BRAIN SURVEILLANCE

                  I had a fascinating weekend in Houston, Texas.  The original reason for the trip was to do a farm consultation for an up-and-coming  fellow who is trying to put together a community of intentionally-minded folks in his permutation of an agri-hood. 

                  But that wasn't the most interesting thing.  He was a sharp student out of high school and ended up on the neuro-surgeon track at Johns Hopkins.  As a budding genius, he got picked up by Elon Musk for Musk's Neurolink program. 

                  This is another of Musk's innovative enterprises using Artificial Intelligence to enable paraplegics to walk.  Who could possibly disparage such a noble objective?  But wait, there's more.  In order to do that, the developers need to be able to intercept thoughts and turn them into action. 

                  This young Musk partner lasted not long in the program because he realized the ramifications of this effort.  He said right now he could hook up the AI apparatus to your head when you go to bed and then play your dreams on a TV screen in the morning when you wake up.  Giving an AI database freedom to read your thoughts and then display them for the world to see is an amazing feat but subject to dire misuse.  He exited the program when he realized how much evil could be sown with the technology.

                  I was incredulous.  After all, I'm just a farm boy from Swoope.  So I checked with my tech-savvy nephew and he didn't bat an eye, noting:  "Your brain works in patterns, and if the AI can deduce the patterns, the notion that it can convert them to images is definitely within the realm of possibility."  Oh my. 

                  Then I went on to do a podcast in Houston and one of the staff there said the average American home has 37 internet-tied electronic gadgets.  We all know your smart phone listens to you, even when it's turned off.  That's why you can have a conversation about puppies and tomorrow morning your smart phone will be full of ads for puppy food.

                  So far, these gadgets have only been accumulating information FROM us.  But she said now they've figured out how to subliminally beam information back to us.  Our brains receive information subconsciously.    All of this on the heels of the Back to Basics conference near Boston two weekends ago where a dozen highly credentialed doctors tore apart the covid scamdemic and then concurred:  "Right now, nobody should accept any vaccine for anything." 

                  My head is spinning.  Where are we headed?  And it all brings up the crux question in the movie Jurassic Park:  "Just because we can, should we?"  Or said another way, when a society worships technology to the exclusion of prophets and poets, it's headed over the cliff.  In other words, the ethics and morality of a culture determine the boundaries of creativity.  

                  I would suggest many things create a cure worse than the disease.  Long time readers of this blog know I've instructed my family not to resuscitate me, even today, if I have a heart attack or something.  We learn how to transplant organs and suddenly have organ harvesting in China from healthy people the state doesn't like. 

                  We figure out how to make paraplegics walk and then start monitoring thoughts of people.  We figure out how to convert atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizer and launch chemical agriculture. 

                  The more techno-sophisticated a culture, the more ethical and moral it must be or its cleverness overruns the headlights.  It's kind of like freedom; the more free a culture, the more it must be bounded by personal ethics and morality.  The only way liberty works is to have behavioral norms that preclude micromanagement (tyranny). 

                  What technology concerns you most?  And you can dip back 50 years if you'd like.