[hungryforcodes]

“For a noninvasive method, this is a real leap forward compared to what’s been done before, which is typically single words or short sentences,” Huth said. “We’re getting the model to decode continuous language for extended periods of time with complicated ideas.”

Thats pretty scary. Who would work on this?

Refine this and in 10 years put it into wifi base stations that scan everything and you can read the thoughts of anyone in a room. Auto scan for "dangerous" keywords and voila: automated police state!

[hnbad]

What people tend to forget about these dystopias is that dystopias are distributed unequally. For some people the police is already going to stop you randomly and may randomly end up killing you. Some people will already spend extensive time being searched and questioned if they want to take a flight. Some people will already be automatically rejected before anyone has actually read their qualifications or interviewed them.

The US is already a police state. The police uses military grade equipment and vehicles. They can literally get away with murder in many cases. They can rob you in open daylight, legally. They can arrest you for no crime, detain you and then dump you in the middle of nowhere. They can shoot out your eyes by directly firing rubber bullets (which are supposed to be deflected off surfaces) straight on. And if you end up in prison, you can be forced into indentured servitude.

Of course this is an exaggeration because all these things don't happen to all the people, but that's the point. Concerns about thought crime are just concerns that the apparatus could be aimed at you, too, when you've been less affected so far. The concern shouldn't be for whom it is aimed at but for the scope, scale and supposed necessity of apparatus itself. The problem isn't that we might oppress the wrong people, the problem is that we think we need oppression.

[soco]

There's also an in-between status: put in the airports, police stations, tribunals, at the bank entrance, at wedding ceremonies or in churches... the fact that the scientist mentions their worries doesn't make any of that avoidable.

[ErikBjare]

Good luck putting an fMRI machine in a wifi base station.