Politicians and technocrats from around the world convened earlier this month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss how best to orient humanity's future on its behalf. Among the speakers who had their ear was a so-called futurist and ethicist who hyped the adoption of...
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No, they were talking about a great many ways to control you.
Politicians and technocrats from around the world convened earlier this month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss how best to orient humanity's future on its behalf. Among the speakers who had their ear was a so-called futurist and ethicist who hyped the adoption of neurotechnology that would afford employers, governments, and others to decode "brain activity in ways we never before thought possible."
"What you think, what you feel: It's all just data," said
Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke Law School and faculty chair of the Duke MA in bioethics and science policy. "And large patterns can be decoded using artificial intelligence."
Farahany explained in her Jan. 19 presentation, entitled "
Ready for Brain Transparency?" that when people think or emote, "neurons are firing in your brain, emitting tiny little electrical discharges. As a particular thought takes form, hundreds of thousands of neurons fire in characteristic patterns that can be decoded with EEG- or electroencephalography- and AI-powered devices."
Once decoded, the resultant data can be used for a multitude of purposes, good and bad.
The ethicist did not dwell long on the resemblances between the possibilities at hand and the dystopian nightmares previously imagined by science fiction writers such as
Philip K. Dick and
William Gibson.
Instead, Farahany focused on what she perceived to be the positive outcomes of monitoring and socially engineering the species, emphasizing that the adoption of these technologies could help address "some of the root causes of human suffering, from neurological disease and degeneration to mental illness, but of also unlocking a lot of the secrets of the human brain."
What would it look like in the field?
The WEF speaker indicated that wearable neurotechnology — contra
implanted neurotechnology of the kind Elon Musk's Neuralink deals in — will herald an era wherein "you can have an EEG sensor in each ear as part of your ear pods, where you also take conference calls and you listen to music but you have brainwave activity that is being monitored all day every day."
Farahany began her talk with a series of hypothetical uses of such wearable neurotechnology, which she likened to "Fitbits for the brain":
- An office employee monitors her stress levels as a deadline approaches and, noticing an unusual trend, sends her readings to her doctor for an update.
- Her technology-inflamed neuroses momentarily dissipate and she begins entertaining romantic thoughts about a male coworker. However, an alert appears on her desktop reminding her to refrain from intra-office romance. The employee focuses back on her work. Her prompt obedience is recognized by her boss — also monitoring the worker's brain waves — who then rewards her with a bonus.
- The next day, in an unrelated incident, her coworker is carted off by police, having been deemed guilty of wire fraud on the basis of his mental activity. Police will eventually scrutinize mental wavelengths in the office for possible co-conspirators.
According to Farahany, it won't just be white-collar environments where workers' minds will be policed and tracked in this fashion.
With the purported aim of preventing distracted-driving accidents on the road, Farahany suggested that truck drivers could be equipped with hats containing embedded electrode censors that would score what stage of alertness they are at in any given moment.
Concerning the prospect of using brain surveillance to know when to preemptively intervene, Farahany underscored, "We as a society should want that."
