[ExI] Brain Implants Could Make the Death Penalty Obsolete

[William Flynn Wallace]

 from Rogers - 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.

from bill w

If you put a picture of a person in the coffee room, or even just a pair of
eyes, a significantly greater amount of money will be put in the coffee
jar.  And not one person will admit (because they do not know) that they
were manipulated.

We can be manipulated in so many different ways by my fellow social
psychologists, that it is incredible.  By far, most Ss in such experiments
deny vigorously that they have been manipulated, because no one wants to
admit that.  We like to think that we are the captains of our ship when in
fact we are manipulated not only by other people and things in our
environment, but by our own unconscious mind.  Then later we rationalize
and come up with reasons why we did what we did.  Some evolutionary
psychologists think that the conscious mind developed just to lie, cover
up, make excuses for, etc. our behavior, which is in fact under the control
of the environment and the unconscious.  And we really and truly honestly
believe ourselves - and others, because they are saying the same things
that we are. We are a mess.  Massive shared delusions.  bill w

On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 4:17 PM, J. Andrew Rogers <andrew at jarbox.org> wrote:

>
> > 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.
>
>
>
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