I recently came across this disturbing article on the Vox News site.
"Over the past few weeks, Facebook and Elon Musk’s Neuralink have announced that they’re building tech to read your mind — literally."
"Mark Zuckerberg’s company is funding research on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that can pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words. The researchers say they’ve already built an algorithm that can decode words from brain activity in real time.
And Musk’s company has created flexible “threads” that can be implanted into a brain and could one day allow you to control your smartphone or computer with just your thoughts. Musk wants to start testing in humans by the end of next year.
Other companies such as Kernel, Emotiv, and Neurosky are also working on brain tech. They say they’re building it for ethical purposes, like helping people with paralysis control their devices.
Some neuroethicists argue that the potential for misuse of these technologies is so great that we need revamped human rights laws — a new “jurisprudence of the mind” — to protect us. The technologies have the potential to interfere with rights that are so basic that we may not even think of them as rights, like our ability to determine where our selves end and machines begin. Our current laws are not equipped to address this."
They are:
1. The right to cognitive liberty.
You should have the right to freely decide you want to use a given neurotechnology or to refuse it.
2. The right to mental privacy.
You should have the right to seclude your brain data or to publicly share it.
3. The right to mental integrity.
You should have the right not to be harmed physically or psychologically by neurotechnology.
4. The right to psychological continuity.
You should have the right to be protected from alterations to your sense of self that you did not authorize.
"Brain data is the ultimate refuge of privacy. When that goes, everything goes,” Ienca warned. “And once brain data is collected on a large scale, it’s going to be very hard to reverse the process.”
We are familiar with the words of Psalm 139:
"Lord, you have probed me, you know me:
you know when I sit and stand;
you understand my thoughts from afar.
You sift through my travels and my rest;
with all my ways you are familiar.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
Lord, you know it all.
Behind and before you encircle me
and rest your hand upon me."
It is comforting to think of God present in my thoughts,
surrounding me with his care. However, it is anything but comforting to think of the neurocapitalists and the government having access to my thoughts.
Think of the opportunities this offers for detecting sins!
ReplyDeleteYou get a thought chip at First Communion or RCIA. You plug in your thought data at the holy water font before mass, and a scanner beeps if sins are detected.
Penances could be correlated to the data on the chip and spit out of a slot, like the coupons in the store. No need for time-consuming Confessions.
The following week, the chip would indicate whether the penance were performed.
Loss of privacy is a small price to pay to ensure a smaller, purer church.
Recommend The Circle by Dave Eggars for more on what that type of world looks like.
Jean, did you ever read The Key to Midnight, by Dean Koontz? It's about a woman who was given a new identity, but whose real identity had been erased by brainwashing because of what she knew. Pretty good thriller.
DeleteKatherine, I have never read a Dean Koontz novel, so I will try that one. The movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" had a related premise--two people getting their memories selectively wiped try to "embed" each other in a retained memory so they can find each other again.
DeleteJean: Think of the opportunities this offers for detecting sins!
DeleteYou get a thought chip at First Communion or RCIA. You plug in your thought data at the holy water font before mass, and a scanner beeps if sins are detected.
Penances could be correlated to the data on the chip and spit out of a slot, like the coupons in the store. No need for time-consuming Confessions.....
Would parents get access to their kids; chips? And maybe their spouses?
Brilliant!
Apparently Dean Koontz has never suffered from writer's block. He has written 78 books, plus short stories. I have read some good ones and some bad ones. I liked this one, not least for its description of the Gion district of Kyoto.
DeleteRe Anne's comment: I like the Netflix show "Black Mirror." There was a recent episode about a hover mom who gets her daughter chipped, and is able to find out things about her. The whole sad saga is the mother acting on info for which she has no complete context. I thought it was quite a good cautionary tale about technology and parental fears running amok.
DeleteHaven't we taken to first steps to having all our thoughts out there for all the world to see with e-mail, blogs, and twitter.
ReplyDeleteIncluding this one?
DeleteThe article points out that the technology could be a boon, for instance, for a paralyzed person. But the possibilities are so rife for abuse in the hands of, say, a totalitarian government.
ReplyDeleteIt just seems like another instance where technological capability is outstripping ethical consideration. On the other hand, maybe it is a case of overhype. Elon Musk hasn't terraformed Mars yet, either.
I'm a Luddite; when I want to know what my family is really thinking, I just read their diaries.
ReplyDeleteDiaries, LOL! Funny, they're still popular with girls. With boys not so much. Except my little brothers unlocked mine with a table knife. Now Kindle has a My Journal app that is password protected. But the granddaughters want the kind with unicorns and glitter on them.
DeleteI guess in making this comment, I'm revealing a gap in my own spiritual development (and thus providing an illustration of Jack's point re: blogs, emails et al): I don't understand the point of diaries. Inasmuch as my innermost thoughts already are apprehendable by me while they're in my head, there seems no incremental value in recording them on paper (or electronically). Plus - and this seems pertinent to the post - once my thoughts are on record, a security breach would reveal them to others.
DeleteThe spiritual gap I'm revealing is that I've never done spiritual journaling. When I started deacon formation, our spiritual director told us that we'd do journaling as part of our spiritual formation, but as things panned out, nobody ever assigned it to me. I'd like to think I'm reflective as the next person, but as mentioned in the previous paragraph, the value in recording my thoughts escapes me.
I have kept journals, off and on, over the years. More off than on, I'm afraid. The main value to me is to see where I've been. As you say, one's thoughts are apprehendable while they're in one's head. But later it is sometimes useful and informative to read about events as you recorded them at the time. Sometimes the passage of time puts a different slant on them, to the point where retrospection isn't accurate. And there have been times when I reread an old journal entry, say after 30 years or so, and I have absolutely no memory of the event or thoughts that I recorded.
DeleteSometimes journals are interesting or useful to generations that come after you. There is one that surfaced lately in our family that was the diary of my great-great grandmother, written on her journey west in a covered wagon. That was of great interest to the family.
I read a book by one woman who had survived a near-death experience, who recommended people writing a memoir for their descendants, both as a faith witness and as a connection to them. Will have to think about that, I don't know that I have led an interesting enough life for a memoir.
I have also kept dream diaries, but gave that up as pretty useless, because it seems like most of the time dreams are just your brain rewinding. Once in a while, though, there is one that seems like a message.
I burned my diaries when the cancer was diagnosed. No big secrets in there, but reading them would be like trying to reconstruct a meal from the crumbs on the kitchen counter.
DeleteMy brother and I agreed to destroy our mother's journals without reading them after she died.
Handwriting does focus the mind and clarify thoughts sometimes. But so does knitting. And nobody is going to become unsettled by a pair of unfinished socks.
There was some interesting psychological criticism going around when I was in grad school, about memory and memoir/autobiography/biography. I got sidetracked on that for awhile because it detailed with hagiography.
Of course everyone hopes that they won't get dementia when they get older. But sometimes it happens. I have thought about writing a memoir as a sort of file backup, in case I forget who I am, and what my life was. I could read my story and not feel lost. Only maybe it doesn't work that way, Maybe it would still feel like someone else's story, even assuming I didn't forget how to read. Wasn't that what the movie "The Notebook" was about?
DeleteAs part of the Great Clean Out I came across a date book I used in the 1970s. There are notes on a meeting I was trying to set up. There is joy when the meeting is set, desolation when it had to be postponed, and then success! We met for lunch. We met four more times in the next three weeks. I have no recollection of the person or the subject of those meetings.
DeleteAs long as I have known my dad, he has kept a little black book in his shirt pocket. Every year the grain elevator gives its customers a little black date book. Dad records the weather, rainfall, the price he got for cattle, etc. Every single day he writes something in the little black book. I've no idea if he has saved them year to year or not. Would be quite a lot of data over 70-plus years of farming and ranching.
DeleteSome guy wrote a letter to his aged self telling himself not to be a pain in the ass to his kids the way his father was to him. Of course, the elder self won't remember writing it and will probably deny he wrote it.
DeleteStan, where did he put the letter so that his aged self would find it?
DeleteKatherine, I think he gave it to his kids with which to confront him, if needed. Good luck to them.
DeleteI don't want Mark Zuckerberg to even know I exist.
ReplyDeleteSame. There are many good reasons to stay away from Facebook (chief among mine being that I can never remember my password), and that one re: Zuckerberg is near the top. Of course, my piddling efforts to maintain a modicum of privacy are no match for Big Data. I bought some flowers online a few days ago for our wedding anniverary. I'm sure that datum is now filed in a few thousand repositories and making connections to other bits and bytes that tell marketers and political consultants more about me and my behavior than I know about myself.
DeleteJim, I made the mistake of sending flowers from one of those online sites. Of course now they fill my email with ads, and they pop up on my Facebook feed too (and how'd they even get that info?). The worst part is that the flowers didn't look like the picture, and I didn't even save any money by the time all the fees were added in. Next time I'll go through a local florist.
DeleteA word in FB's defense:
DeleteFB has been a boon to those of us with myeloproliferative neoplasms. It's the only way we can find each other because these cancers are so rare.
These grassroots groups are actually more free of commercial interference than the MPN research foundations, which are heavily subsidized by the drug companies.
In the FB groups patients can share info and, most helpfully, hematology recommendations. Most hematologists have little experience with MPNs, so they neglect management of the disease. They will shift into high gear when we progress to acute leukemia, but by then we're looking at a year's survival rate, tops.
I belong to a few other FB groups, but I don't "friend" people.
I don't diss Facebook, it's how I stay in touch with friends and family that I don't see too often. But I do have issues with how they share your information. And I block most political stuff.
DeleteJean, I definitely can see how it would be a plus for your myeloproliferative illness groups.
I have kept old date books, used for business, since, as a freelancer, I had to keep track of my time on projects by 15 minute increments for invoices. Occasionally a personal entry, but not many. I have thrown most of them out now, since I used to keep them for income tax purposes (In addition to timekeeping,I recorded mileage to client sites, detailed office supply costs etc). No more need for that.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I recently went through a box of old correspondence, college and early marriage years mostly. My mom had kept the letters, including letters my college friends sent to me at her address. Reading the letters did bring back a whole lot of memories. Also some information in them that I would prefer never be read by my survivors after death! I started to throw the whole lot away, but weakened, and pulled out the letters that did not have TMI for my adult kids, especially the exchanges I had with a very close friend regarding my (and her) kids and the challenges of parenting! Plus letters related to old boyfriends.
My life has been pretty normal, nothing extraordinary. The most interesting letters were those I wrote to my mother during my academic year in Paris. Especially interesting to compare my lifestyle there, and descriptions of Paris life in general, with my more recent trips to Paris. The city has changed. And it hasn't. Thanks be to God. Happily, they French PTB have been wise enough to keep high-rise buildings on the outskirts of the city, and in suburbs, even if American fast food chains are now all over the place (there were no faat food chains there at all when I was a student). I was on a VERY tight budget that year, funded by a scholarship, but it did not cover personal expenses. In some letters I listed the cost of things like shampoo and soap and toothpaste to my mother, hoping for a small check in the mail at some point. I was funding my personal expenses through savings from summer jobs I had held from age 13 on, but it was hard to stretch at times. A small check was all that she could afford, and even very small was a stretch for her, so I always felt guilty even asking.
I did keep a small combination date book/diary that year,which I dutifully wrote in French. Fortunately my French was pretty basic so I can still understand what I wrote. Lots of good memories there.
Anne, an academic year in Paris sounds so interesting!
DeleteKatherine, I had wanted to go to France and live from the time I was a little girl. I couldn't imagine how it would ever happen, especially since by the time I was a sophomore in college, my mother had lost her home and was living in a room given her as part of her compensation at a conference center. I spent school holidays with friends, as I had no home to go home to.
DeleteI was able to do it because one of my two scholarships transferred to cover the French tuition,and I used my own savings to cover my personal expenses. But it was the behind-the-scenes work of two of my professors, both religious sisters, to arrange financing to cover my room and board that really made it possible. I didn't even know what they had done for many years, and never properly thanked them.
I was the poor kid of the group. The other girls were daughters of affluent professionals like doctors, and some were actually super-wealthy. I struggled to pay for my carnets of 2nd class metro tickets (discount for 10 at a time). But they were great friends, and they made sure I was never left out of things. It was an amazing year, an amazing experience. When I read the letters, and saw the prices of my personal items, it was shocking. Maybe 50cents for shampoo and a quarter for soap, but it was a LOT to me at the time. Decades of inflation since then!
Jean: I thought you might be interested in this week's newsletter from the EC News Service. Not a whole lot of Republican sentiment in the stories - even if the faces in the photos are still white.
https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/
Been thinking about this for Confession.
ReplyDeletePenitent: Bless me father.
Priest: Really?
Penitent: If it says so.
Priest: Say three Rosaries and don't even think of making that face.
Wow. Three whole rosaries. You must have done something really bad. Penance here is always a decade for the souls in Purgatory. Doesn't seem to matter what you did. I suspect Father doesn't hear that well.
DeleteWe get the customary five Hail Mary's. Or nothing at all.
DeleteWe had a priest who got creative and gave everyone the penance to go to the parish mission. Which lasted four evenings.
DeleteNone of you know what the Zuckerberg BCI told the priest that produced such a penance. That's now. I suppose in the future, there'll be a BCI on your Fitbit, and everyone in church will know. I doubt many of them will want to call attention to themselves, though.
DeleteTom, probably the BCI knows all about impure thoughts before you even think them!
DeleteKatherine, At least it must be able to see them coming. It should end the he-said, she-said problem Because when they say, all they have to do is go to the record of she-thought, he-thought.
Delete