Combine hallucinations with police adopting this as the new polygraph and this could take a pretty bad turn.
Cool tech though, lots of positive applications too.
Cool tech though, lots of positive applications too.
Unfortunately there will be authoritarian regimes that will use and abuse this type of tech, but we need to take a firm stand against it in liberal democracies at the very least.
What if perfect brainreaders/liedetectors became as common as smartphones.
Used on everybody all the time. From politicians and cops to schoolkids and your own siblings.
What would be an optimistic version of that?
Most people have intrusive thoughts, some people (like those with OCD, for example) have really frequent and distressing intrusive thoughts. What are you going to think of the OCD sufferer in the cubicle next to you who keeps inadvertently broadcasting intrusive thoughts about violently stabbing you to death? Keep in mind, they will never act on those thoughts, they are simply the result of some faulty brain wiring and they are even more disgusted about them than you are. What are you going to think when you find out your sister-in-law had an affair with a coworker ten years ago, because her mind wandered there while you were having coffee with her?
Humanity does not even come close to having the level of understanding and compassion needed to prevent total chaos in a world like that. People naïvely believed that edgy or embarrassing social media posts made by millenials in the late 2000s wouldn't be a big deal, because we'd all figure out that everyone is imperfect and the person you were 10 years ago is not the person you are today. Nope, if anything the opposite has happened: it's now a widely accepted practice to go on a fishing expedition through someone's social media history to find something compromising to shame them with. Now imagine that, but applied to mind reading. No, that's not a future that we can survive as a species, at least not without radical changes in our approaches to dealing with each other.
- insurance discount if you wear this while driving
- remote work offered as a "perk" as long as you wear it
- the "alladvantage ecg helmet" that pays you to wear it around while you're shown advertising
- to augment one of those video interviews where you have to answer questions and a computer screens your behavior
That's all stuff that already exists more or less and much more likely to be the form that the abuse of this technology takes
They also said that the person must cooperate for the decoding to work, meaning the person could reduce the decoding accuracy by thinking of specific things (e.g. counting).
CORRECTION: The paper I read was not the correct paper, ignore this comment. The actual paper states that the model is transferrable across subjects.
Sadly accuracy has not been a big concern historically of polygraphs and much of forensic "science".