I know that this will most likely sound like a bit of a cliché to a lot of people. However, I think that it is not as disconnected from reality as we might think. I can assure you that this post is not about computers taking over the world and controlling humans by making them
live in a computer simulation. Neither is it about using human beings as a source of energy. Simply it's about control, what I think to be one of the oldest obsessions of our kind.
My friend Jan brought up this issue of control in his
latest blog post through
Noam Chomsky's vision about how the mass media form a strong form of control in the world we currently live in. And how intellectuals have a responsibility to reveal the truth.
During the 1950s the CIA was conducting an illegal research program called
MKULTRA. This research program involved the use of mind altering drugs to control humans. Turn them into puppets or efficient assassins that do not ask questions or doubt the ultimate wisdom of there superiors but just do what they are told.
Documents showed also an interest for using such drugs to control leaders of other nations.
Now the field of biotechnology is doing some very amazing things. An example of that is an experiment that showed a macaque controlling a robotic arm, using nothing but brain signals, as natural and precise as if it was its own arm. I also think that now some humans are using such prosthetic limbs. Such things I tend to think no one can dispute how great they are and how much they are considered necessary.
Sort of a marriage between biotechnology and information technology is the field of
Neurotechnology. Although I could see how this might be used in a wrong way I could also see the great benefits of having something like a brain-computer interface (BCI). Enabling
brain cells to communicate with computers by issuing commands to the computer (boy that would really satisfy the geek inside us wouldn't it?) or by receiving signals from computers, the latter actually had very amazing success in restoring vision to blind people.
In general I like to think that inventions or discoveries that might be seen intrinsically bad are not actually bad in themselves but it completely depends on how we use them. I think that when Alfred Noble invented Dynamite he didn't conceive it as a great way for killing masses of people. But unfortunately we have a great history in discovering the bad side of those inventions and using them to serve our most evil intentions.
But I don't know why when I saw
this I failed to see the good side of it. Or to be more accurate I thought, and perhaps for the first time in my entire life, that anything good that could come from this is infinitesimal compared to the evil that it could bring.
I know that the human brain is much more complicated than rat brain. I also know that "THEY SAY" that the rat has a choice here and he is following those orders given to its brain merely because the reward it gets by sending signals to the pleasure center of its brain. But I still tremble each time I imagine what could happen.
Am I wrong here? I certainly hope I am. But I would very much hate to see the same type of mentality that carried out MKULTRA present us with MKULTRA 2.0 or
Human Puppets 2.0