Selling ‘telepathy’: Transhuman techies are coming for your conscience

They haven’t quite pulled it off yet, but at least two corporate/academic entities are lately pushing research and tech efforts to pierce the last boundary of privacy, your inner monologue. This isn’t mind control or telepathy (yet), but it’s a big step on the road thereto and contributes to that larger project of remaking the human as cyborg.

MIT-associated startup AlterEgo just dropped a wearable device that detects subvocalizations, maps them to language, and translates to a robot voice that can be shared with others using their own device. Sort of a silent walkie-talkie. The X.com sales pitch for the product, Silent Sense, depicts two co-workers engaged in small talk. AlterEgo acknowledges, however, that the other intended percipient in the translation of your subvocal thoughts is AI.

If the inner monologue is absorbed, as it were, into the Borg, our very humanity and relationship to the divine will be (perhaps irrevocably) altered.

When humans think or read, most of us silently and imperceptibly, even to ourselves, work the speech muscles around the throat as we parse text or form the precursors to a vocal expression. This is the organic subvocalization process that the company seeks to map in full. One imagines that if that map is completed and then combined with other research on the reciprocal neural activity relating to thought, actual telepathy and actual invasion of the interior will be very realistic indeed.

The other curiously timed entry into the contest to tap your inner monologue is a paper entitled “Inner speech in motor cortex and implications for speech neuroprosthesis.” It comes from a consortium of academic departments and authors and pushes a slightly different tack: Instead of the monitoring of mechanical (muscular) subvocalizations, the authors go directly to the brain’s motor cortex. It’s a short step to combining the two approaches to form a wider, more detailed map.

“We investigated the possibility of decoding private inner speech,” the authors state in their summary, “and found that some aspects of free-form inner speech could be decoded during sequence recall and counting tasks.”

The paper’s authors and their designs may be running parallel or in competition with AlterEgo — it’s not entirely clear at the time of this writing — but, along with almost 20 other university research labs, MIT is cited, and we know the academic-corporate-military-intelligence complex, now all huddling together beneath the tech umbrella, has demonstrated countless times that it isn’t interested in shouldering the burden of moral consideration or consequence. It is, of course, beholden to pressure related to funding.

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Photo by NurPhoto / Contributor via Getty Images

Neuroprosthesis sounds like a project geared toward helping return the power of communication to human beings. Sounds great, but the dominant operable value system is, however, still just plain cash. It’s not human well-being. We’re a long way from money funding altruistic science. We would do well to concern ourselves with all the other likely uses and misuses, places this research is going to go up for sale, and how it will be reapplied to suspect ethics, before the critical moment is reached and “the science” actually pierces the inner monologue.

Beyond the laundry list related to surveillance, pre-crime, geopolitical espionage, and so forth, what about the undeniable and patently insane trend toward talking (a lot) to an inanimate, corporate-government-owned robot personality? The criticality related to the inner monologue isn’t just about your secrets getting out, although that is absolutely on the table and of its own immense concern. Worse, though, if the inner monologue is absorbed, as it were, into the Borg, our very humanity and relationship to the divine will be (perhaps irrevocably) altered.

Why? Neither science nor religion can claim to fully understand the communication apparatuses available between our inner selves, other humans, the world at large (animals, electromagnetics, Sheldrakian morphic resonance, etc.). Consider that every religion of note has put primary importance on the inner psychic condition. And science has jumped on board, too, because the conscious awareness and control of the inner monologue is the gateway to spiritual — to say nothing of functional/survival — importance.

The inner monologue is essential in the application of discernment, yet another attribute highly prized in all of human history! So, as these many and various institutions, once highly esteemed, put the finishing touches on psychic penetration, we may want to inquire here, just before leaping: Would we be best served at this point in history, or any other, turning over our internal, personal, and ultimate barriers of privacy to another? Would that ever be a good idea?