From the Denver Post article entitled – Mind-controlled devices may be next, say experts at CES

I believe in mind control,” Xavier Lauwaert, worldwide marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard, said Thursday during a panel discussion about the future of user interfaces.

Such technology would be like voice control, only a user would simply need to think of what he wanted a device to do, rather than having to say anything.

“The next evolution of the HP PCs will be mind control,” Lauwaert predicted.

I can’t help but think this poses a whole new area of privacy concerns. I freely admit that if you use a device to turn things on and off, there is little to be concerned about but the ability to monitor how another person makes decisions (how their mind works) is not an area I want the government or private industry poking around in.

Look at it this way, if you use parts of your brain to maneuver through the internet or make financial decisions by paying your bills or investing on line, monitoring those kinds of transactions provides an intimate portrait of how one formulates thoughts and make decisions often on an unconscious level. A powerful computer can make sense of these of the minds patterns which can then be incorporated in music, videos, advertisements, scams and political campaigns.

Advertising campaigns are already designed to probe the unconscious but they have been limited by the occasional burst of rationality on the part of the public. Manipulation of thought patterns could devestate this last line of defense. They could short circuit the conscious mind bypassing it entirely.

It could be used as a limited but quite effective form of mind control depending on the power and detail of the monitoring equipment.

So, I have some concerns.

James Pilant