Technocratic Solutions for Convicts & Prisoners.

Although grossly outdated in its sci-spec, we will likely end up with a Brave New World whether people know it or not. Its quite likely we will replace all labor someday with robots, we have already replaced epsilon class people with automotons: in that book he describes the breeding of mentally retard midgets as elevator operators, of course we have developed the technology to do the same thing but with simple electronics. As robotics have also made significant inroads today in replacing people of delta class, most accessibly lines now use robots, there is nothing to suggest the technology won't develop to the point of replacing the gammas, betas and even alphas as well. Humans will become obsolete and likely sit around with all their needs attended for like we were all royalty.

 

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Once we look at some people as meat, this affects the way we view everyone. The direct Newtonian effects of these ideas might seem good. I say might. But the indirect affects, I think, will be intolerable. The US, for example has an incredibly high % of its population in some form of incarceration. Once this large group gets treated this way, everyone's humanity will be lowered. As it is now to various degrees by the current system. But I think it would be worse. The cold mechanistic view of people involved in these policies will not stay nicely inside the prisoners or inside the prisons.

We definitely need to clear up some of the class and race biases in the justice system before enacting this. It would be another way for the better off to benefit from the poor, since the latter are vastly more likely to end up in prison, and thus become fodder for the former and objects to researchers.

 

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no change/no evolution

 

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Change for the sake of change is pointless. The people in Brave New World had no need to change; they were content, organized, et cetera, already.

 

Have you ever been treated for a mental illness? If you have were you treated as "meat"? Would take a good bet you were treated with the utmost respect and sympathy by at least the medical practitioners. Treaty all criminals as if they were mentally ill and having a treatment for all of them they allows them to return to society with productive rewarding lives is very very far from treating them as meat!

The poor would get brain upgrades for free, while the rich would have to pay money! Imagine being never procrastinating, always feeling ready, able, happy and controlled. Fuck I would pay an arm and a leg for that! I can just imagine people committing crimes just to get free cybernetic implants! "Dam I can't work, I hate my job, I hate my wife, I hate my kid, hum if I were to get one of those brain implants I would be able to work twice as hard and love it, I would love my bitch wife and my kid I never wanted to have, dam I don't have enough money!"

 

Brave New World will be old in its own time sooner or later. There is no such thing as Utopia and never will be.

The people of THX 1138 had no need to change, they were content, organized, et cetera.

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What is so inhumane about killing a person? Everyone dies eventually, some later than others. There are no lasting effects on a person's psyche from getting executed. (Not unless you believe in ghosts.)

The lasting effects are the ones their living victims have to endure for the rest of their lives. The pain they caused gets slightly eased when it becomes apparent to their victims that the person who hurt them can't ever do it again. Not "so long as they don't escape", not "so long as the don't get parole", but "never"

I think you have a naive view of what these electrodes are capable of. In the first place, a person completely deprived of the ability to get angry would probably be abused by his/her peers. You've taken their capacity for self defense away. I agree that they probably don't deserve to have that capacity, having misused it in the past, but still...... life would not be peachy.

I really doubt the pleasure would last. Maybe at first it would be a novel feeling, but eventually an equilibrium sets in, kind of like how drug addicts start needing more and more of their drug in order to get the same effect, until they only feel normal when they're high.

Or a better comparison: think of a kidnapped woman forced into sexual slavery, who's captors hook her on heroine in order to make her easier to control. Even if she's kept high as a kite most of the time, would you suggest that she's enjoying a high quality of life?

 

draqon,

I'm amused you can't tell the difference between fantasy and viable scientific speculation. :bravo:

Try at least to stick to Huxley or Orwell, THX was a cinematic master piece but its themes were all borrowed and were covered in greater detail and more realism by those two. In the end I feel Huxley will win over Orwell, We have already had Orwellian states and they have failed. It likely we will reach a world in which most if not all labor is done by machines, where people modify their minds and live in virtual world voluntarily, etc, orgasmic pleasure for all eternity could be achievable... all of that is closer to Huxley then Orwell.

 

Aside for fact we have just wasted someone that could have provide benefit to the rest of us is that many people seem to get upset about killing people, they seem to find it threatening, thus is best for society to outlaw it.

The justice system is not about revenge. Capital punishment is valid to me on the count of prevent that person from murdering again, its even more palatable if we can at least save many lives with that persons organs. I would prefer to get rid of capital punish and in fact prison system its self by "curing" criminals so they don't commit crimes again and so they function better in our society. A psychomurderer is worth more providing a life time of good service to society as a kind and non-violent individual then appeasing the animalistic desires of the family of his victims.

I would not say singular electrodes, perhaps full arrays hook together to provide feedback looks and artificial neural pathways. It would not be hard to make a person capable of get a little angry, just not as angry as he was to beat his wife or to kill another man, etc. Of course we don't know how advance this could get, testing like this has been limited to monkeys.

If worse came to worse, they could be placed under a state of continues euphoria, you could beat them to the ground and they still would not be unhappy.

A viable theory but without testing we will never know. In testing with neural stimulator on Tourette it appears they can be treated with treatment not decaying unless the device is deactivated. But then again Tourettes is not like needing better anger management or empathy. Its very likely the brain can be rewired and will not fall out wiring any less so then a person will forget how to ride a bike.

Heroine is not a brain implant, its effects are far more apparent, and far more debilitating. More so a brain implant may be able to prevent the patient from thinking about having a brain implant, thus keeping them perpetually psychological unaware of their treatment, you could tell them to their face they are under the control of a sophisticate implant and they would forget it instantly.

 

There is a vast difference between a consenting person, choosing to visit a psychiatrist and using the kinds of help offered. Here we have a free agent who is also flesh and blood. But the proposals you make eliminate the free agent, human aspects of the prisoners. Certainly this is already the case to some degree, but I think your proposals are using people as meat and making them non-human.

Sure, these days. We don't have to go far back to see how those with mental illness, say women who got pissed off at their men, often ended up getting treated like meat - the lobotomy and hysterectomy fads, the latter going back a good ways. Here they were not treated as agents or really as full humans.

Obviously I was being polemical in my choice of words, or perhaps it's better to say 'openly polemical'.

I cannot prove that your policies will have bad effects on us all, as we dehumanize them, we dehumanize ourselves, but I do think it will happen.

Michael Crichton, a doctor, wrote a novel critical, essentially, of something very like your brain implants ideas. The Terminal Man.

Well, now we are into the dreamy utopian part of your case.

As we give up on having a society that fits us, we can change ourselves to like whatever is going on. I do think you are feeling the pulse of the times. Psychotropic meds - especially given the way they are doled out - and the coming genetic modifications will be doing this to varying degrees.

Me I see this as giving up. The problem will always be us, as individuals. Fascist governments will lap this up.

Oh, you don't like this facet of society, well that's you. You will like it after this or that modification.

A thousand years in the future we'll wake up and realize we stripped ourselves of what it was to be human.

The new species - decathalon atheletes with high IQs and no emotional lives - will be very efficient however.

 

Many people are admitted into psychiatric clinics against their will. Although patients were treated quite cruelly in the old lunatic asylums, modern psychiatric hospitals strive to treat patients as humans. Your argument does not make sense, we don't treat people who are deemed ill as "meat", if anything putting them in prisons to rot or executing them is treating them as meat!

If this is the way you look at it then any hospital treats it patients as meat, any time a doctor decides on a medical procedure on a patient who is not capable or not deemed capable of deciding on medical treatments that patient is being treated as meat?

I don't see it as dehumanizing, I see it as the opposite, as humanizing! People are today being imprisoned and treated as animals, and you seem to think that is more humane?

Appeal to Authority.

I happen to believe cybernetic modifications will get more traction, laws are likely to sprout up preventing the modification of the unborn for all but the most serious of genetic illnesses. But it while be much harder to forbid willing paying adults, although genetic modification on adults will be much harder cybernetic implants won't. Once the technology becomes advance enough their will be at least some pressure to try it on convicts, first voluntarily, but if it becomes successful enough against their wills.

Me I see this as giving up. The problem will always be us, as individuals.

Slipper slope fallacy.

As long as the procedures voluntary on all those except criminals of violent crime, I don't think it would be vary effective at controlling the masses. In fact imagine a world were everyone can link there minds and govern via a internet direct democracy instantaneously. If you don't want to join that you can run off to the Amish commune meat bag.

And be so very thankful for doing that, immortal and not retained by the limits of flesh we will be able to travel the universe as software, if you want to be human you can download your self into a body or play out a few lifetimes in a MMORPG. Human is so over rated, and once it becomes obsolete those that exceed it bounds will likely never look back.

Your view of the future is grossly limited. If in a thousand years all we achieve is decathlon athletes with high IQ we will deserve to live in a Huxley dystopia! But huxley did not predict a technological singularity, a fourth wave or transhumanism. If the technological singularity does occur the future is beyond are imagination to comprehend in fullness, rather all that can be assumed is the final product will certainly not be mortal, not be as limited in thought and body and not be human.