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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

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varispeed

Well you are going to have a brain scanning device directly linked to your social credit score.

That's the future.

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First use will be for criminal suspects, to "save lives". Then its use slowly expands from there.

"For the children" is the first excuse usually.

Exactly! Strap it on anyone who has to work with children to see if they ever have any untoward thoughts.... Then move on to everyone else.

"To fight terrorism" usually is the second.

I'm sure among the first applications of this technology will be to scan user thoughts for evidence of CSAM.

Being banned in the EU as we speak.

No, it’s not. Good lord…

There are already businesses tracking their employees' fitness for insurance purposes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/with-fitness...

EDIT: There's also a national legislative proposal to mandate that all cars have a system to monitor their drivers and lock them out on signs of intoxication.

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/09/1053847935/congress-cars-drun...

The fix here is banning these sorts of potentially abusive uses, not hoping the technology itself doesn't develop.

I would agree if I didn't think there were really strong incentives and precedents for abuse of the technology.

There absolutely are, but when’s the last time that stopped us advancing new tech?

We have laws that prevent people being subjected to brain surgery against their will. The credit score concept is ridiculous.

The real battle will be with law enforcement who get a warrant to look at your brain in an MRI.

You don't need brain surgery or an MRI to scan a brain, this just uses an EEG.

yeah, and then we remember the videos from the good old downunder where the cops assaulted parents, chased kids around, pinned them down, and injected them with experimental drugs that turned out to cause worse outcome for their agegroup.. this was a couple of years ago.

There's really strong incentives to abuse any technology or system that gives people more power. This doesn't just apply to cutting-edge computer science like mind-reading, but to even our basic institutions like law and government; yet most people would agree the solution isn't to basically give up and hope for the best, but to be vigilant and fight back against that abuse.

Neither of these things are even remotely related to what the person I replied to suggested, but nice equivocation.

For a while, eventually we will become so suggestible you'd wish you were special enough to have a score.

Why are you so certain that’s the future?

Because spouting FUD is easier than actually doing anything.

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