What constitutes a "private space" in the Internet Age is becoming more and more unclear. We live in a world where email is mined for marketing, and Facebook passwords are revealed in legal investigations. Choosing to put something online is tantamount to choosing to give up the privacy of that thing, at least in the worst-case scenario.
Now it turns out that even our thoughts may someday be online, via thought-identification technology, which has the potential to make our subjective thoughts available to the outside world.
Until recently, the content of subjective experience was thought to be "in principle" resistant to scientific understanding, irreducible to formula, fundamentally opposed to abstraction. Recent neuroscientific breakthroughs, however, indicate otherwise -- blowing concerns regarding privacy and technology wide open in ways that could alter the course of human-technological evolution.
Thought-identification technology, characterized by neuroscientific efforts to correlate neural patterns with mental states, has taken long strides this year, lending considerable optimism to the prospect of a more prolific and predictive account of human imagination.
Our most private thoughts have in many ways already been digitized, replicated, stored, and viewed from outside the mind. Through data-mining and pattern recognition, including techniques such as "sentiment analysis," machines are capable of knowing a surprising amount about our qualitative experiences. As we merge more and more with technology, and our computing methods become more refined, they will provide increasingly insightful information about the subjective components of our reality to the point that in some cases, they could know more about us than we do.
Alarming as that alone may be, what the more recent progress in thought-identification technology research attempts is something of an even greater magnitude, something much more disruptive and invasive.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are using computational neuroscience, machine learning propagated by fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans, to determine what happens in the brain when people think specific thoughts.
Subjects are shown a series of images, then asked to think of those images one by one while machines measure their neural activity. Computers are able to predict which of the images the subject held in the mind at a given time by comparing neural activity in looking at an image with that of thinking of the image.
More impressive perhaps is research underway at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin by John Dylan Haynes, who is interested in reading information from the part of the brain that controls intentions.
In Haynes's "add/subtract" experiment, he shows subjects a pair of numbers and asks them to decide whether they intend to "add" or "subtract" them. Computers were able to correlate the intention to "add" and "subtract" with neural activity, rendering them capable of predicting the unspoken intention a person holds in the mind.
As we substantially increase our understanding of how the brain represents images, language, and intentions, this recent neuroscientific success indicates, the barrier between subjective "mind" and objective "world" is perhaps a lot more permeable than previously thought.
This technological capability, if brought to fruition, will be highly disruptive. Biases and lack of awareness about the full range of technological possibilities for the future have limited discussion of preventive measures thus far. The idea that "science could never do that" has comforted us up to now, but is more and more untrue.
But in the future, digital information from our subjective minds will likely not only appear on the Internet, but like "sentiment analysis," it will influence how the Internet runs.
Thought identification can also be applied to search, allowing one to search with thoughts rather than typing, making us much more "plugged in" and "embedded" in the technology we have created than we ever would have thought possible.
— Kim Solez, MD, Director of NKF cyberNephrology at the University of Alberta
There are many failures in human reasoning systems, especially when we factor in shortcomings such as confirmation bias, emotional reasoning, using incomplete information when drawing conclusions... There are many. Complicated and multifactorial analysis done by computers doesn't apply only to chess playing and weather predictions, this kind of software will be applied to mind reading technology with the likely result that the margin of error in predicting the intentions and private thoughts of an individual will be very low. That being said, there is a always a risk of having a bug in important computer systems, even ones that exist today. After all, the planes today depend on computer systems to fly. The bottom line is that having this kind of technology presents another reliable line of defence. Not infallible, but likely very good.
When I read the article I also thought of the potential to increase our safety.Then I thought what if there is a bug in the program and people are detained when they had no ill intent?That is very scary!
Yes I believe all the means discussed in this article, including Israeli type security measures with concentric circles, will eventually be employed. As scary as these mind reading technologies are to the average person, they are even much more scarier to someone who routinely has malicious intent. The mere existence of such technologies will do much to deter those who intend to commit evil acts.
Yes very interesting! Thanks! Not perfect images yet from brain waves but much much much better than one might expect. Things really are advancing very quickly!
Research on thought identification technology so far indicates that how we represent concepts in the brain is to some extent stable from person to person. But there is still considerable variation among us. Symbols mean different things to different people, absolutely. And so, in alignment with the Deconstructionist movement, we can expect different neural representations of a given concept from person to person. Research thus far has indicated a combination of recognizable patterns and variation for even simple concepts like ‘hammer’.
That being said, the success of machines recognizing a single concept over a broad range of people in the future is hard to predict. The surprising and exciting component of this research is the relative success in translating neural patterns to symbols—of identifying the neural correlates of conscious experience. Previous decades saw more uncertainty in the relationship between the mind and the brain than we have today, and seriously questioned whether subjective thought correlated so closely with observable and identifiable neural patterns, as well as whether or not we could 'read off' neural patterns to predict the subjective visual and intentional experience of the subject.
For a number of reasons, the technology employed in doing more involved mind reading will have to be relatively flexible. For one, what a given symbol means changes over time. September 11th for instance, probably stored and represented in the brain like many other days before 2001 now represents something quite different to many people. If there were to be a ‘database’ of neural correlates of thought used by machines to interpret fMRI, the database would have to be consistently updated.
Also, in order to account for and anticipate individual variation in concept representation, the computer would have to take contextual information, like age and gender, from a person’s brain into consideration, factoring it into interpretation accordingly. For instance, an adult and a child likely represent the word ‘book’ differently. As would a librarian and a travel agent.
Initially this may seem like a massive and impossible task, with too many variables to consider. However, with faster computers, and better ways to scan the brain that should come along, it is not unrealistic to assume that a more prolific mind reading technology will come to fruition.
The data mining of e-mail to surmise a person’s interests etc. is a lower scale example of how software can account for context in determining facts about a person. Research into information architecture and the proliferation of a more semantic Web will contribute to our understanding of how ideas are grouped together and patterned.
So you are very right! The crossing of disciplines will be a crucial component to the revelations about the mind that are to come!
Could you provide information on Harold Bloom’s categorizing of desires? Sounds very interesting!
Also, Harold Bloom has been working on the taxonomy of desire. Once you have defined a taxonomy, you can start digitizing it and having computer programs operate on it. What a boon to marketing people!
Additionally, there is a whole NBIC revolution going on (Nanotech, Biotech, IT and Cognition). The overlap of these different fields is going to be enormous.
If it were an opt-in thing, I think I'd actually want my mind read sometimes. I'm an intuitive person and I do get really tired when I have to explain things to other people who aren't the intuitive type. Would be glad if I could just place a scanner over my head and have someone read my explanation so that I won't have to figure out how to say it.
Ok, maybe I'm just avoiding the flourishing philosophical debate here, which has so many nuances that my intuition keeps on pointing out to me. Headache...
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In the final episode of this series about the death of Internet anonymity, Saunders describes how the Internet of the future will start to attain a level of intelligence that requires no human intervention. Scary.
What can users today do to protect their online privacy? The simplest and most obvious option is to not use the Internet – at all. However, once all digital information is consolidated over the Internet, trying to protect digital identity by simply unplugging from the Internet becomes impossible – a fact that has manifest implications for civil liberties, Saunders says.
By 2011 the number of Internet-connected sensors will exceed 1 trillion, making your chances of doing anything or going anywhere unnoticed pretty much zero. Saunders talks about how the 'sensortization' of the Internet is eliminating the traditional divide between online and offline populations.
The 20th Century Internet was characterized by the ability to interact with other people and information on the Internet largely without anyone knowing who you were. The Internet of this century, conversely, will be defined by identity. Saunders explains how Internet users are unwittingly contributing to the demise of the anonymous Internet.
Steve Saunders talks about the risks inherent in uncontrolled, widespread profiling of Internet users, and how one day this practice could form the basis of a new industry, the Outernet, which in economic terms will have outgrown the commercial value of the Internet itself.
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One of the most important Internet issues of all time is being ignored by the media. In this three-part video series Steve Saunders explains how search companies are turning the tables on their users by creating user profiles for financial gain, and how soon this trend will explode into full scale profiling.
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