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posted by
CoolHand
on Monday May 15 2017, @01:58PM
from the you-didnt-just-think-at-me-did-you dept.
from the you-didnt-just-think-at-me-did-you dept.
"Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind," wrote the playwright John Milton in 1634.
But, nearly 400 years later, technological advances in machines that can read our thoughts mean the privacy of our brain is under threat.
Now two biomedical ethicists are calling for the creation of new human rights laws to ensure people are protected, including "the right to cognitive liberty" and "the right to mental integrity".
Scientists have already developed devices capable of telling whether people are politically right-wing or left-wing. In one experiment, researchers were able to read people's minds to tell with 70 per cent accuracy whether they planned to add or subtract two numbers.
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Experts Warn New Computers Could Delete Thoughts Without Your Knowledge
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The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 15 2017, @03:12PM (2 children)
By "developed device" in a very wide ranging sense they mean a classic IQ test.
Star Trek handled the moral and ethical issues by allowing unwilling Vulcan mind melds if and only if it advanced the plot. I suspect that'll be the long term result in practice.
Note that we can't detect lying right now, we can only measure gross emotional state in relatively uneducated poor actors and by being theatrical enough the victim can be convinced to be terrified when they lie, and the physical effects of terror can be quantified and put on paper. That's a kind of a long jump to wandering around inside holodecks and coworkers getting pissed off at their holodeck character presence, or waving a scanner over someones head.
Once interesting error source is age and the rapidly leftward moving Overton window. My grandparents were classic limousine liberals of the most stereotypical sort and as such they held pretty weird views compared to modern lefties. Of course they've been dead for decades so its kind of unfair to compare them to living 2017 snowflakes, but toward the end of their lives in the 80s they didn't really fit in with the D party anymore. Simply measuring brain age would give a semi-accurate political spectrum measurement.
Or perhaps instead of IQ or brain age, how about THC level? I would think that's nearly perfectly correlated with politics which is the main reason why Americans are such lunatics about weed, you have to bicker for the sake of bickering about anything that's highly party polarized. We aren't going to have socialized medicine or federally legalized weed until we have national consensus those issues are not owned by one party simply for party politics reasons. Weed is inherently left wing in the sense of lay around and daydream and eat a lot. I'd be willing to propose stimulants, legal and illegal, for the right, historically right wing governments have had a weird relationship to stimulants. Stimulant drugs are very much "get on your feet, get out there, and invade Poland again" kind of drug.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @04:38PM
Smoke weed socially to make other people more interesting only to discover they're boring as hell. Weed is a mental stimulant in controllable doses though, especially for creative people.
You're wasted here, you should be writing advertising copy for pharmaceutical steroids. "Forget depression and embrace oppression - free swastika armband with every order - 50% discount for antifa members".
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @07:54PM
Weed is Anti-Capitalist??
This is news to me.
It would be good if people would use proper callouts for characteristics.
If you mean Anti-Authoritarian or Progressive, you should use those terms.
If you mean Conservative or Reactionary, you should use those terms.
Left and Right are ECONOMIC terms.
Civil liberties are plotted on an axis that is at a right angle to that.
Quit mindlessly repeating the inappropriate terms which talking heads in Lamestream Media (who have empty heads) keep mindlessly repeating.
...and I reject the premise that uptight suit-wearing dedicated followers of Ayn Rand or Barry Goldwater never do recreational pharmaceuticals.
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