Mens vertitur cum fortuna
Keys to the Mind and the Heart
We are often
dissatisfied with what is happening around us, we criticise officials and the
government, repine at life and get stuck in vain contemplation and fruitless
discussions. But what are we actually doing in order to eliminate the existing
negations and correct the situation?!
Why drown in the morass of hopelessness or
desperately try to overcome the consequences of the blunders committed by the state
authorities, ineffectively protesting and stubbornly using the forms of
political struggle that
bear little if any
resemblance to the spirit of times? If we have to
experience yet another disappointment over and over again – continuing the unsuccessful
fight against the machine of power with quixotic
obstinacy. As a result, we are subjected to ruthless repression, suffer
bitterly and ultimately become victims, losers, failures.
The evolution of
humankind has always been associated with violence permeated by the struggle
for the survival of every nation and with a hunger for the expansionist development
of one’s state – often disregarding outlanders and fighting rebels and adherents
of a different faith. Trying in every possible way to provide the necessary
resources and conditions for one’s survival within the framework of the
existing society. Without shying away from aggressive actions, with no holds
barred, when all available methods are used.
Mind Reading and Mind Control Technologies
Are Coming
We need to
figure out the ethical implications before they arrive
The
ability to detect electrical activity in the brain through the scalp, and to
control it, will soon transform medicine and change society in profound ways.
Patterns of electrical activity in the brain can reveal a person’s
cognition—normal and abnormal. New methods to stimulate specific brain circuits
can treat neurological and mental illnesses and control behavior. In crossing this
threshold of great promise, difficult ethical quandaries confront us.
MIND READING
The
ability to interrogate and manipulate electrical activity in the human brain
promises to do for the brain what biochemistry did for the body. When you go to
the doctor, a chemical analysis of your blood is used to detect your body’s
health and potential disease. Forewarned that your cholesterol level is high,
and you are at risk of having a stroke, you can take action to avoid suffering
one. Likewise, in experimental research destined to soon enter medical
practice, just a few minutes of monitoring electrical activity in your brain
using EEG and other methods can reveal not only neurological illness but also
mental conditions like ADHD and schizophrenia. What’s more, five minutes of
monitoring electrical activity flowing through your brain, while you do nothing
but let your mind wander, can reveal how your individual brain is wired.
Tapping
into your wandering mind can measure your IQ, identify your cognitive strengths
and weaknesses, perceive your personality and determine your aptitude for
learning specific types of information. Electrical activity in a preschooler’s
brain be used to can predict, for example, how well that child will be able to
read when they go to school. As I recount in my new book, Electric Brain (BenBella, 2020),
after having brainwaves in my idling mind recorded using EEG for only five
minutes, neuropsychologist Chantel Prat at the University of Washington, in
Seattle, pronounced that learning a foreign language would be difficult for me
because of weak beta waves in a particular part of my cerebral cortex
processing language. (Don’t ask me to speak German or Spanish, languages that I
studied but never mastered.) How will this ability to know a person’s mind
change education and career choices?
Neuroscientist
Marcel Just and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University are using fMRI brain
imaging to decipher what a person is thinking. By using machine learning to
analyze complex patterns of activity in a person’s brain when they think of a
specific number or object, read a sentence, experience a particular emotion or
learn a new type of information, the researchers can read minds and know the
person’s specific thoughts and emotions. “Nothing is more private than a
thought,” Just says, but that privacy is no longer sacrosanct.
Armed
with the ability to know what a person is thinking, scientists can do even
more. They can predict what a person might do. Just and his team are able to
tell if a person is contemplating suicide, simply by watching how the person’s
brain responds to hearing words like “death” or “happiness.” As the tragic
deaths of comedian Robin Williams and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain show,
suicide often comes as a shock because people tend to conceal their thoughts of
suicide, even from loved ones and therapists.
Such
“brain hacking” to uncover that someone is thinking of suicide could be
lifesaving. The technique applied to the Columbine high school mass murderers
might have prevented the horror of two troubled teens slaughtering their
classmates and teachers, as well as their own suicides. But this insight into
suicidal ideation is gleaned by judging that the pattern of brain activity in
an individual’s brain deviates from what is considered “normal” as defined as
the average response from a large population. At what point do we remove a
person from society because their brain activity deviates from what is
considered normal?
MIND CONTROL
The
ability to control electrical activity in brain circuits has the potential to
do for brain disorders what electrical stimulation has accomplished in treating
cardiac disorders. By beaming electrical or magnetic pulses through the scalp,
and by implanting electrodes in the brain, researchers and doctors can treat a
vast array of neurological and psychiatric disorders, from Parkinson’s disease
to chronic depression.
But
the prospect of “mind control” frightens many, and brain stimulation to modify
behavior and treat mental illness has a sordid history. In the 1970s
neuropsychologist Robert Heath at Tulane University inserted electrodes into a
homosexual man’s brain to “cure” him of his homosexual nature by stimulating
his brain’s pleasure center. Spanish neuroscientist José Delgado used brain
stimulation in monkeys, people and even a charging bull to understand how, at a
neural circuit level, specific behaviors and functions are controlled—and to
control them at will by pushing buttons on his radio-controlled device
energizing electrodes implanted in the brain. Controlling movements, altering
thoughts, evoking memories, rage and passion were all at Delgado’s fingertips.
Delgado’s goal was to relieve the world of deviant behavior through brain
stimulation and produce a “psychocivilized” society.
The
prospect of controlling a person’s brain by electrical stimulation is
disturbing for many, but current methods of treating mental and neurological
disorders are woefully inadequate and far too blunt. Neurological and
psychoactive drugs affect many different neural circuits in addition to the one
targeted, causing wide-ranging side effects. Not only the brain but every cell
in the body that interacts with the drugs, such as SSRIs for treating chronic
depression, will be affected.
At
present, drugs available for treating mental illness and neurological
conditions are not always effective, and they are often prescribed in a
trial-and-error manner. Psychosurgery, notoriously prefrontal lobotomy, also has
a tragic history of abuse. Moreover, while any surgeon faces the prospect of
losing the patient on the operating table, neurosurgeons face the unique risk
of saving a patient’s life but losing the person. Surgical removal of brain
tissue can leave patients with physical, cognitive, personality or mood
dysfunctions by damaging healthy tissu, or failing to remove all the
dysfunctional tissue. Electroconvulsive stimulation (ECT), to treat chronic
depression and other mental illnesses, rocks the entire brain with seizure; in
the wake of the electrical firestorm, the brain somehow resets itself, and many
patients are helped, but not all, and sometimes there are debilitating side
effects or the method fails to work.
Rather
than blasting the whole brain with bolts of electricity or saturating it with
drugs, it makes far more sense to stimulate the precise neural circuit that is
malfunctioning. Following the success of deep brain stimulation in treating
Parkinson’s disorder, doctors are now applying the same method to treat a wide
range of neurological and psychiatric illnesses, from dystonia to OCD. But they
are often doing so without the requisite scientific understanding of the
disorder at a neural circuit level. This is especially so for mental illnesses,
which are poorly represented in nonhuman animals used in research. How
electrical stimulation is working to help these conditions, including
Parkinson’s disease, is not fully understood. The necessary knowledge of where
to put the electrodes or what strength and pattern of electrical stimulation to
use is not always available. Such doctors are in effect doing experiments on
their patients, but they are doing so because it helps.
Noninvasive
means of modifying brainwaves and patterns of electrical activity in specific
brain circuits, such as neurofeedback, rhythmic sound or flashing light,
ultrasonic and magnetic stimulation through the scalp, can modify neural
activity without implanting electrodes in the brain to treat neurological and
mental illnesses and improve mood and cognition. The FDA approved treating
depression by transcranial magnetic stimulation in 2008, and subsequently
expanded approval for treating pain and migraine. Electrical current can be
applied by an electrode on the scalp to stimulate or inhibit neurons from
firing in appropriate brain regions.
The
military is using this method to speed learning and enhance cognitive
performance in pilots. The method is so simple, brain stimulation devices can
be purchased over the internet or you can make one yourself from nine-volt
batteries. But the DIY approach renders the user an experimental guinea pig.
New
methods of precision brain stimulation are being developed. Electrical
stimulation is notoriously imprecise, following the path of least resistance through
brain tissue and stimulating neurons from distant regions of the brain that
extend axons past the electrode. In experimental animals, very precise
stimulation or inhibition of neuronal firing can be achieved by optogenetics.
This method uses genetic engineering to insert light sensitive ion channels
into specific neurons to control their firing very precisely using laser light
beamed into the brain through a fiberoptic cable. Applied to humans,
optogenetic stimulation could relieve many neurological and psychiatric
disorders by precision control of specific neural circuits, but using this
approach in people is not considered ethical.
CROSSING THE
THRESHOLD
Against
the historical backdrop of ethical lapses and concerns that curtailed brain
stimulation research for mental illnesses decades ago, we are reaching a point
where it will become unethical to deny people suffering from severe mental or
neurological illness treatments by optogenetic or electrical stimulation of
their brain, or to withhold diagnosing their conditions objectively by reading
their brain’s electrical activity. The new capabilities of being able to
directly monitor and manipulate the brain’s electrical activity raise daunting
ethical questions from technology that has not existed previously. But the
genie is out of the bottle. We better get to know her.
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How
Political Opinions Change
A clever experiment shows it's surprisingly easy
to change someone’s political views, revealing how flexible we are
Our political opinions and attitudes are an important
part of who we are and how we construct our identities. Hence, if I ask your
opinion on health care, you will not only share it with me, but you will likely
resist any of my attempts to persuade you of another point of view. Likewise,
it would be odd for me to ask if you are sure that what you said actually was
your opinion. If anything seems certain to us, it is our own attitudes. But
what if this weren’t necessarily the case?
In a recent experiment, we showed it is possible to trick
people into changing their political views. In fact, we could get some people
to adopt opinions that were directly opposite of their original ones. Our
findings imply that we should rethink some of the ways we think about our own
attitudes, and how they relate to the currently polarized political climate.
When it comes to the actual political attitudes we hold, we are considerably
more flexible than we think.
A powerful shaping factor about our social and
political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities. For instance, researchers have found that moral and emotion
messages on contentious political topics, such as gun-control and climate
change, spread more rapidly within rather than between ideologically
like-minded networks. This echo-chamber problem seems to be made worse by the
algorithms of social media companies who send us increasingly extreme content
to fit our political preferences.
We are also far more motivated to reason and argue to
protect our own or our group’s views. Indeed, some researchers argue that our
reasoning capabilities evolved to serve that very function. A recent study illustrates this very well:
participants who were assigned to follow Twitter accounts that retweeted
information containing opposing political views to their own with the hope of
exposing them to new political views. But the exposure backfired—increased
polarization in the participants. Simply tuning Republicans into MSNBC, or
Democrats into Fox News, might only amplify conflict. What can we do to make
people open their minds?
The trick, as strange as it may sound, is to make
people believe the opposite opinion was their own to begin
with.
The experiment relies on a phenomenon known as choice
blindness. Choice
blindness was discovered in 2005 by a team of Swedish researchers. They presented participants
with two photos of faces and asked participants to choose the photo they
thought was more attractive, and then handed participants that photo.
Using a clever
trick inspired by stage magic, when participants received the photo
it had been switched to the person not chosen by the
participant—the less attractive photo. Remarkably, most participants accepted
this card as their own choice and then proceeded to give arguments for why they
had chosen that face in the first place. This revealed a striking mismatch
between our choices and our ability to rationalize outcomes. This same finding
has since been replicated in various domains including taste for jam, financial
decisions, and eye-witness testimony.
While it is remarkable that people can be fooled into
picking an attractive photo or a sweet jam in the moment, we wondered whether it
would be possible to use this false-feedback to alter political beliefs in a
way that would stand the test of time.
In our experiment, we first gave false-feedback about
their choices, but this time concerning actual political questions (e.g.,
climate taxes on consumer goods). Participants were then asked to state their
views a second time that same day, and again one week later. The results were
striking. Participants’ responses were shifted considerably in the
direction of the manipulation. For instance, those who originally had favoured
higher taxes were more likely to be undecided or even opposed to it.
These effects lasted up to a week later. The changes
in their opinions were also larger when they were asked to give an argument—or
rationalization—for their new opinion. It seems that giving people the
opportunity to reason reinforced the false-feedback and led them further away
from their initial attitude.
Why do attitudes shift in our experiment? The
difference is that when faced with the false-feedback people are free from the
motives that normally lead them to defend themselves or their ideas from
external criticism. Instead they can consider the benefits of the alternative
position.
To understand this, imagine that you have picked out a
pair of pants to wear later in the evening. Your partner comes in and
criticizes your choice, saying you should have picked the blue ones rather than
the red ones. You will likely become defensive about your choice and defend
it—maybe even becoming more entrenched in your choice of hot red pants.
Now imagine instead that your partner switches the
pants while you are distracted, instead of arguing with you. You turn around
and discover that you had picked the blue pants. In this case, you need to
reconcile the physical evidence of your preference (the pants on your bed) with
whatever inside your brain normally makes you choose the red pants. Perhaps you
made a mistake or had a shift in opinion that slipped you mind. But now that
the pants were placed in front of you, it would be easy to slip them on and
continue getting ready for the party. As you catch yourself in the mirror, you
decide that these pants are quite flattering after all.
The very same thing happens in our experiment, which
suggests that people have a pretty high degree of flexibility about their
political views once you strip away the things that normally make them
defensive. Their results suggest that we need rethink what it means to hold an
attitude. If we become aware that our political attitudes are not set in stone,
it might become easier for us to seek out information that might change them.
There is no quick fix to the current polarization and
inter-party conflict tearing apart this country and many others. But
understanding and embracing the fluid nature of our beliefs, might reduce the
temptation to grandstand about our political opinions. Instead humility might
again find a place in our political lives.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-political-opinions-change/?amp&utm_source=
Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It?
How Can We Know?
The
intelligence failures surrounding the invasion of Iraq dramatically illustrate
the necessity of developing standards for evaluating expert opinion. This book
fills that need. Here, Philip E. Tetlock explores what constitutes good
judgment in predicting future events, and looks at why experts are often wrong
in their forecasts.
Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for
people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict
the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields,
comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple
extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of
thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah
Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the
fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of
traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is
more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big
thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on
ill-defined problems. He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the
best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media
most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in
ideological combat.
Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the
literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic
disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging
expert decision-making.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of
Prediction
Everyone
would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks,
crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week’s meals.
Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor
Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts’ predictions are
only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported
conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and
Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some
people so good? And can this talent be taught?
In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a
masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a
massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project
involves tens of thousands of ordinary people—including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a
retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer—who set out to forecast
global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good.
They’ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They’ve
even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to
classified information. They are "superforecasters."
In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we
can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting
successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound) and failures (the Bay of
Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David
Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn’t require
powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a
variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping
score, and being willing to admit error and change course. Superforecasting offers
the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the
future—whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily
life—and is destined to become a modern classic.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304924623
With
the 2020 election on the horizon, one of Washington’s best minds on regulating
tech shares his fears about social media manipulation and discusses Congress’s
failure to tackle election security and interference.
Senator
Mark Warner has proved himself to be a sort of braintrust on tech issues in the
Senate. Through his questioning of tech execs in hearings and the oft-cited
white papers produced by his office, the Virginia Democrat has arguably raised
the Senate’s game in understanding and dealing with Big Tech.
After
all, Warner and tech go way back. As a telecom guy in the
1980s, he was among the first to see the importance of wireless networks. He
made his millions brokering wireless spectrum deals around FCC auctions. As a
venture capital guy in the ’90s, he helped build the internet pioneer America
Online. And as a governor in the 2000s, he brought 700 miles of broadband cable
network to rural Virginia.
Government
oversight of tech companies is one thing, but in this election year Warner is
also thinking about the various ways technology is being used to threaten democracy
itself. We spoke shortly after the Donald Trump impeachment trial and the
ill-fated Iowa caucuses. It was a good time to talk about election
interference, misinformation, cybersecurity threats, and the government’s
ability and willingness to deal with such problems.
The following
interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Fast Company: Some news
outlets portrayed the Iowa caucus app meltdown as part
of a failed attempt by the Democratic party to push their tech and data game forward. Was that
your conclusion?
Mark Warner: I think it was a
huge screwup. Do we really want to trust either political party to run an
election totally independently, as opposed to having election professionals
[run it]? We have no information that outside sources were involved.
I
think it was purely a non-tested app that was put into place. But then you saw
the level and volume of [social media] traffic afterwards and all the conspiracy theories [about the legitimacy of
the results]. One of the things I’m still trying to get from our intel
community is how much of this conspiracy theory was being manipulated by
foreign bots. I don’t have that answer yet. I hope to have it soon. But it goes
to the heart of why this area is so important. The bad guys don’t have to come
in and change totals if they simply lessen American’s belief in the integrity
of our voting process. Or, they give people reasons not to vote, as they were
so successful in doing in 2016.
THE
BAD GUYS DON’T HAVE TO COME IN AND CHANGE TOTALS IF THEY SIMPLY LESSEN
AMERICAN’S BELIEF IN THE INTEGRITY OF OUR VOTING PROCESS.”
SENATOR
MARK WARNER
FC: Do you think that
the Department of Homeland Security is interacting with state election officials
and offering the kind of oversight and advice they should be?
MW: Chris Krebs [the director
of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in DHS] has done
a very good job. Most all state election systems now have what they call an
Einstein (cybersecurity certification) program, which is a basic protection
unit. I think we are better protected from hacking into actual voting machines
or actual election night results. But we could do better.
There
were a number of secretaries of state who in the first year after 2016 didn’t
believe the problem was real. I’m really proud of our [Senate Intelligence]
committee because we kept it bipartisan and we’ve laid [the problem] out—both
the election interference, and the Russian social media use. I don’t think
there’s an election official around that doesn’t realize these threats are
real.
But
I think the White House has been grossly irresponsible for not being willing to
echo these messages. I think it’s an embarrassment that Mitch McConnell has not
allowed any of these election security bills to come to the floor of
the Senate. I think it’s an embarrassment that the White House continues to
fight tooth and nail against any kind of low-hanging fruit like [bills
mandating] paper ballot backups and post-election audits. I’m still very
worried that three large [election equipment] companies control 90% of all the
voter files in the country. It doesn’t have to be the government, but there’s
no kind of independent industry standard on safety and security.
FC: When you think
about people trying to contaminate the accuracy or the legitimacy of the
election, do you think that we have more to worry about from foreign actors, or
from domestic actors who may have learned some of the foreign actors’ tricks?
MW: I think it’s a bit of
both. There are these domestic right-wing extremist groups, but a network that
comes out of Russia—frankly, comes out of Germany almost as much as
Russia—reinforces those messages. So there’s a real collaboration there.
There’s some of that on the left, but it doesn’t seem to be as pervasive.
China’s efforts, which are getting much more sophisticated, are more about
trying to manipulate the Chinese diaspora. There’s not that kind of
nation-state infrastructure to support some of this on the left. Although
ironically, some of the Russian activity does promote some of the leftist
theories, some of the “Bernie Sanders is getting screwed” theories. Because
again, it undermines everybody’s faith in the process.
FC: Are you worried
about deepfakes in this election cycle?
IT
UNDERMINES EVERYBODY’S FAITH IN THE PROCESS.”
SENATOR
MARK WARNER
MW: The irony is that there
hasn’t been a need for sophisticated deepfakes to have this kind of
interference. Just look at the two things with Pelosi—the one with the slurring of her speech, or the more
recent video where they’ve made it appear that she was
tearing up Trump’s State of the Union speech at inappropriate times during the
speech. So instead of showing her standing up and applauding the Tuskegee
Airmen, the video makes it look like she’s tearing up the speech while he’s
talking about the Tuskegee Airmen.
These
are pretty low-tech examples of deepfakes. If there’s this much ability to
spread [misinformation] with such low tech, think about what we may see in the
coming months with more sophisticated deepfake technology. You even have some
of the president’s family sending out some of those doctored videos. I believe
there is still a willingness from this administration to invite this kind of
mischief.
FC: Are there other
areas of vulnerability you’re concerned about for 2020?
MW: One of the areas that I’m
particularly worried about is messing with upstream voter registration files.
If you simply move 10,000 or 20,000 people in Miami Dade County from one set of
precincts to another, and they show up to the right precinct but were listed in
a different precinct, you’d have chaos on election day. I’m not sure how often
the registrars go back and rescreen their voter file to make sure people are
still where they say they are.
One
area I want to give the Trump administration some credit for is they’ve allowed
our cyber capabilities to go a bit more on offense. For many years, whether you
were talking about Russian interference or Chinese intellectual property
thefts, we were kind of a punching bag. They could attack us with a great deal
of impunity. Now we have good capabilities here, too. So we’ve struck back a
little bit, and 2018 was much safer. But we had plenty of evidence that Russia
was going to spend most of their efforts on 2020, not 2018.
That’s
all on the election integrity side. Where we haven’t made much progress at all
is with social media manipulation, whether it’s the spreading of false theories
or the targeting that was geared at African Americans to suppress their vote in
2016.
FC: We’ve just come off a big
impeachment trial that revolved around the credibility of our elections, with
Trump asking a foreign power to help him get reelected. As you were sitting
there during the State of the Union on the eve of his acquittal in the Senate,
is there anything you can share with us about what you were thinking?
MW: In America, we’ve
lived through plenty of political disputes in our history and plenty of
political divisions. But I think there were rules both written and unwritten
about some level of ethical behavior that I think this president has thrown out
the window. While a lot of my Republican colleagues privately express chagrin
at that, so far they’ve not been willing to speak up. I’m so worried about this
kind of asymmetric attack from foreign entities, whether they’re for Trump or not
for Trump. If Russia was trying to help a certain candidate, and the candidate
didn’t want that help and that leaks out, that could be
devastating to somebody’s chances. [Warner proved prescient here. Reports of that very thing happening to Bernie
Sanders emerged days later on February 21.]
If
you add up what the Russians spent in our election in 2016, what they spent in
the Brexit vote a year or so before, and what they spent in the French
presidential elections . . . it’s less than the cost of one new F-35 airplane.
In a world where the U.S. is spending $748 billion on defense, for $35 million
or $50 million you can do this kind of damage. I sometimes worry that maybe
we’re fighting the last century’s wars when conflict in the 21st century is
going to be a lot more around cyber misinformation and disinformation, where
your dollar can go a long way. And if you don’t have a united opposition
against that kind of behavior, it can do a lot of damage.
FC: Do you think Congress is
up to the task of delivering a tough consumer data privacy bill anytime soon?
MW: We haven’t so far and
it’s one more example of where America is ceding its historic technology
leadership. On privacy, obviously the Europeans have moved with GDPR.
California’s moved with their own version of privacy law. The Brits, the
Australians, and the French are moving on content regulation. I think the only
thing that’s holding up privacy legislation is how much federal preemption
there ought to be. But I think there are ways to work through that.
I
do think that some of the social media companies may be waking up to the fact
that their ability to delay a pretty ineffective Congress may come back and
bite them. Because when Congress [is ready to pass regulation], the bar’s going
to be raised so much that I think there will be a much stricter set of
regulations than what might’ve happened if we’d actually passed something this
year or the year before.
I’ve
been looking at what I think are the issues around pro-competition, around more
disclosure around dark patterns. I’ve got a half dozen bills—all of them
bipartisan—that look at data portability, [data value] evaluation, and dark patterns. I’ve been working on some of the
election security stuff around Facebook. We are looking at some Section 230
reforms. My hope is that you have a privacy bill that we could then add a
number of these other things to, because I think the world is moving fast
enough that privacy legislation is necessary but not sufficient.
FC: You’re referencing
Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which protects tech
companies from being liable for what users post on their platforms and how they
moderate content. To focus on the Section 230 reforms for a moment, are you
contemplating a partial change to the language of the law that would make tech
platforms legally liable for a very specific kind of toxic content? Or are you
talking about a broader lifting of tech’s immunity under the law?
MW: Maybe Section 230
made some sense in the late ’90s when [tech platforms] were startup ventures.
But when 65% of Americans get some or all their news from Facebook and Google
and that news is being curated to you, the idea that [tech companies] should
bear no responsibility at all about the content you’re receiving is one of the
reasons why I think there’s broad-based interest in reexamining this.
I
THINK THERE’S A GROWING SENSITIVITY THAT THE STATUS QUO IS NOT WORKING.”
SENATOR
MARK WARNER
I
think there’s a growing sensitivity that the status quo is not working. It’s
pretty outrageous that we’re three and a half years after the 2016 campaign,
when the whole political world went from being techno-optimists to having a
more realistic view of these platform companies, and we still haven’t passed a
single piece of legislation.
I’ve
found some of Facebook’s arguments on protecting free speech
to be not very compelling. I think Facebook is much more comparable to a cable
news network than it is to a broadcasting station that does protect First
Amendment speech. And the way I’ve been thinking about it is that it’s less
about the ability to say stupid stuff or racist stuff—because there may be some
First Amendment rights on some of that activity—but more about the
amplification issue. You may have a right to say a stupid thing, but does that
right extend to guaranteeing a social media company will promote it a million
times or 100 million times without any restriction?
This story is
part of our Hacking Democracy series, which examines the ways in which
technology is eroding our elections and democratic institutions—and what’s been
done to fix them. Read more here.
In
the post-Soviet situation, the destruction of authoritarian normative
structures entailed a situation when all values and normative systems of
society are corrupted at different levels (including the personal one), which
is not less dangerous than the widely discussed corruptibility of its economic
and political systems. At the same time, the situation of visible normative
pluralism and 'bespedel' (borrowed from criminal slang, the word means extreme
outrage and violence), similar to any situation of conflict, has its logic,
i.e.. its unwritten rules of the game. The actual absence of universally
compulsory authorities entails a 'multi-polar' structure of a field where
different centres of influence co-exist, compete, and to some extent balance
each other. This field is a site where behavioural structures of the 'Homo
Praevaricatus' of the latest domestic pattern are acting and taking root.
Cunning behaviour of a stagnating epoch is primarily an adaptation to stable
structures, and conformist careerism. An 'epoch of changechanges the nature of
adaptability. Instability of all structures, including ruling ones, those
hidden in shadow, pressure and support groups, etc., makes favourable
conditions for short-term 'pyramids' (not only financial and economic but
political as well, at different levels of power) and high-speed careers. This
creates the demand for respective types of human personality, and first of all
that of a smart fellow capable to make use of a changeable situation for own
sake and change views and likings in conformity with a current conjuncture. The
article uses findings of the study 'Homo Sovieticus' concerning the framework
of permissible behaviour. The author compares the answers to the question
"Did you ever act contrary to what you consider to be just9",
obtained in H)89 and 1999....:
Woe to those who say
that good is bad and bad is good,+Those who substitute darkness for light and light for
darkness,
Those who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! https://www.jw.org/en/library/bible/nwt/books/isaiah/5/
The
truth is always hidden in the past; in a prophetic 35- year-old interview, KGB operative, Yuri Bezmenov,
aka Tomas David Schuman, explains
Russian influence and subversion techniques that have disturbing echoes in
present day US/UK. Full
clip: https://youtu.be/bX3EZCVj2XA
Wearable Brain Devices Will Challenge Our Mental
Privacy
A new era of neurotechnology
means we may need new protections to safeguard our brain and mental
experiences
By Nita A.
Farahany on March 27, 2023
A last bastion of privacy, our brains have remained
inviolate, even as sensors now record our heartbeats, breaths, steps and sleep.
All that is about to change. An avalanche of brain-tracking devices—earbuds,
headphones, headbands, watches and even wearable tattoos—will soon enter the
market, promising to transform our lives. And threatening to breach the refuge
of our minds.
Tech titans Meta, Snap, Microsoft and Apple are
already investing heavily in brain wearables. They aim to embed brain sensors
into smart watches, earbuds, headsets and sleep aids. Integrating them into our
everyday lives could revolutionize
health care, enabling early diagnosis and personalized treatment of
conditions such as depression, epilepsy and
even cognitive
decline. Brain sensors could improve our ability to meditate, focus and
even communicate with a seamless technological telepathy—using the power of
thoughts and emotion to drive our interaction with augmented reality (AR) and
virtual reality (VR) headsets, or even type
on virtual keyboards with our minds.
But brain wearables also pose very real risks to
mental privacy, freedom of thought and self-determination. As these
devices proliferate, they will generate vast amounts of neural data, creating
an intimate window into our brain states, emotions and even memories. We need
the individual power to shutter this new view into our inner selves.
Employers already seek out such data,
tracking worker fatigue
levels and offering brain
wellness programs to mitigate stress, via platforms that give them
unprecedented access to employees’ brains. Cognitive and emotional testing
based on neuroscience is becoming
a new job screening norm, revealing personality aspects that may have little
to do with a job. In China, train
conductors of the Beijing-Shanghai line, the busiest of its kind in the
world, wear brain sensors throughout their work day. There are even reports of
Chinese employees being sent
home if their brain activity shows less than stellar brain metrics. As
companies embrace brain wearables that can track employees’ attention, focus
and even boredom, without safeguards in place, they could trample on employee’s
mental privacy, eroding trust and well-being along with the dignity of work
itself.
Governments, too, are seeking access to our brains,
with a U.S brain initiative seeking “‘every spike from every
neuron’ in the human brain,” to reveal “how the firing of these neurons
produced complex thoughts.” While aimed at the underlying causes of
neurological and psychiatric conditions, this same investment could also
enable government interference with freedom of thought—a freedom critical to
human flourishing. From functional
brain biometric programs under development to authenticate
individuals—including
those funded by the National Science Foundation at Binghamton University—to
so-called brain-fingerprinting techniques used to interrogate criminal
suspects—sold by companies like Brainwave
Science and funded by law enforcement agencies from Singapore to Australia to
the United
Arab Emirates—we must act quickly to ensure neurotechnology benefits
humanity rather than heralding an Orwellian future of spying on our brains.
The rush to hack the human brain veers from
neuromarketing to the rabbit hole of social media and even to cognitive warfare
programs designed to disable or disorient. These technologies should have our
full attention. Neuromarketing campaigns such as one conducted
by Frito-Lays used insights about how women’s brains could affect
snacking decisions, then monitored brain activity while people viewed their
newly designed advertisements, allowing them to fine-tune their campaigns to
better capture attention and drive women to snack more on their products.
Social media “like” buttons and notifications are features designed to draw us
habitually back to platforms, exploiting our brains’ reward systems. Clickbait
headlines and pseudoscience claims prey on our cognitive
biases, hobbling critical thinking. And nations worldwide are considering
possible military applications of neuroscience, which some planners call
warfare’s “sixth
domain” (adding to a list that includes land, sea, air, space and
cyberspace).
As brain wearables and artificial intelligences
advance, the line between human agency and machine intervention will also blur.
When a wearable reshapes our thoughts and emotions, how much of our actions and
decisions remain truly our own? As we begin to offload mental tasks to AI, we
risk becoming overly dependent on technology, weakening independent thought and
even our capacity for reflective decision-making. Should we allow AI to shape
our brains and mental experiences? And how do we retain our humanity in an
increasingly interconnected world remade by these two technologies?
Malicious use and even hacking of brain wearables is
another threat. From probing for information, to intercepting
our PIN numbers as we think or type them, neural cybersecurity will
rule. Imagine a world where brain wearables can track what we read and see,
alter perceptions, manipulate emotions or even trigger physical pain.
That’s a world that may soon arrive. Already, companies including China’s Entertech have accumulated
millions of raw EEG data recordings from individuals across the world
using its popular consumer-based brain wearables, along with personal
information and device and app usage by those individuals. Entertech makes
plain in their privacy
policy they also record personal information, GPS signals, device
sensors, computers and services a person is using, including websites they may
be visiting. We must ensure that brain wearables are designed with security in
mind and with device and data safeguards in place to mitigate these risks.
We stand at an inflection point in the beginning of
a brain wearable revolution. We need prudent vigilance and an open and honest
debate about the risks and benefits of neurotechnology, to ensure it is used
responsibly and ethically. With the right safeguards, neurotechnology could be
truly empowering for individuals. To get there will require we recognize new
digital age rights to preserve our cognitive liberty—self-determination over
our brains and mental experiences. We must do so now, before the choice is no
longer ours to make.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the
views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific
American.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wearable-brain-devices-will-challenge-our-mental-privacy/?utm
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