the test questions for a lie detector, but this would involve investigation into personal history, together with careful analysis of different types of judgment for the individual. This would be time-consuming and costly, and would somehow have to be meaningfully related to a large enough statistical sample (all of whom had been through the same screening) to make the results useful.This is going to take a long time, and anyone claiming it's possible now or in the very near future is either lying, or hasn't thought it through. (Let's put them under a brain scanner and see which it is!
> What is a conspiracy? It may be no more than two people discussing some things that they *might* do some time in the future. No criminal act, you see. But still deemed to be a crime. Why is conspiracy a crime and not intention? I believe the real reason is simply that intentions have not previously been detectable or provable.
IANAL, but my understanding of the law is that they have to have done something in "furtherance" of the crime. E.G. to have bought the things necessary to carry out the plan, to have enacted at least part of it, etc.
So there's a difference between just claiming that you're going to blow up some building and doing that plus buying all the explosives necessary to do so.
Or else when my wife catches me, I won't be able to pass it off that I was flipping through the Victoria's Secret catalog just because i was interested in finding something for her...
I thought that was a pretty amusing article. It really underscores the misunderstandings that a lot of people have about neuroscience and brain imaging. To clear up some "Minority-Report Phobias"...
(1) The part of the brain scanned in this study that predicted people's intentions (a modest 70% of the time) deals with in-the-moment attention and working memory. It could predict what the person would do in the next two seconds, not what they'll do next Tuesday.
(2) Second, it's important to look at what's being predicted. The participants in the study were asked to choose between two options... pick addition or pick subtraction. The algorithm used to scan and predict their choice is likely something along the lines of "The spike in brain activity was usually 5mm to the left if they chose addition, and 5mm to the right if they chose addition." This level of detail will let you predict which of two choices someone will pick, but there's no way to take a similar scan and say, "Oh, this distributed pattern of brain activity means that they're thinking about going to the grocery store and buying whatever brand of milk is on sale."
(3) The type of brain scan used (fMRI - very popular these days), generates an image that's highly detailed spatially (hi-res in the traditional sense), but very low-detail in terms of time. Each high-res scan represents the average activity in that part of the brain over a span of two seconds. How many thoughts go through your head in 2 seconds? If you take an average of those thoughts, does it mean anything? In this study it apparently meant that, on average, you spent more time thinking about addition than subtraction.
1. I wont have to take off my shoes at the airport any more.
2. I can screen my teenage daughters suitors when they come to the door without involving "The Talk".
... it is only used on politicians.
Frequently.
I wonder if this mind-reading is language-specific, especially for typing emails, etc.
Limb movement is universal, object names are not. Feelings are also universal, but expressing them is quite different from culture to culture.
Americans also have the oft-ignored, "Jury Nullification" which allows a jury to claim that, though the act technically violated the law, and the defendant is guilty, they did not act wrongly and shouldn't be punished. Essentially, the jury can say, "case dismissed."
THAT is where a legal system gets good. It allows you to put the law, itself, on trial per-case. That's not exclusive to the USA, I'm sure, but this "innocent until proven guilty" thing everyone's on about is pedestrian.
What? Holmes's thoughts are not divined by scanning the media that Doyle's stories are displayed on? This is in fact a category mistake? Oh. Right. Sorry. Never mind.
makes me glad i'm not going to live too long, nor have any kids.. with the way things are going, people will literally be man-made. and nothing will be the same.. think matrix, without the super powers, or herosm of neo, and robocop without arnold.
Merely discussing the activity, without at least one party to the conspiracy undertaking an act in furtherance of the conspiracy, is not fulfillment of the elements of proof for conspiracy.
If you and I discuss lynching Joe, then you go home to sleep it off, but I go buy a rope for the party, then we're both eligible for conspiracy to commit the crime.
Please don't contribute inaccurate information.
I mean, what the FUCK?! Your suspicion is beyong logic. Every man is innocent until proven to be guilty. And this is simply because we have no fucken clue that he did it.
If so, maybe it could be used so that infants can finally express their preference not to be circumcised! (should be obvious anyway, but apparently it's not)
One use can be for interacting with patients that're non-nteractive (I don't even know what the proper medical term is) and in apparent vegetive states. Maybe their brain is functioning but they can't talk to the rest of the world?
And although this is getting a bit farfetched, but if they can minimize the technology and use less power, how would that work for the next generation of video games?