Just read an article "On Second Thoughts" in TOI by Mukul Sharma .It talks about recent experiment conducted in Germany regarding scanning human brain .Volunteers were kept in proximity of functional MRI(magnetic resonance imagining) machine and were told to perform arithmetic calculations in their brains and depending upon their first thoughts they were asked to press a 'SELECT' button .MRI machine was to scan their brain and images received were fed into computer where they were mapped to possible decisions the volunteers were to take.The results obtained were staggering with 70% accuracy achieved .Though the experiment is still in it's infancy but no one can rule out the possibility of it being reaching greater altitudes.
This led me to think about the consequences once the technology is developed fully .On one hand it might prove to be a boon to paralysed who face terrible problems with mundane affairs and make them self reliant to a certain extent (actually they would have to just depend on machines and not on any human).But other side of the coin does'nt seem to be so bright .Just imagine you are sitting in front of some device which works following the instructions from your brain and some incongruous thought arises in your mind .It would just take few micro seconds or may be less than that for machine to react and this might lead to a catastrophe.It's human nature to have some tempting thoughts raising in their mind and then eventually withdrawing from forging with them releasing the effects they might have .If wise men of science are able to build such device and that gadget reaches in hands of some perverted mind then it would result in a precarious situation.To make this kind of device actually work in efficacious manner it should have some resistance or say some time lag between accepting the instruction and then executing it so as to allow user to have a second thought .If not so then we will have to be very careful before thinking, actually we will have to think what we are suppose to ThInK......
4 comments:
hmmm..good point raised...but as a purely random exercise the speed of the fastest micro-processor is still much slower than our brains...so technically when it is trying to process your first thought you may have moved on to your Nth...so it would be inherently difficult to implement it to the level u propose...and in case such a thing is developed, it would definitely not be given over to mentally unstable persons with the possibility that they might be able to use it to harm others
Agreed that brain works at speed much greater than fastest microprocessors but then if you see the existing panorama where commands are executed one at a time then you can imagine that instruction provided by first thought will be completed first and then we will have commands given by second thought to follow up and so on....
Also even the greatest men have'nt yet been able to control their senses so you never know when devil rules over the wisest of men and creating
chaos.
u shud definitely read abt kavin warwick if u liked the article
he is touted to be the first cyborg of our times....and he's doing exactly what u talk abt..controlling machines thru our thoughts
here's a useful link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Warwick
People will be more transparent in that case and it is obviously the good side of this coin.
But if every thought of yours will be a command for the Robot...
The bad or funny side can be described by following scenarios:
You are watching TV and you switch the channel from Asian Sky Shop to WWE.
You are planning to take your wife out for a dinner and you meet your neighbour's wife first.
and many more to go. guess it for yourself and laugh till you die!
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