A neuroscientist is warning us that new technologies exist or are being developed to become mainstream that will break down the final wall of privacy we as human beings have - our thoughts and emotions. Read the story HERE. She claims that our bodies' telltale signs of emotions that are detectable by thermal imaging, for instance, are one gateway to the possibility of public cameras "reading" our internal states. All sorts of other technologies currently exist such as "mind-reading" EEG caps, carbon dioxide monitors that can measure human fear, heart rate monitors, and skin sensors that betray the nature of our inner thoughts and emotional states, and these technologies are not far from being harnessed for other applications that can be used publicly and even covertly to seize from us the one last bit of privacy we have.
You think internet data mining of your buying preferences is bad? Suppose there's a camera or computer out there in the streets or in your place of employment that can instantly analyze you someday and know how you really feel about your boss? Sound far-fetched? Look how fast technology moves and grows. Fifteen years ago, none of us had Facebook. Smart phones were not in everyone's hands. And everything we use, as amazing as it seems at the time, just keeps getting better. Smarter. More advanced. Could you even have imagined in, say, 1990, reading this blog ("what's a blog," you would say back then) on what is essentially a tiny super computer in the palm of your hand?
This neuroscientist who made the presentation to which I am referring is right. We need to expect the worst. Follow the money. There's an agenda. There's monetary value and power in collecting as much information as possible about the masses. Don't think for a second that people aren't working on ways to secretly read your thoughts or emotions. If I sound like a conspiracy theorist, so be it. Legislators need to be proactive and forward thinking to start putting regulations in place now to control new technologies. To inhibit the development and placement of technologies that are likely being developed. We can't afford to have these technologies developed and unleashed on the world and then wait for the slow wheels of law-making to put controls on them. It's getting out of control. We, as a technological society, are getting too smart for our own good.
Perhaps somewhere in the room I'm in is a super-computer analyzing my emotional state as I rant about technology. And it is sending a warning to a bunch of guys in lab coats in some far-off lab who will decide that I need to be eliminated.
We are on the verge of crossing the final threshold of invasiveness. We have to stop it and preserve the final piece of humanity that we and only we all carry inside us.
For now.