CDMA and chips under our skull, with cochlear implants and retina scans with electronic brain stimulation could make it easy to control people:
economist.com
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The “robots” in question are really rats with electrodes implanted into their brains to tell them what to do. An operator sitting at a laptop computer can control the movement of the rats via a transmitter that activates the electrodes. Up to a point, a “roborat” will do whatever its operator instructs—even things that are instinctively repellent to it, such as hanging around in brightly-lit open spaces.
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Rather than extracting information from the firing of nerve cells, the new system feeds stimulation to certain cells in a rat's brain in a pattern that coaxes it to move as desired.
The trick lies in getting the right nerve cells to fire at the right time. The researchers trained a rat to move by stimulating part of the brain known as the somato-sensory cortex (this is the region responsible for bodily sensation). When electrodes stimulate a certain patch of this cortex, a rat feels a nudge on its left whiskers. When another patch is stimulated, the nudge is to the right whiskers.
Since rats rely on signals from their whiskers to detect obstacles, Dr Talwar and Dr Chapin were able to use the electrodes to persuade a rat to move one way or the other. To reinforce their false signals, they also sent pulses to a part of the brain known as the medial forebrain bundle (MFB) whenever a rat obeyed. The MFB is the so-called “pleasure pathway” that is thought to be responsible for both the sense of motivation and the sense of reward. Rats worked out that obeying the nudges would produce pleasurable feelings, and quickly fell into line.
Despite appearances, Dr Talwar says that his rats are “not zombies”. They retain their native intelligence and when guided towards an obvious threat or a difficult obstacle, they flinch and recoil. With enough MFB stimulation, this hesitation can sometimes be overcome, but occasionally cannot. Of course, he admits, the experimenters never actually tried very hard to push a rat to do something self-destructive or uncomfortable. So the strength of a rat's willpower remains untested.
So, too, does the limit of a human's. In all probability, a similar device could be installed in a human being tomorrow, though Dr Talwar thinks it should be illegal to do so. Whether anybody else will want to have a go—and whether any ethics committee would allow them to try—remains to be seen.>
Cloning, genetic engineering and control by It of our pleasure senses and we'll be like lab rats.
But hang on, how do we know that we are not already subject to such a manipulation. After all, we are at the beck and call of hunger, thirst, lust, fun and happiness already. Who said we need to be controlled by those things? What about our much-vaunted free will?
Maybe our free will is not as real as we fancy. graviton.com is going to be the harbinger of the control system. Initially we'll have transducers to monitor our blood sugar, blood pressure and many other parameters for health purposes, linked to cyberspace medical management. Then, there will be cyberspace-controlled releases of insulin, blood pressure medicine, beta blockers, mental illness medicine and oh heck, why not pleasure centre stimulation for good behaviour. It will be able to manage us and keep us happy, healthy, safe and co-operative all the time. No more of the problems in A Clockwork Orange. Naughty people could be given electrical or chemical stimulation to induce the right responses [including being dead].
With SnapTrack, we could be managed to within a metre. With high data rate CDMA systems, visual and aural control inputs could be excellent. Stereoscopic cameras, microphones, thermometers and so on would provide excellent output too, for good quality remote sensing of our environment.
Okay you lab rats reading this, you may click next now... [thanks for taking part in the experiment].
Mqurice |
