I spoke with a friend earlier about whether 'they'* could ever make a machine which completely destroys the last shreds of human privacy.
I read, or I dreamt, that a device had been built which could, 60 per cent of the time, predict which of a series of cards a volunteer was looking at in an adjacent room. This time a drawing of a tree, this time a mechanical digger, this time a child, this time a building with a red door.
The machine derives its ouput from examining the excitation of particular brain cells, and associating the excitations with the likelihood of a particular card being presented. It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to conceptualise of that which can associate any particular 'card' - or 'abstract card' or 'mental image' - with a particular sequence of cells firing.
Such a contraption, if it could be realised, would be the dream of many governments, not least the one which I live under. It would, at a stroke, negate any notion of a private internal world, with no discontinuity between what is thought, and what is said.
It would furthermore do the job of my psychiatrist, untangling the Gordian knot of ideas, prejudices and censored material - the things which I am aware of but concealing, and the 'unknown unknowns' which reside in what Freud would call the id. All classes of mental processes are lit up on the screen, able to be analysed in a few simple steps, and my psychiatrist's job is done for her.
