A couple of scientists demonstrating voiceless communication. There’s a band around one chap’s neck that reads his brain waves. At present it has a vocabulary of about 150 words…
Wander down the street, wonder “where is the nearest restaurant?”, and hear the answer in your brain…?
I admit I’ve gotten so jaded by inventions (especially those in their early stages) that I can’t really get myself to react even over this one. But I did think it was worth noting. It has the potential to evolve into something that challenges concepts of privacy and property and calls for new ones. Rules on what others may feed into your brain, the default settings of commercial products that read in and out; whether such a device may ever be used against one’s will; the reliability of testimony based on on data read off of such a device.
Which is interesting, because at one time I would have thought that there really could not be new rules and basic rights, or ought not to be. One was pretty much stuck with whatever had evolved in a state of nature–for anything new like this, it would be a rule-less environment, a war of technology against technology. Want to keep someone out? Physically block it with your own tech… and so on.
But that sort of limitation on our rules of the game won’t do; it is far too limiting and arbitrarily so. On the other hand, this doesn’t mean anything goes. Difficult territory.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.