The future of biotechnology has arrived, and it is terrifying.
—
The science beat reveals that in the future, technologies could induce a serious sort of mind warp that tricks prisoners into thinking they’ve served an impossible amount of time behind bars. This development has the power to change the landscape of punishment and the justice system forever.
Philosopher Rebecca Roache, who leads a team of scholars, explains two methods to this madness. The first involves psychotic drugs that distort a person’s sense of time.
With a simple pill or injection, prisoners may believe they’ve been incarcerated for much longer than any natural human life could allow.
The second approach Roach explains is a bit more complex. Option number two involves uploading human minds to computers (da f*ck?), and speeding up the rate at which the brain functions. On her blog, Roach writes:
“If the speed-up were a factor of a million, a millennium of thinking would be accomplished in eight and a half hours… Uploading the mind of a convicted criminal and running it a million times faster than normal would enable the uploaded criminal to serve a 1,000 year sentence in eight-and-a-half hours. This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals’ lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time.”
However frightening this mind trip may appear, it would seem there is valid cause for such a practice. Roach explains:
“Is it really OK to lock someone up for the best part of the only life they will ever have, or might it be more humane to tinker with their brains and set them free? When we ask that question, the goal isn’t simply to imagine a bunch of futuristic punishments – the goal is to look at today’s punishments through the lens of the future.”
What initially comes across as an unspeakably-cruel practice may just give way to the future of a more humane penal system.
—originally published with Elite Daily.
I’ve seen something like this on an episode of Outer Limits…it didn’t end well for those people either. I think that this writer needs to seriously reexamine his idea of “humane”.. What kind of reality will these “convicts” be in? If it’s anything like the prisons that exist today…I feel like we’d literally be sentencing someone to hell for an eternity. They’d not even be able to commit suicide, because I’d imagine the safety protocol would be to prevent them from dying. I’d rather focus on ways of resolving crime and the causes of it. We live in a society… Read more »
Agreed
I think they’re missing the point of jail sentences. The purpose is not (entirely) for offenders to feel like they’ve been in jail forever. The purposes are also to reform them (which I’d argue isn’t happening in the current system either), and to protect other potential victims from violent offenders by keeping the latter detained. Messing with people’s brains doesn’t accomplish either of those things. The only thing it does accomplish is punishment, and is punishment really the most effective component of incarceration?
There’s multiple very dangerous and likely things that haven’t been covered: 1) yes, a person mentally serving 1000 years could come out “better” but you have to remember, they could also very well come out Lex Luther. They had 1000 years to think about their crime- next time, they might just not get caught because they figured out how. 2) I can barely go an hour with no contact of any kind (no people, no books, no tv, just nothing). Imagine the psychological effects of ten centuries of isolation. “Cracked” would be the biggest understatement of human history at that… Read more »
Hey. Usually your stuff is great, but this headline is ridiculously misleading. This is an old sci-fi meme and there is no new technical information reported. You can do better than this. Please do.
Your missing the point of locking someone up for committing a crime. They broke a law, took something away from society, as punishment we take away real years from that person. As that person sits and rots in jail life is happening outside events are happening and we as a society have deemed that that person can’t participate in them as they choose to take away from society. That is the reason for the time in jail we have given a time value for crimes, you do something against our laws we take away a certain amount of your life.… Read more »
Would not it be more humane just to abolish prisons altogether?
Because dealing with criminal minds is as simple as chemically inducing dementia and depression at an inhumane level without any construct of rehabilitation. Until a human can live a thousand years naturally, “inhumane” is legally 100% accurate.
Does anybody think ever of what those ppl would become after such a brain “transformation” after all… And getting out from prison may just easier become – free mind fucked-up criminals doing more and unbelievable “futuristic” crimes(some of them our minds wouldn’t even though about)!!!!!! It is scary!
Why thinking about punishment and not “simply” create a more human society.
I don’t believe in punishment.
Okay, first of all, PSYCHOTROPIC drugs, not psychotic (yes, one would probably be psychotic after being led to believe they just spent 1,000 years in a prison, but still … ). Second of all, have we learned NOTHING from “A Clockwork Orange”?
Apparently you learned nothing from A Clockwork Orange, or rather, you never actually saw or read it. The point was to manipulate the mind with crazy amounts of violence to the point where someone can’t even defend themselves from attack. This thought experiment deals only with the mental ability to make you believe time went by multitudes faster than it did. You wouldn’t imagine that time was moving fast, as it doesn’t. You simply see a reality in which you served many years in prison, when in reality you sat on a table for a couple hours. Do you know… Read more »
What, seriously? How could someone even consider serving 1’000 years of prison as a more humane penal system? If we can speed up brain activity, those people would actually live those 1’000 years. All of those years would be reality for them, not merely a dream that passes really fast. To better picture it, it would be something like the movie Inception, when they get into the Limbo and live an entire life there. Now, how torturing someone to believe they lived that amount of time in prison, waking them up after some hours and believing they would become “moral”… Read more »
I so agree.
I see no good that could come of this.
First of all: kinda off the beaten path, GMP.
Second: as long as you’re messing with brains, you might as well just fix their neural network’s defects, rather than punishing them at all.
The time distortion is more appropriate for intellectuals.
Couldn’t this also be used as a sort of therapy? If we can speed up the rate at which brains process information we can give someone time to process trauma over the course of a week instead of over a decade. More chilling than this technology is that the immediate thought was how it can be used in the prison industry.
This is not real technology; the posting is a thought-exercise by a philosopher. We don’t even yet know whether is it even technologically possible to read the state of a human mind by examining the brain, much less doing so non-destructively. (Though in the thought-exercise linked above, the non-destructive part is beside the point.) It’s a long way off, if it ever comes to pass at all.
Anyone else thinking of “A Clockwork Orange”?
Wasn’t this from a Star Trek Deep Space 9 episode?