Brain Privacy 495
sleepyrobot writes "As neuroscience advances and brain scans become more sophisticated, the Boston Globe points out that some privacy advocates are concerned about brain privacy. Could employees be scanned for violent or depressive impulses? Could soldiers be screened for homosexuality? It sounds like a Philip K. Dick vision of the future, but some predict this will be a bigger ethical issue than genetics."
Gah! (Score:3, Insightful)
Frightening (Score:5, Insightful)
irony (Score:5, Insightful)
I always find it ironic that technologies created by open-mindedness have to ability to empower the narrow-minded.
what you are fearing... (Score:1, Insightful)
People are afraid of the truth...if people couldn't hide from their own thoughts, they'd be faced to deal with the lies they live, and perhaps actually have to consider change.
It's a lot easier,,, (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Making a potential employee whiz in a cup in front of a stranger became an acceptable business practice overnight. Scanning brains seems pretty civil in comparison.
But the stuff in your piss is because of someting (drugs, alcohol, etc) that you've done. A brain scan searches for things that you didn't cause, and things that you can't change.
neurostarGot a whole lotta hype (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is scary, or is it just over-reaction? (Score:5, Insightful)
Brain scanning like this, combined with genetic testing will create a tiered populous with those deemd "fit" (and deemed by who, exactly?) at the top, and the great unwashed masses at the bottom.
It seems almost inevitable that humanity keeps trying to organize itself into the lords and the serfs.
It's an over-reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
... not that that will stop people from trying to use it as a high-tech lie-detector :-/
From the original article:
If a truly accurate lie detector could be developed, Caplan warns, current privacy guarantees might not provide enough protection against scanning requests from courts, the government, the military, or employers.
The key word here is if. Functional brain imaging like f(unctional)MRI is still in its infancy, and it takes quite a lot of repetitions of looking at your stimulus (e.g. something you might or might not have lied about) before you can build up a statistically reliable picture about the parts of the brain involved in processing that stimulus. If someone is stressed out because they are being investigated, and they *know* what the investigators are looking for evidence of, then there is nothing to say that they won't show stress at the appropriate moments out of fear! (By way of comparison, parts of the primary motor cortex have been found to 'light up' when people imagine movement, not just when they excecute it).
But what if someone with no symptoms is diagnosed as having a tendency toward mental illness because of a brain profile?
IMO, there is an enormous risk of misdiagnosis using this technology - currently, brain mapping involves a lot of "stamp collecting" and relatively little consideration of how the individual areas of the brain might function as a series of joined up units (and there are a lot of units).
The Spartans (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what's really funny about this? The most feared army in Greek times, the Spartans, were all gay. Many of them fighting shoulder to shoulder with their lovers.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype (Score:1, Insightful)
Guess you haven't heard about the Hate Crimes bills that have passed here in the States in the past few years...
Neuroethics (Score:2, Insightful)
That makes sense. I expect that your brain is much more likely than your DNA to determine your behavior. However, DNA can be fully sequenced right now. I would bet we're a long way off from being able to fully map a human brain.
Also, I think that much of the expectation of the privacy of one's thoughts is founded on the fact that today nobody else can be sure what those thoughts are. The examples in the article are fairly crude tools related to activity in a certain area of the brain. Care certainly will need to be taken with any potential use of these tools. Taking it to the extreme of real-time mind-reading will be a different thing entirely.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Got a whole lotta hype (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit.
Chemical screens for drug metabolites say absolutely nothing about whether you are a safety issue. If that was the issue, impairment tests would be used. (And a few intelligent employers do use impairment tests.) Drug screens are about what you're doing in your own time - they are a lifestyle screen. They're a loyalty oath to the Drug War.
(They're also surprisingly inaccurate [tripod.com] for something that can ruin your life.)
I got my first job in high school, 17 years ago. I've been in the workforce ever since. I've never pissed in a cup for an employer [infamous.net]. I've turned down job offers over it. I've still done ok.
Drug tests: just say no.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype (Score:4, Insightful)
Base hit.
Re:The Spartans (Score:4, Insightful)
And no, I'm not gay. I have known gays all my life, and have been in situations where my safety, and even my life, has been in the hands of homosexuals. At no point was my trust in their ability compromised.
It is my firm belief... (Score:3, Insightful)
We are the techno-elite, right?
Technology may be our plaything, but the technologies we do not own will own us.
There is always a window of opportunity for the early adopters to acquire mastery over those who would use a technology to oppress. Plus, brain hacking might just be the ultimate in geek fun.
While not everyone can afford to use their own MRI to do neuro-feedback hacking, there are tools that can be had right now that will let you do some serious tweaking of your own skull pudding. One such device is made by IBVA Technologies [ibva.com]
IBVA has been at the forefront for the past few decades in building devices that allows one to view in real-time their own brain activity on Macs and PCs. They soon will be releasing a Linux version of their software.
Hopefully, we'll stay ahead of the curve on this folks, because the dark side of this tech is pretty fucking dark.
I want this for a programming tool... (Score:5, Insightful)
But let's take the conservative view--that the brain is just a computer program that is trillions or quadrillions of times more complex than your average programming project for work. Now we're talking about hooking us up to a machine that has no idea what a single line of source looks like, no idea what data has been preloaded, and is just going to watch the approximate equivalent of the blinking lights on the console and tell me if my program is not only functioning correctly now, but whether it's predicted to function correctly in the future?
Geez, forget core dumps, stack debuggers, tracing tools, and all that. I just want one of these cool push-button debugging tools for writing programs!! People pay enormous amounts for teams of people to pour over source code for days or weeks or more on projects so trivial as today's... and it's apparently all wasted. We could have solved the whole Y2K problem by just letting this machine watch the blinky lights on the front of some COBOL boxes and tell us that the planes wouldn't crash and the elevators wouldn't stop. Why didn't we rush them into production if they were this close to ready?
Or is it possible that the effectiveness is slightly oversold?
Re:irony (Score:1, Insightful)
Why is screening soldiers for homosexuality "narrow-minded"?
Whether you like it or not, sex, love, and the associated emotions are not a military benefit - they're a distraction, and a liability in a combat situation. This is a liability that can be avoided fairly easily by placing straight men and straight women together in the same combat units. (Yah, I know. No women-only combat units. I think that will happen sooner or later, though...)
I'm ex-Navy, and I've seen mixed-sex ships in operation. They get the whole host of problems that you see in regular military units, plus - prostitution rings, trading sexual favors for perks, love triangles, increased incidences of STDs, quarrels (sometimes violent) between ex-lovers, etc. The same thing happens in combat units where you have a mixed straight/homosexual (or suspected homosexual) environment, only now you have the wonderful added tension of putting everyone into an uncomfortable situation: having to dress, bathe, live in close quaters with, and otherwise deal intimately with someone who may or may not be attracted to them sexually. This would be considered sexual harrasement under any other set of circumstances.
IMHO, listing "heterosexual" as a job requirement for the military is akin to requiring uncorrected 20/20 vision for a combat pilot or having a maximum height restriction for submariners. I wanted to be a pilot, but hey, my eyes are lousy... well, life sucks, and I'm not qualified. Hey, you wanted to be a Marine, but you're bisexual or homosexual... well, life sucks, and you're not qualified.
<shrug>
Get over it, move on, and be happy that your sexual orientation will also keep you out of the next draft - so you won't have the dubious privlige of going and dying in some third-world hell-hole someday.
Not to worry (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Truth Machine (Score:5, Insightful)
I have nothing to hide, but my privacy is my own.
Am I gay? No.
Am I a criminal (Caught or not)? No.
Am I trying to hide something? No.
But, if I look at a woman and think to myself, "Boy I'd sure Like to F*** her!" That thought is my own and not something that anyone has the right to know about me. Thinking that doesn't make me a rapist nor someone to fear or "keep tabs" on.
Much like if I thought to myself, "Boy, the President is a dumb sonofabitch." That too is not something that I feel is something that should be public knowledge nor held against me. Just because I might think something doesn't make me guilty of anything.
Much like this discussion, it's my opinion and I should be the one to choose if and when I want to share it.
Everyone has a right to their own personal privacy. Just because someone enjoys their privacy, it doesn't make them a criminal. Did you ever think that it might protect you FROM the criminals? What would happen if everyone could know if you were scared of them. Wouldn't that make you a target of those that would exploit that fear?
Any kind of brain scanning that invades my privacy, or makes public my privacy is wrong.
That's my two bits on the matter.
-Goran
Re:Got a whole lotta hype (Score:5, Insightful)
If you assault someone without hating them for their race, you get the standard punishment. But if you do the exact same assault and feel hatred, you get an additional punishment.
In some cases this can get absurd. Here in Pennsylvania a couple years ago, two ignorant pranksters put racist stickers on a sign outside a Martin Luther King memorial. Normally, such vandalism would been a misdemeanor, giving the punks a fine and comunity service. But in their case, it was a felony due to additional hate crimes penalties.
Is that good? Maybe so, since we all hate racists. But what if someone vandalizes a Microsoft billboard because they hate monopolistic corporations, and then they get a felony for having the wrong motives when they did the crime? If everyone doesn't have freedom of thought, then none of us do.
Punish people's crimes; don't punish their thoughts.
And since the thoughts of a person in a free society are no one's business but their own, the government needs to stay out of our brains and stop conccerning itself with our thoughts.
Re:irony (Score:5, Insightful)
The Spartan army that day numbered some 11,000 men, claiming a heritage stretching back hundreds of years. Glory upon glory enshrouded this fighting force, the decendents of the famous 300 and heirs to the legacy of Thermopylae.
Across the plain from them stood the Thebian army. Only 6,000 stong, the Thebians were acutely aware of the overwhelming numerical superiority of their enemy.
In the moments before the crucial clash of arms, Epaminandos, general of the Thebian Army, called "The Sacred Band" to hold a position usualy reserved for cannon fodder: face to face with the Spartan Elite. The Band consisted of 300 highly trained shock troops. Against them stood nearly 600 of Sparta's best.
But the Thebians held a key advantage. Hoplite warfare relies heavily on the defence of those on the flanks, as well as the defence of the individual, to maintain the integrity of the unit. Here the Thebian system was superior. The Sacred Band was comprised, not simply of 300 shock troops, but of 150 pairs of homosexual lovers. These men were willing to fight and die for each other, not only because it benefited the unit as a whole, but because of the deeper bonds between them.
When the sun set on Luctra that day it set upon the aftermath of the Thebian victory. The Spartan army had been crushed by a smaller force and forced to request a truce. In the years following Luctra, Spartan military power would be shattered forever.
While I don't argue that sexual tension in our military can be a problem, I object to the idea that is MUST be a problem. Speaking as a historian I belive the problems in our military associated with sex and sexuality do not derive from having people sexualy attracted serving together, but rather the way we deal with that circumstance. The Thebians turned it into an advantage. They were not the first, nor the last.
Re:Brain Scanners Work On Politicians - No Problem (Score:1, Insightful)
Only when used on politicians. Um, national security, that's it. It's okay on ordinary citizens, though.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype (Score:2, Insightful)
If you see no problem with either violating state and federal laws or ignoring medical reccomendations just to feel good, why should a potential employer believe you would pay any attention to company and government health and safety requirements?
"If that was the issue, impairment tests would be used."
Impairment tests only tell employers about the here and now. Potential employers aren't interested in if you can show one sober on one particular day to pass a test, they're more concerned about a pattern of use over the course of weeks and months, which chemical screening is much better at spotting. Passing a breathalizer doesn't mean you never drive drunk.
"Drug screens are about what you're doing in your own time"
But what you're doing "on your own time" does have effects on the employer's time. And again, why should a potential employer believe that it's only on your own time? If you're having difficulty not breaking the law, why wouldn't you violate company policy?
Re:THis is already being done, to a certan degree. (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the problem the original poster was talking about was not that serial killers were assumed to be wierd, but that wierd people were assumed to be serial killers. What if you were a person with 'odd' tastes, who got fingered by the police for murder just because you fit some 'profile' made up by some dude in a office who's never met you? Like, say, someone that pretends to be an hunchbacked cave-dweller from outer space *must* be the murderer... As for the past being worse, things have been getting better with respect to being an 'outlier' of society for some time, and this technology seems to be a step in the wrong direction.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, whether this argument extends to non-equipment operating personnel is potentially another matter. The main motivation there is probably insurance related. Now don't get me wrong - personally, I think pot should be legalized. But drug users do represent a higher risk in terms of attendance and health care issues, so from the employers perspective that makes them expendable...
Screening Soldiers (Score:3, Insightful)
No, because that violates the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" regulation. Half of that policy is "Don't Ask."
Of course, screening someone's brain with that kind of precision will probably tell you that homosexuality has little impact in one's ability to serve in the military.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype (Score:2, Insightful)
What about the heavy drinkers?
Or just the people that don't get a good amount of sleep. Both of those have similar safety issues.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype (Score:3, Insightful)
US law != ethics.
I don't use illegal drugs, but I drink occassionally. Does that mean I'm going to get wasted on company time?
Re:The Spartans (Score:3, Insightful)
So here is a little thinking question...if it is simply 100% OK to admit gays into the military (and leave them in when they are discovered), is it OK to house men and women soldiers together in the same rooms? Make them use the same showers? Make them roomies?
I am a military type and though I don't get bent out of shape about homosexuals being in the military (of COURSE they are, they are in every frickin' job in every corner of the world), I still am supportive of the pschizophrenic "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy as a matter of policy. Why? The answers to the questions above.
It is not acceptable and would not be conducive to military discipline, morale, and capability to house men and women 100% together, sharing rooms, bathrooms, showers, etc. It wouldn't be acceptable to the public at large and it wouldn't be acceptable to most members (though the idea of getting roomed up with a hottie has a certain appeal...but therein lies the problem).
Homosexuals are not any better at suppressing their desires/urges than anyone else. While they have to keep their orientation secret, they are especially driven to control their urges/desires in open company (or in the showers or in roomie situations) because of what happens if they don't.
If you freely mix and match men and women together there WILL be problems, period, end of story. There will be sex, sexual politics to the extreme, uncomfortable staring and drooling. This because it is a given that most of the guys and women will be oriented towards the opposite sex. So, how is it different and OK to house homosexual men with the very item of their sexual attraction, and OPENLY with full acceptance by the powers-that-be, and housing men and women together, the items of each others sexual attraction? How would this NOT adversely affect the mission of the military (the military is NOT for social experimentation or other touchy-feelie bullcrap that floats in corporate America, academe, etc)?
Are people actually positing that homosexuals are superior at controlling themselves than any heterosexual? I doubt that many men would be comfortable KNOWING that the guy their undressing in front of finds men in general sexually exciting - just like a woman would feel undressing in front of generic men in a similar situation, KNOWING that the guy is almost assuredly hetero and finds women of sexual interest (remember, we think about sex every 5 minutes or so).
You COULD propose that declared homosexuals get housed with women, which MIGHT work if most of the women didn't have a problem in general having a generic man around while they undressed, showered, etc, but this isn't assured. You COULDN'T do the reverse with lesbians housing with men because many/most men would STILL get off having a nekkid chick in their room/shower regardless of whether she was hot for men or not...and that whole lesbian sex, girl-on-girl thing is a turn-on to a lot of men to boot.
It really isn't as simple as the intellectual, twice-removed thinking a lot of people have about homosexuals in the military seem to think. Like it or not, the morale and fighting ability, and trust between soldiers is more important than any other consideration. Period. And it has nothing to do with who is homophobic or why. One doesn't have to be homophobic or have "conflicted" sexual feelings to not be comfortable in VERY close quarters for an extended period of time with someone who by nature finds your sex sexually exciting.
Re:Brain Scanners Work On Politicians - No Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a fine point, and I don't dispute it.
However, politicians have other defenses as well. One such defense is changing the form of the question. Remember they are always at risk of having anything they say proven wrong, so they try not to say anything with interesting truth value at all.
One common politician trick is to make sure all questions about what they support are single-place predicates ("Do you favor lower taxes?") and not two-place predicates ("Do you think it's more important to have lower taxes or better schools?"). By doing this, they can be in favor of everything good but omit the critical bit--how much they're in favor of each thing, and therefore what their actual priorities are. I'm sure this is not the only trick they use.
(Incidentally, I've noticed a surprising similarity between the problem of detecting whether a politician is someone you should trust and the Turing Test [wikipedia.org]. Or maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Maybe the essential question is the same--"is this person for real?")
Furthermore, I've been fascinated for a long time by an analysis of the late HP Grice called The Rules of Conversational Implicature, which basically assert that the relevance of speech is often not carried in its propositional, or per se, truth value, but rather in what is written between the lines. (Grice offers techniques for making this more concrete than you might expect.) I've often thought it would be interesting to see some implementation of Grice's rules applied to the various legal arenas involving speech acts (slander, fraud, perjury, etc.) I don't think it's practical (yet), but if it could be, it would yield fascinatingly different results than what we get now. Poking about in Google reveals at least one good writeup of Grice's position [umn.edu], though there must surely be others.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype (Score:2, Insightful)
You're confusing intent with motive, which legally are two entirely different things. The classic example (from first-year law school) is stealing. If someone robs a bank in order to feed their starving family, they are just as guilty as someone who robs it out of greed. Both had the same intent of absconding with someone else's property.
Throughout the entire history of Anglo-Saxon common law, motivate has always been irrelevant. A crime was a crime, and it didn't matter why the criminal did his deed. Hate crimes legislation has overturned that, however, by saying motive does matter.