 Larry Niven, the acclaimed science-fiction writer, once drolly observed, “I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.” It certainly seems so today, with networked Ring cameras on every door linked to public and private CCTV, license plate readers, and government agencies buying up our digital lives from data brokers… all of it potentially connected to AI and facial recognition software. Even inside our home, drones can look through our windows. Thermal imaging cameras in the hands of police can penetrate walls to watch us move around in our living rooms and bedrooms. But at least there is one place where surveillance cannot penetrate, one last refuge of absolute, inviolable privacy – the inside of our skulls. We are free to think any thought, sacred or profane, sublime or silly, without fear of detection or punishment by any human authority. But maybe not for much longer. The science journal Cell reports that a computer system has been trained to decode brain waves from people who silently move their mouths while mentally sounding the words to themselves. The signal from the brain is then translated into speech in real time on a computer screen with an error rate of 26 percent to 54 percent. Annika Inampudi in Science reports that this technology, as it is refined, will be a godsend to speech-impaired people paralyzed by strokes or neurological conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). To protect test subjects from blurting out private, inner speech, users can be given unique, nonsense phrases like “chitty chitty bang bang” to cue the device to read their thoughts only when they want it to. It is this latter development that gives us pause. The fact that a safeword is needed to defend against unwanted exposure of thought is concerning. Also concerning is that scientists have had significant success decoding thought even when the subject is not silently mouthing the words he or she is thinking about. The system at times can read mere inner thoughts. At a time when digital technology evolves on fast-forward, it is not too early to be concerned about how this technology might be abused. After all, a few years ago AI couldn’t pass the Turing test. Now ChatGPT is regularly writing entertaining short stories, poems with striking imagery, and student papers that get A’s from naïve professors. The same progression could enable mind-reading technology to rapidly allow authorities to dip into people’s skulls against their will. Imagine, for example, how this technology might be used in interrogations. In this country, at least, the Fifth Amendment prohibition against self-incrimination should make results from such mind-readings inadmissible. But in professions in which polygraphs are routine, from law enforcement to intelligence and some retail positions, it is easy to imagine how such technology could be abused. Overall, speech recognition technology is a boon for handicapped people who are desperate to communicate. It is a heartening and praiseworthy development that scientists – often caricatured as amoral agents of progress – are diligently thinking of procedures to compartmentalize the reading of thoughts only when subjects permit it. Still, this story should give us pause. Something to think about… Comments are closed.
|
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed