The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'protect our private thoughts from technology sunset.'
A recent Guardian piece titled 'The professor trying to protect our private thoughts from technology' caught my eye today. It was about Prof Nita Farahany's new book The Battle for Your Brain, which deals with the ethics of emerging technologies. Here's some of what the article says:
"But aside from the many benefits, there are clear threats around political indoctrination and interference, workplace or police surveillance, brain fingerprinting, the right to have thoughts, good or bad, the implications for the role of "intent" in the justice system, and so on. ... Farahany, who served on Barack Obama's commission for the study of bioethical issues, believes that advances in neurotechnology mean that intrusions through the door of brain privacy, whether by way of military programs or by way of well-funded research labs at big tech companies, are at hand via brain-to-computer innovations like wearable tech.
The piece references a 2020 report titled 'Cognitive Warfare' by François du Cluzel, a project manager at the Nato Act Innovation Hub. Note that you have to scroll down to find the report. Here's a quote:
Cognitive warfare has universal reach, from the individual to states and multinational organisations. It feeds on the techniques of disinformation and propaganda aimed at psychologically exhausting the receptors of information. Everyone contributes to it, to varying degrees, consciously or sub consciously and it provides invaluable knowledge on society, especially open societies, such as those in the West. This knowledge can then be easily weaponised.
The report describes the human domain as the sixth domain of conflict, after air, land, sea, space and cyber. Core capabilities of information warfare, from which cognitive warfare arises, "include electronic warfare, computer network operations, PsyOps, military deception, and operational security." But operating in the cognitive space is somewhat different from information warfare. "Cognitive Warfare degrades the capacity to know, produce or thwart knowledge. ... The goal is not to attack what individuals think but rather the way they think."
This all sounds very dystopian. And evidence of cognitive warfare is already evident throughout society. The big tech firms are definitely degrading our capacities for knowledge and exhausting our receptors of information. And they're barely getting started.
I would even go so far as to classify the saturation of our environment with contaminants that impair thinking an act of cognitive warfare, in line with other widespread practices that dumb us down and make us easier to control. Authors like Nita Farahany rightly warn of a future when more and more devices interface directly with more and more brains. But I wonder about the wisdom in wrestling with the ethics of future tech when the ethics governing the use of present tech are virtually nonexistent.
Consider privacy. Our lives are already radically transparent to government agencies and big companies. The US doesn't have a legal system capable of protecting the privacy of individuals, nor is it ever likely to. Maybe things will drastically change to begin protecting brain privacy. Maybe that's where we'll draw the line.
I've looked into brain computer interface (BCI) technology extensively in researching promising treatments for my headache disorder. The commercially available tech is primitive and the latest brain implants don't look much better. Although there have been some success stories where BCIs helped provide motor function to the disabled, I feel like it'll be 20 years before people are using brain chips to make phone calls or do other routine stuff.
At the same time, it's likely that the military and its contractors have much more advanced neural interface tech. And they definitely have weapons that can impair cognition remotely. The LRAD, given to police departments across the country by the pentagon, is perhaps the most obnoxious of these. It's difficult to think when you're being blasted with an acoustic weapon.
Overall, I strongly favor developing better technological ethics. I'm just not convinced that enough other people are serious about developing them. In a more everyday sense, I do think there's value in being aware of cognitive warfare. Whether we like it or not, it may become increasingly a feature of our information environment.
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