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Brain Will Be Battlefield of the Future, Warns US
Anti-Globalism sends this except from the Guardian:
"In a report commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency, leading scientists were asked to examine how a greater understanding of the brain over the next 20 years is likely to drive the development of new medicines and technologies. They found several areas in which progress could have a profound impact, including behaviour-altering drugs, scanners that can interpret a person's state of mind and devices capable of boosting senses such as hearing and vision. ...The report highlights one electronic technique, called transcranial direct current stimulation, which involves using electrical pulses to interfere with the firing of neurons in the brain and has been shown to delay a person's ability to tell a lie."
The temptation will be too great. Crowd control? Voter control? Don't like the price of fuel? Easy. A way will be found to change your mind.
At what price? Chemical weapons developed in the 1950s-1980s cost billions to destroy. Are mind-control weapons going to be equally as horrible? Historical trends would say so.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
From the article:
> On the battlefield, bullets may be replaced with "pharmacological land mines" that release drugs to incapacitate soldiers on contact
How likely is that? Someone will invent a drug to make you immune to incapacitating drugs, and we'll go back to bullets and explosions.
> "The concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possible that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects," the report states.
I hope not. I imagine the police could give you the stuff and ask you if you ever commited any crimes. It'll be a routine thing, just like taking your fingerprint and DNA and firstborn, when you are arrested.
> "In the intelligence community, there is an extremely small number of people who understand the science and without that it's going to be impossible to predict surprises. This is a black hole that needs to be filled with light," Green told the Guardian.
There's a dumb analogy if I ever saw one. Let's shine light on the black hole!
> The technologies will one day have applications in counter-terrorism and crime-fighting. The report says brain imaging will not improve sufficiently in the next 20 years to read peoples' intentions from afar and spot criminals before they act, but it might be good enough to help identify people at a checkpoint or counter who are afraid or anxious.
Do we really need a brainscan for that, though? People who are afraid or anxious are easy to spot, and being afraid or anxious hardly makes you a criminal.
> "We're not going to be reading minds at a distance, but that doesn't mean we can't detect gross changes in anxiety or fear, and then subsequently talk to those individuals to see what's upsetting them," Green said.
Will that talk involve one of those lie-detector brainscan-things?
> The development of advanced surveillance techniques, such as cameras that can spot fearful expressions on people's faces, could lead to some inventive ways to fool them, the report adds, such as Botox injections to relax facial muscles.
Dude, enough about anxious people alright. People are afraid and nervous all the time about all sorts of things, and the thought that some asshole security guy is going to detect that with some sort of remote brainscan and invite them to have a chat will only make that worse. How many of these people will turn out to be innocent? Many.
One drug they have me on makes it impossible for me to get upset about anything. If we could isolate what it is that makes the brain do that, put it into an airborne form and spray it over an enemy, then we could simply march in and say "We are taking your land, your government and your freedom", and their response would be (in a semi-zombie state) "Oh. Okay. I hope you enjoy it".
All without firing a shot.
But we already have that. It's called television.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
When the military or a collective of enough industry voices declare where we're going to be in twenty years, you can safely bet that those advancements are already here in some dark lab someplace.
My reasoning is this: When you have developed a super-advanced technology in secret, then when it is out-moded and no longer useful because it is being replaced by an even more super-advanced secret technology, what do you do with it? Why you sell the heck out of it. Profit, profit, profit. The bad guys understand and live in the frequency of all things one can be fearful of. A big one is the Fear of Want. --Will I be safe from being homeless on the streets? Better make enough money to get a house. Will I be safe from a mortgage collapse? Better own a house and lots of extra money on top of that to see me through the hard times. Ooh, but the natives are growing restless. I better make sure my house is gated with armed guards on the walls. How much does that cost? Oh, and what if the economy collapses altogether? I'd better have enough resources saved up to be REALLY safe.
It never ends, and so greed never ends. You need more to protect what you have, which in turn needs protecting. Fear, fear, fear.
And so. . , you find schemes to make lots and lots of money. Keeping the economy running on new tech advancements; keep the people chasing after new and better stuff to replace old and outmoded stuff. So when your secret technologies which multiple agencies sworn to secrecy have been working on in compartmentalized areas with talk-and-die non-disclosure agreements signed and filed. . , when those technologies no longer serve to protect you directly because of newer and better items, you sell them! Yay!
But hold on. You can't just dump a super-advanced technology on the market just like that. People will ask, "But where did it come from? Hey! Are you making secret technologies? With tax money? Well we want some of that!"
So you need a narrative. You need to establish a logical development path for a new technology to sprout from for people to see. It doesn't have to be true, but just true enough. Think of all those poor busy-work developers re-inventing stuff in a guided manner so that their 'new' stuff lines up with the prescribed flow of stuff which you want to drop on the market in ten or twenty years time. Stuff, stuff, stuff!
A silly game. Enjoy your iPods.
-FL
If the product works, then he tells the truth and you think the product works great. If the product doesn't work, then he lies and says the product works great.
Hooking the salesman up proves nothing.
Sun Tzu argued that you have to know your enemy in detail, but prevent your enemy from knowing you: pretend that you are weak where you are strong, and pretend that you are strong where you are weak. Information and deception have always been integral to warfare, and always will be. More modern examples include the Allies managing to trick Hitler into believing that they will invade at Calais, rather than Normandy, and Saddam Hussein pretending that his WMD programs are much stronger than they are (a ploy that backfired, in his case). But I'm not sure technology really changes this that much. It changes how we can collect and disseminate information, but at the end of the day, you need to have smart, educated, capable guys sifting through this information with their brains and giving good advice to their Commander-in-Chief... and a Commander-in-Chief with the brains to listen.