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."
This is scary, or is it just over-reaction? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem I see though is people are not thinking broad enough. Technologies such as this can be used on a large scale against humanity. I believe the consequences of such abilities need to be addressed in a uniform manner, without always talking about the terrorists that will kill us all anyway. How far will society let the security over take our lives? I for one do not want to end up living in a military state where every body that does not have blonde hair, blue eyes, and a perfect attitude is destroyed. Do you?
Go calculate [webcalc.net] something
THis is already being done, to a certan degree. (Score:4, Interesting)
Its getting to the point where any variaton from the median of society is being seen as wrong, or a disease. Speaking as an outlier, fuck you.
Re:Gah! (Score:5, Interesting)
Most lies are not told simply to be dishonest.
Most lies are told because I know you would be aginst my answer if it was the truth.
Secrets need to be kept until every person understands everyone else.
Until that time, you can not have a fully open and honest group of people.
Does the homosexual not tell everyone they are homosexual because they intend to trick people or are ashamed? No. They dont tell people because there are (good) chances the person would not understand and treat them badly.
It's like drugtests at the work place. Do drugs make people a better or worse employee? Neither of those answers will apply 100% of the time. Yet its assumed 'worse' is always right even when its not. This is why people keep their drug use secret.
I would be all for a planet where all humans could read everyone elses minds and there were no secrets. But to have that, I would not want people to judge me incorrectly based on what I think.
This is basically what we do now.
If you for example were homosexual, or did drugs, you dont tell 'everyone' this, but you tell the people who are your friends or better, who you know won't react out of fear or misunderstanding.
The best answer is for everyone in the world to be just as understanding of everyone as you and your best friends are.
At that point, secrets will be unneeded.
What a load.... (Score:2, Interesting)
That was one of the most poorly researched articles I've read about brain imaging. When will magazines and newspapers stop hyping up a technology that will never deliever the big brother scenarios they try to drum up ratings with....... For starters, MRI doesn't measure brain activity!
MRI imaging can only measure blood flow in a certain area, not the actual eletrical impulses of your brain. The way it works is by using huge magnetic pulses it forces all that wonderful iron-rich blood in your head to align in a certain orientation. After that, it essentially lets the "flash-magnetized" blood sink back out of alignment. Where your brain is working it's hardest (continually using "fresh" blood), it takes the longest for the blood to fall out of alignment relative to the rest of your sleepy noggin because of the increased iron content.
That is only the first step to getting those pretty magazine studies which most of the time are mere pseudo-science.
MRI has HORRIBLE temporal resolution. Anyone who has ever sat for an eternity in one of these machines knows this....It's the exact reverse problem of an EKG or similar system. An EKG is excellent at recording when electrical activity in the brain occurs, except for the fact that you have little or no idea where in the brain it is occuring. With MRI you get to find out exactly where in the brain this blood-consuming activity is occuring, but it takes considerably longer than instantaneous... COnsidering that most brain processes occur in under 250ms, this is like shooting in the dark. Only by repetative exposure to a given stimulus can you even hope to gain usable results...
Nor do the inaccuracies end there. After you've collected all of this wonderful MRI data from multiple test subjects (Doing a single on would be completely usualess as individual brain topology can vary) you need to compute thresholds, percent differences, and generally massage the data however you would like! The kicker is that most of these "scientific studies" never share the number crunching with any other group of scientists for independant verification..They just smile, show the pictures, and recieve the avalanche of funding.
Now I don't mean to suggest that MRI as a technology is without merit, but when you look at its limitations it can only produce useful data on a limited number of things. (Like FFA research, etc.) It certainly can't read the contents of your thoughts.
Now, even 50 years down the road if Mr. Executive placed an ultra-fine grid of sensors inside your skull, chances are you would still be safe for a long, long time. Staring at localized electrical impulses and trying to discover the functional equivalence of neural networks in a system as complex as the human brain is going to take a while.
Companies are already doing this ... (Score:3, Interesting)
A question like:
A Customer is demanding they get their money back for a product we don't carry or that will not scan. You
A) Da da da da
B) Da da do da
or
C) Da da de da
This was clearly a personality test as some of the questions had no "wrong answers" with some choices seeming better. But better to who?
I was told at the beginning of the survey, the answers had NO bearing on my employment chances. If it didn't, why administrate it?
And while this may get this post moderated "funny" I also have this point to make:
Companies like CompUSA make you go through a ridiculous "smile for the customer course". I beleive it's intent was two fold. One, to test to see if an applicant would be driven into a psychotic state. Two, to alert management to "moldable corporate clones".
The training at CompUSA was over two weeks and touched on subjects like greeting customers and asking specific questions. I consider a lot of the training like this; if you don't know how to sell, or you were not born with the ability to sell (some aren't) then CompUSA is not the job for you. I do agree with training. But to tell people they need to sell at CompUSA by Mary Lou Retton (I kid you not) that you are part of the "Winning Team" with a twinkling smile is absurd and belittling. I really do consider this type of training a "personality test" with a twist.
I am sure that some jobs use training and other subliminal ways to test personality. While not a job, isn't this what Sororities and Fraternities do as initiatiations?
Oh if we were all so enlightened... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's an over-reaction (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed.
There's a story I heard in AI class about early 'perceptron' research. (A perceptron is, to round numbers, an especially badly conceptualized neural program that can be trained to recognize things... well, some kinds of things. We've since learned there are some limits to what they can recognize.) Anyway, as the story goes, these perceptrons were trained to recognize (you guessed it) tanks. And after a while, they were apparently pretty reliable in the lab using pictures of tanks so they took them out to the field. In the field, they failed. Apparently, what they had learned to recognize in the pictures wasn't "tanks" but "lateness in the day" (which is when the tanks were rolled in); apparently, all the pictures of an empty field (no tanks) were taken earlier in the day when it was lighter. So all the training was wrong.
Somehow I expect if we deploy these brain testers, we might get initially very good results only to find out later (if we're lucky enough to find out at all) that we're measuring something like "how good a breakfast you had" or something like that--probably something with a vague statistical correlation that allows the truth to be hidden behind 'acceptable degree of failure' during heavy testing.
Who will audit what the machines really do measure? And will we use the machine to audit those auditors to make sure they're being competent in their auditing?
And what about savants and others who've had brain injury? Doesn't the data suggest that when you're absent a skill or sensory device, you recycle existing brain memory for "other purposes"? Will you get a pass on these brain tests if you're blind and using your would-be visual memory store for "something else" or will you get graded as if your use is the same as everyone else's or will you be treated as "someone with something to hide" for having a custom brain layout?
And as with genetics... (Score:4, Interesting)
In both cases there will be untold millions for large corporations to save by abusing this technology. If we do not fight for our rights to be ourselves, companies will require periodic brain-scans as easily as periodic drug checks. They won't have to pay attention to individuality or the cause of one person's odd brain-patterns, they will justify it with statistics. "People with your brain-type are 80% more likely to become unhappy at this job, therefore we will not risk hiring you." They won't care that 5% of the people with your brain-type do especially well at that job, because they will work the percentages and it won't pay to take the risk.
The pay off of having faith in people doesn't show up on the bottom line, and the burden of having faith in people is one that the "gifted" or "blessed" often don't want to shoulder. If we want these scientific advances to be stairs for the ascension of mankind into the kind of species we can truly admire, then we must bridge this social gap. We must say as a society that we are willing to pay the price in dollars and cents, in mistakes and losses, to retain our diversity and that of our neighbors, even when we don't understand or approve of them.
Numerous studies have shown, the category of people who smoke has more accidents to it's credit than that of people who don't. As it stands, today it is legal to charge someone more for insurance if they smoke, than if they don't. Smokers have become the outsiders. This injustice remains. It is based on a statistic no more or less true than:
-
People who smoke pot have a greater chance of becoming addicted to pot.
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"People who steal in their youth are more likely to steal as adults."
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The first black person on your board of directors will have a harder time "getting along."
As technology advances more "truths" like these will exist, and the scientific evidence to back them up will become undeniable. The socially myopic corporations of the world will want to modify the way they treat the people who fall into the categories above in a profitable fashion and they will fight for their perceived right to do so.Can't really argue that one.
Also very true, and plainly so when you consider it's corollary.
This, in my limited exposure to such things is also likely to be true, and were the mechanism to exist to quantify such things (one day it will) I'll wager that statistics would bear this out.
The question of how to move forward is not one of fighting discoveries, or denying the obvious.
It is one of willfully choosing to make illegal and immoral by our societies standards, any use of indirectly related statistical phenomena to alter or inhibit any citizen's opportunities in any endeavor the public is permitted to regulate.
Most of us would raise hell if our auto insurance company demanded the right to to base our insurance rates on the following questions:
Have you ever stolen anything in your life?
Have you ever smoked canabis?
Are you of African American descent?
And we can be proud of that fact.
How many of us left the question box "Do you smoke?" unanswered and got on the insurance agent for being at the root of a Gattacan state?
Is it because of how incredibly annoying it is to step outside a crowded shopping area yearning to breath fresh air only to find our lungs filled by a cloud of noxious fumes? Is it the meal ruined by the elderly folk, who sat at the edge of the smoking section in a restaurant in our youths and managed to billow forth more atmospheric poisons than a '66 Chevelle? What ever our reason for just checking the box handing over the form, does it really justify making them pay more for mandatory auto insurance? Is any reason you could give any less a prejudice than would be implied by seeing the three questions in my list above listed on a job application?
Gattaca ends or begins with us.
Re:The Spartans (Score:2, Interesting)
Romans 1:26-32 - 26. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. 28. Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. 29. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30. slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31. they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype (Score:4, Interesting)
Brain Scanners Work On Politicians - No Problem! (Score:4, Interesting)
The media will hype this up so far, it'll make the Clinton sex scandals look like a 5-over-limit speeding ticket.
Conclusion - self-serving sleazy politicians will make sure than brain scanners are *extremely* illegal.
Screening for homosexuals -- already been done! (Score:4, Interesting)
By the way, one of the devices used to measure sexual excitation was called a "Penile Photoplathismograph". It measures blood flow to the sexual organ, and most youngish men can't help but get a little bit of an erection when exposed to a picture of a naked attractive potential sex object.
ANYWAY, the idea was abandoned, for two reasons. First, some of the extremely homophobic people could not pass the test themselves. This grants some credence to the notion that angrily homophobic people are sometimes having some kind of internal conflict. Second, people who are "bisexual" to some extent greatly outnumber people who are outright gay. Although men who are exclusively homosexual make up 1-2% of the population, people who will evince at least some attraction to members of the same sex make up 5-6% of the population. Kicking out 6% of the military would be a problem.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype (Score:2, Interesting)
These two punks needed to learn that it is even more wrong to vandalize a memorial like one to Martin Luther King because of what the man stood for for the black people of our country.
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.
While your example sucks, I get what you are attempting to say. Had the people of Microsoft been punished and held down by people of our country then yes, I would say the preps in this case should be held on higher charges. But, because MS has not been, you can't quite compare your example to the Pennsylvania case.
In a mild attempt to get back on topic, I think it will be a long time before we see any sort of thing like public brain scanning. It would take some serious advances (both in actual brain scans and in the society in which we live) for something like this to happen.
Re:It's an over-reaction (Score:3, Interesting)
Certainly one could raise this issue as a theoretical exercise, but I don't think it's closed-minded of me to think they're not. Payroll systems do something that's a lot better understood and they're not 100% accurate.
You're talking about tracing the areas that are "getting used" in the brain, not tracing the data. We can't know why the area is getting used. You can't say "Oh, the floating point processor in a CPU was used--it must have been computing salary numbers." The number of reasons to use odd parts of a CPU abound, not least of which is "that part was unused and I found a use". Why would the brain, whose design is obviously more clever than most of our programs, lack the ability to make creative use of unused parts once in a while--perhaps without telling the makers of the lie detector software.
There is not even a good philosophical definition of truth, so it seems meaningless (not to mention premature) to have a 100% reliable truth-finder. Just for example:
What if a person is a devout Christian who has been to war and killed someone. What if you ask them if they've ever murdered someone and the "lie" indicator comes up. Are you sure it's not because they feel guilt over their time in war, even though they are guilty of no crime of murder under the law?
What if a person is asked if they're cheating on their spouse and one guy says "no" because he doesn't think genital contact is cheating while another guy says "no" and is found to be a liar because in his heart he knows that Internet chatroom pal he's developed a fondness for is something more than it should be.
What if a person is asked if they're a liar and they answer "yes" because they just believe "all people lie", while another person is asked and says "no" because they believe the same thing (that all people lie), but conclude from this that "lie" must not mean that thing they think all people do or it would lose all meaning.
What if a person is found answering "no" to "Did you cause the car accident that killed your wife?" only to be detected as a liar not because he did something sinful but because he was due to take the car in for preventative maintenance and had failed to... or maybe he felt he should have been driving instead of her?
President Clinton wasn't kidding when he said "it depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." He wasn't skirting (pardon the pun) the truth either. He was helping the questioner to understand that they had badly phrased their question, and the hammering he got from the opposition for having done so probably made him feel like he shouldn't have bothered. A person might say he is not having an affair because "he's never thought he was doing anything", "he thought he was doing something but it was a lot of isolated events not to be coalesced into a single overarching relationship", "he thinks he was having an affair but has ended it", etc. Unless you know, with more precision than language generally offers us, what the question means, how can you know whether the answer is a lie?
Pollsters surely know this because even subtle changes in wording cause very different results when people have no material motivation to lie and are presumably doing their best to answer accurately.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype (Score:2, Interesting)
I like to take the tests (a small price to pay in order to make my point more effective), pass them and then inform the potential employer that I choose not to work for them because of their disrespect for the privacy of their own employees. It seems to me that just refusing the job before taking the test reinforces their faith in the good that the test is doing for them ("Well, he was just a stoner/crackhead/junkie anyway. I'm glad he didn't waste our time.")
I choose to drive my point in more thoroughly by wasting both their time and money (as I feel that they wasted mine).