[booleandilemma]

We should simply make mind reading technology illegal, full-stop.

If we do anything less than criminalizing it outright, it will turn into something “voluntary”, but opting out will exclude you from certain events, or you’ll have to pay some sort of premium to maintain your privacy. This will have the side effect of making you seem suspicious.

I simply don’t want any entity, public or private, knowing my thoughts, at all, for any reason whatsoever.

[bertil]

I don’t think that it will ever be widely used the way you describe, just like the "Truth serum" sodium pentothal wasn’t outside of counter-intellgence agencies. I would also be surprised if that system worked well in an adversarial context: polygraph are another example of a technique that have proven a lot less effective than it’s nickname of "Lie detector" implies.

Sure, we can _imagine_ issues, but long before we can get to anything ominous, there are countless applications to give back to people with major health issues their mobility, their ability to communicate. For that, they would need to focus voluntarily, intensely on one specific activity for seconds — a miracle today, but a frustrating practice when it takes 30 seconds trying to tell your nurse that you need the pan. I feel like there’s a couple of years between that and anything Orwellian.

We’ll worry about AI being super-intelligent _after_ Amazon recommendation engine is still stuck on assuming that I’ve started a vacuum cleaner collection.

[drdeca]

What if instead of completely banning it, we set a cap and trade market with a fairly small maximum number of people (say, a few hundred within all of the US) that it can be applied to per year?

[drdeca]

(clarification: applied to with their consent / at their request)

[daniel-cussen]

Yeah the goal is obviously harming people.

There's a reason some people don't tell you what they're thinking even if you connect them to a car battery until they talk.

[WillDaSilva]

Banning it all but guarantees human obsolescence. We certainly need to tread very carefully here, but foregoing this advancement would be a grave mistake.