Your Thoughts About Thinking

A free society does have an interest in protecting freedoms.

What is better, reading someones mind, or hoping torture will work?

Can't really tell all that much from the sneak peak.

Hope the info somehow helps children.

We can assume that many people from many backgrounds will continue to work on mind-reading technology for a wide variety of potential uses.

From the data I have, it should be possible for an individual, or a machine, to read the mind of another person. I believe documented cases exist of people seeing other people's thoughts. The brain-based model is incorrect, but someone will eventually work out an electronic system that can do this.

There have always been persons who, through threat or actual ability have sought to control others by claiming they could read minds. It is a valid concern. But it is just one more example in a long string of examples down through history of technology being misused by people with bad intentions. The technology is going to continue to develop as long as we exist as a "modern" culture. What is really needed is a parallel technology to either detect or handle the problem of bad intentions or that would somehow proof us against the problem. The advantage of having the personal - not machine - ability to read a mind would be that a well-intentioned person would be able to read the thoughts of an ill-intentioned person just as easily as the other way around. Though you can get into the whole question of whether it might be possible to "jam" the signal or some such thing, this is a technology that should work both ways. Finding technologies that incorporate this sort of balance is a key to protecting ourselves from technologies that could be dangerous.

If mind-reading became prevalent in society, it would seriously change the whole game. It would blow the workability of passwords, for example. And that's just one issue that comes to mind. I think the game would still be playable, but it would be a very different game.

I am not worried about what society would do with such a device; I am more concerned with what would happen if my wife managed to acquire one