Moral complexity

Two recent stories about developments in brain technologies illustrate how complex even good news can be and suggest that we all need to be ever thoughtful in the years ahead and demand the same of our leaders.

The first story is about a paralyzed man who used only his mind to make his character in the Second Life virtual world walk. A piece of headgear monitored his brain waves and let him make his character walk simply by imagining walking. Pretty cool.

The implications are even more cool: if you can imagine walking and a piece of software can translate those thoughts into instructions that cause an avatar to move, then a more powerful program could make a walking robot take off. If that robot happened to be one in which you were riding, or perhaps even one attached to your body as prosthetics, then you'd be walking.

The second story is also about a machine interfacing with a human brain, but this one concerns a device that can tell which of a small group of words you're thinking about simply by monitoring your brain waves. The headline boldly proclaims this hardware/software combo a "mind-reading computer," and though it's far from that, it is a step in that direction.

Couple the two technologies, march forward a decade or two--or maybe a lot less if I'm being pessimistic--and you could have a system that would help the paralyzed, let us better understand language development, and provide serious insights into how the brain processes meaning. Good stuff, all of it.

Of course, these same technologies could make it easier for human-controlled physical avatars to walk through hostile territory and kill bad guys. Again, this might be good stuff, provided we use it only on bad guys, we have no bugs in the software interfaces, and so on.

Twist the viewpoint knob a few degrees, however, and you have a really powerful interrogation engine. As long as scanners are very expensive, only the truly rich--say, for example, the government--would be able to use them to read the mind of people under custody. Of course, if the devices appear to work, the free market will drive down their prices. Wait long enough, and the tech will migrate to the street, so that off-market mind readers will be doing half-rate jobs of deciding whether you get that new position at BigCo that you desperately need to pay your bills.

As for the privacy implications, well, hey, you didn't expect privacy to last, did you? (Oh, you did? Then you need to be thinking about these things right now.)

My point in all this is not just to indulge in science-fiction writer geekery, though I do admit to enjoying doing that. Instead, what I think we all must do is realize that developments like these are occurring by the dozens all over the world today as tech marches onward at an ever faster speed. We're going to need to think hard about the complex issues these trends will raise, and we're going to need our leaders to do the same. Six months from now, those of us in the U.S. will be electing new leaders. I suggest we do our best to choose those who show the greatest capacity for handling our increasingly complex future.