[ExI] Brain Implants Could Make the Death Penalty Obsolete

[J. Andrew Rogers]

> On Jul 29, 2015, at 3:37 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> What is upsetting people is 'mission creep'. You start by putting
> implants in murderers only, then violent criminals, then terrorists,
> then ---- why not just put implants in everybody?  The TSA, NSA, etc
> are already checking and monitoring everyone as possible suspects.


This is why overt implants would not be used for this, except perhaps to make an explicit point, nor are they necessary to achieve approximately the same effect with the ubiquitous instrumentation of our environment. An implant draws unnecessary attention to a mechanism that people will attempt to subvert. It is a rather blunt form of behavioral modification. 

With the digitization of the physical world, it is becoming much easier to continuously “nudge” individual behavior below the threshold where an individual can perceive the nature of the manipulation. I have to imagine that most implementors would greatly prefer more ambient, invisible mechanisms for a wide variety of reasons. 

I suspect many likely technological dystopias will not be perceived as such from the inside, almost definitionally.