Ethical Assessment of Implantable Brain Chips – with a TI perspective

As targeted individuals, both who know, think or are not sure, if they are implanted, we experience a few symptoms that we often label “science fiction” – experiences and “nightmares”. Examples are:

• Enhanced hearing: Some targeted individuals experience sounds louder then they really are (often also used to sleep deprive TIs and disturb them).
• Upload/Download of thoughts, images, personalities or previous experiences, that are experienced with all senses (visual, thoughts transformed into one’s own voice, feelings exactly as they occured), a little bit like virtual reality.
• Cyberthink: Retriving information without previous knowledge about it, and sometimes seeing another TI retrive one’s own information, sometimes word by word. Another experience is thinking word by word about something that will soon be broadcasted on radio or TV – that sometimes is interpreted by TIs either as “copying” or media-harassment.
• Mind reading. The implant/s will read our thoughts and send them to a computer or as sound to another individual, enabling “perps” to anticipate our movement and plans and what we are going to to next (often because they will try to interfere with it). Communication the other way, can also be experienced: The TI will receive voice messages from the perpetrators, something that, at least in the beginning will be scary, especially because of the negative messages. This can also be done, at least partially by a learning computer that will learn to communicate from the TI.
• Hypnotical programming and brainwashing. Negative, painful sensations are triggered by certain words or actions, that feel like “attacks”. Sometimes the implants can also be activated remotely by somebody else, that is, not by the implantee himself or herself (as it happens in the case of trigger words), but with some kind of remote control from outside. This can also create the sensation that the TI is attacked with electricity, or directed energy weapons. It is though not excluded that directed energy weapons and other non-lethal weapons are used on the TIs. in order to incapacitate them partially and sometimes completely.

The information below can be useful for TIs, shedding light, informing, emanating discussion, aiding our understanding about what we stand up against with and what we deal with. The original manuscript can be found clicking here.

Ellen M. McGee’s and G. Q. Maguire, Jr.’s Ethical Assessment of Implantable Brain Chips

“ABSTRACT: My purpose is to initiate a discussion of the ethics of implanting computer chips in the brain and to raise some initial ethical and social questions. Computer scientists predict that within the next twenty years neural interfaces will be designed that will not only increase the dynamic range of senses, but will alsoenhance memory and enable “cyberthink” — invisible communication with others. This technology will facilitate consistent and constant access to information when and where it is needed. The ethical evaluation in this paper focuses on issues of safely and informed consent, issues of manufacturing and scientific responsibility, anxieties about the psychological impacts of enhancing human nature, worries about possible usage in children, and most troubling, issues of privacy and autonomy. Inasmuch as this technology is fraught with perilous implications for radically changing human nature, for invasions of privacy and forgovernmental control of individuals, public discussion of its benefits and burdens should be initiated, and policy decisions should be made as to whether its development should be proscribed or regulated, rather than left to happenstance, experts and the vagaries of the commercial market.”

Scientific predictions of the future involve a time when man will merge with machines, and when people will become the science fiction’s cyborgs. Implantable computer chips will enhance memory and people’s senses in general. There are few doubts that interfacing the brain and computers is possible. 3 million people live today with artificial implants. Deaf people have thanks to cochlear implants been able to hear sounds. For the blind, there is hope of developing implants that restore vision in the future, either with the air of retinal implants or cortical implants.

The next vision of the future happens when these technologies combine making human beings a multimedia machine that can interact and share experiences with others in a huge worldwide network.

“The linkage of smaller, lighter, and more powerful computer systems with radio technologies will enable users to access information and communicate anywhere or anytime.”

The components of these systems will be so small that they will be almost invisible. For this to be possible, the implantable brain chip, direct neural interfacing must be developed. In 1968, Nicholas Negroponte said that man and machine till merge in the future and Professor Gershenfeld said that the technology will be embedded by bioengineers in our bodies. The technology is expected to alter human nature. With the aid of this technology we will be able to alter our external and internal world. Once it’s done, the network of brains will create a “collective counsciousness”, “The Hive Mind”.

“The hive mind…is about taking all these trillions of cells in our skulls that make individual consciousness and putting them together and arriving at a new kind of consciousness that transcends all the individuals.”

First, the technology will be adopted by people with disability, but in the next stage, the technology will be used to enhance human beings. At this point, ethical evaluation is imperative. Soldiers on the battlefield will be interested in the technology, and some people who’s work depending on networking and information sharing.

Why do scientists want this science?

1. The implantable chip will increase the range of senses (seeing IR, UV, etc.)
2. The implantable chip will enhance memory.
3. The implantable chip will enable “cyberthink” – invisible communication with others, when making decisions.
4. The implantable chip will enable consistent and constant access to information where and when it is needed.

” The first prototype devices for these improvements in human functioning should be available in five years, with the military prototypes starting within ten years, and information workers using prototypes within fifteen years; general adoption will take roughly twenty to thirty years. The brain chip will probably function as a prosthetic cortical implant. The user’s visual cortex will receive stimulation from a computer based either on what a camera sees or based on an artificial “window” interface.”

The ethical questions asked is if there is any real reason and benefit from implanting people and enhancing human nature, if humans should play God, and if the predictions made aren’t too optimistic.

As far as we TIs know, interest for this kind of research stems from authorities, the military and futurists. The view of the future for some futurists like Kurtzweil is among others at least “digital immortality”, if not physical immortality, that will enable humans minds to live in the future in a computer. Other’s people’s lives would later be experienced by relatives or other people. The research that TIs believe is done on them, and torturing them, is done for the sake of a few people’s dreams and because of the wish of the military to enhance it’s soldiers (and eventually, as it will be discussed later, to control entire population’s thoughts and behavior). Already now in our time, abortions for children that will be born with a handicap is encouraged, leaving the research to benefit human kind in other ways, without people’s knowledge about it and torturing thousand of innocent with scientific methods that are not safe. Implants can lead to cancer and the implants are putting pressure on our minds and bodies, while our entire life and integrity is lost.

The most frightening implication of this technology is the grave possibility that it would facilitate totalitarian control of humans. In a prescient projection of experimental protocols, George Annas writes of the “project to implant removable monitoring devices at the base of the brain of neonates in three major teaching hospitals….The devices would not only permit us to locate all the implantees at any time, but could be programmed in the future to monitor the sound around them and to play subliminal messages directly to their brains.”

Using such technology governments could control and monitor citizens. In a free society this possibility may seem remote, although it is not implausible to project usage for children as an early step.

That the technology will be implemented by the military is no doubt, is concluded in the paper. Later, when other people will be able to take advantage of the technology, control of information links will be important. Potential for sinister invasions of liberty is an issue for the future. There could be advantages with the technology, but the dangers are even greater.

The issues are too significant to leave to happenstance, computer scientists, or the commercial market. It is vital that world societies assess this technology and reach some conclusions about what course they wish to take.

As TIs we have all experienced the worst of everything that this technology can do and what the results can be. The perpetrators test the tech on us, while it is still not working properly and it’s nothing but torture. It is still not safe, because the implants can lead to cancer and to other disturbances in the human body that in time can and will eventually lead to diseases and a premature death.

As Targeted Individuals we might be marginalized from society and at the same time we have a deep responsability for the same. Therefore, discussions about the ethics of the technology regarding the future of populations in society is important to be discussed. Or, what do you think?