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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.
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!
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...
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
These are not the droids you are looking for ...
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
Thought suppressor devices are already in every living room. They're called TV.
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?
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
Wrong. It's a crime to deny the holocaust. It's not a crime to not talk about it.
So if someone asked if you thought the holocaust happened you could just not answer if you didn't want to talk about it.
But thanks for playing the I think I know the law game.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
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.]
No, no you can't.
You have to cause to be published, or presented, your views that the holocaust didn't happen [or support the Nazi party, etc]. If someone compels you against your will, e.g., by forcibly reading your mind, then you're hardly at fault.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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
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
> synapse firing
Synapse firing is a simplified approximation of the passing of chemical signals from one cell to another. All cells throughout the body continually emit and absorb various signaling molecules (lymphokines, chemokines, cytokines, to name three classes). Taken as a whole this can be called the language of cells (a particular interest of mine). There are many different chemicals involved in synapse firing, and not all (or even the same set) of them are used all the time. Think of brain synapses as a parallel bus. Different voltages can be sent along different patterns of different wires at any given time.
In short, though, yes. The brain can be ed digitally. It is much more complex than most people initially think.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac